NFL

Coughlin, Giants in familiar territory with record

Here they are again, right back where they almost always are under coach Tom Coughlin, sitting at 6-2 at the midpoint of the season. The Giants, as usual, have positioned themselves for greatness while mindful that nothing is guaranteed and everything is possible.

“There’s nobody looking at this than anything other than what it is,’’ Coughlin said yesterday as the Giants returned home early yesterday morning ahead of Hurricane Sandy after disposing of the Cowboys 29-24. “We’re very happy to be 6-2. We have a long way to go, we have a lot of work to do to be the team we want to be.’’

The Giants sit atop the NFC East, holding a 2 1/2 -game lead on the Eagles and Cowboys — quite a cushion, considering they lost their first two division games. This is the third consecutive year and the sixth time in Coughlin’s nine seasons his team is 6-2 at the break. In the previous five 6-2 starts, the Giants went 4-4 or worse four times, including last season (3-5) and in 2007 (4-4). Of course, both those seasons ended in Super Bowl triumphs, making the second-half swoons far more palatable.

Last season, the Giants at 6-2 came out and lost their next four games. Coughlin has little patience for this topic.

“Here you go again with the problems we’ve gotten into,’’ he said. “We’re going to talk about the string of four games last year, we’re going to talk about the losses. I’m telling you as I’ve told you before, throughout the course of those games we played some very, very difficult opponents and lost by a couple points here, a couple points there, with the exception of one game.’’

Still, Coughlin is under no illusion his team has it all going its way. He admitted the offense is settling for too many field goals, that punching the ball into the end zone is “an Achilles heel for us right now.’’ He didn’t like the third-down conversion rate against the Cowboys (3-for-15) and didn’t like that “the execution in the pass game just wasn’t there.’’

On defense, Coughlin knows the Giants caught a break when Dez Bryant’s hand, by inches, touched down out of the end zone on what would have been the game-winning touchdown reception for the Cowboys.

“Even the play Bryant made late in the game didn’t have to happen,’’ Coughlin said. “He had a double move, he got behind us, Michael Coe was right there to make a play on the ball. “We just had trouble making a play on the ball, but [Bryant] was definitely out of bounds,’’ Coughlin said.

This victory was so harrowing, the visitors’ locker room inside Cowboys Stadium felt more relieved than ebullient.

“It’s not subdued at all,’’ countered Osi Umenyiora. “We didn’t expect to come down here and just destroy them. We knew it was going to be a fight.’’

The Giants won this fight, as they have won most of them in the first half of the season. Those who have been around for a while know this is nothing new.

“What I’m worried about is what we’ve always done,” Justin Tuck said. “We’ve always been 6-2 at the break or 5-3 at the break. We’ve got to find ways to make sure we keep this thing going. I think the NFC is going to be the powerhouse of the NFL this year, so we’ve got to keep pace. Atlanta is still undefeated. You know San Fran … is going to be there at the end of the year. We’ve got some surprise teams that are playing well.

“So we don’t have time to sit back and gloat about being 6-2 because we all know that we’ve still got a gauntlet to go through and this thing could still turn for the worse if we don’t keep focused and keep doing what we’re doing. So that’s where our focus is.

“The past is the past, but hopefully you learn from it and get stronger from it. But it warrants a little bit of my thoughts, knowing that we’re kind of on a high right now, but we can’t allow ourselves to stay on that high.”

paul.schwartz@nypost.com