This was maybe half an hour after we last saw the Giants play a football game in anger, half an hour after they’d defeated the Washington Redskins at MetLife Stadium last December, playing the second half with Curtis Painter at quarterback, making it feel every bit a summertime scrimmage even in the gloom of early winter.
Tom Coughlin was besieged with questions about his future, because that has become a regular part of his job description during his time here. He wouldn’t answer, partly out of decorum, partly because he surely already knew the Giants would welcome him back. And partly because he wanted to force-feed a message that few were especially ready to hear just yet.
“I’m proud of our team,” Coughlin said, certainly understanding how that was going to sound in the immediate aftermath of a 7-9 season that had begun 0-6, one in which mere contention after Columbus Day was entirely reliant on the haplessness of their division — and even then, only peripherally.
No matter. Coughlin isn’t a man given to wasting anyone’s time, least of all his own, and he is not a man enamored with the sound of his own hoarse voice. He proceeded:
“Not only how they rallied today, but to win the last two games,” the head coach of the Giants said. “I thought the way we played — we had a lot of injuries; a lot of things happened out there — obviously not a great day today, and the weather [was awful], too. But everybody hung in there.”
He wouldn’t say this, of course, not even if you fed him sodium pentothal as a side dish with every meal. But there was a good reason for Coughlin to have felt proud about the way the Giants ran through the tape to close 2013, to win seven out of 10, to reboot the season after six games rather than engage in a full-speed dash toward Jadeveon Clowney.
Because he had done a hell of a job.
Look, Coughlin is a coach with two Super Bowls on his résumé. It would be a long and fruitless task to say a 7-9 team better reflected who he is as a coach than either of the squads that took the full measure of January (and into February), and it’s probably not the team he’ll rhapsodize about whenever he makes his speech some future summer Sunday in Canton.
Doesn’t mean he didn’t do a splendid job. Because he did. His quarterback had a decidedly miserable year, throwing 27 interceptions, sometimes looking every bit as hapless as the Jets’ rookie, Geno Smith. The defense was calamitous at the start of the season, the offensive line ruinous, and injuries did take their toll. It’s hard to identify one player who played beyond expectation.
Somehow, they still were playing meaningful games after 0-6. Somehow, if they’d managed to beat the Cowboys in Week 12, they might really have gotten all the way back. Yes, a coach’s career will always be judged by whether he won titles or not.
But despite two championships and several other terrific teams, the job Bill Parcells did in rallying the ’99 Jets from 1-6 to 8-8 might have been one of his best ever. And for the five times Vince Lombardi won championships, he was never prouder than with the teams he coached his first year in Green Bay and his only year in Washington that didn’t sniff the postseason.
Sometimes, despite Parcells’ famous declaration to the contrary, you really aren’t what your record says you are.
So as the Giants begin to assemble Monday morning for the first time, and as they prepare themselves for Tuesday’s first official workout, there are reasons aplenty to be optimistic about the coming season, to be eager for the show to start Sept. 8 at Detroit’s Ford Field. The line is rebuilt. There is a new man, Ben McAdoo, in charge of the offense. Eli Manning can’t (you have to believe, anyway) be as bad as he looked in 2013.
And Coughlin is still on the beat.
“I know this isn’t what everybody wanted,” Coughlin said last December. “It’s not what I wanted, either.”
Coughlin usually gets what he wants. Starting Tuesday, he’ll make sure of it.