In the whirl of activity that turned the NFL’s first week into a maelstrom and a hail storm of speculation and hope and dread and impatience, a week capped by Plaxico Burress trading in blue for green, there was one small news item that snuck through the noise, like a scatback eking through a defense.
The transaction, officially, ran like this:
“New York Giants: Extended the contract of coach Tom Coughlin through the 2012 season.”
Now, this obviously qualified as news that wasn’t exactly news. About 15 seconds after the Giants’ 2010 season died in Washington, D.C., two days after the New Year, when the Packers had beaten the Bears and it became official the 10 wins the Giants posted would only be good enough, along with $2.25, to get them the proverbial seat on the subway, John Mara had said as such.
“I’m obviously disappointed we didn’t make the playoffs but that doesn’t mean you blow the whole thing up,” the Giants co-owner said that afternoon, an army of microphones halo-ing his face. “I think we have a good solid organization and there are some things we can improve on, but Tom is still the guy that we want as our head coach.”
It was, of course, a sane and entirely grown-up thing to say, and to do, and as much as anything served as a defiant reminder of the way the Giants do business, the way they’ve always done it. Time has a way of leavening out the anger and the fury, so it can be easy to remember that as things began to turn grim for the Giants last year — starting with that inexplicable loss at home to the Cowboys in November, capped by the inexcusable self-immolation to the Eagles a month later — there was one constant target for all the bile that spews from the frustrated and the displeased.
And that was Thomas Richard Coughlin.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t heard the din before. He’d been drawn and quartered by so many segments of the media in 2005 and 2006, a sentiment that either reflected or refracted the feelings of so many Giants fans in those days. Then, of course, he’d authored the unforgettable 2007 season, and the forever run through those playoffs, and the upset of the unbeatable Patriots, all of that done with an or-else sign hanging around his neck.
So he’d already negotiated the terrain once.
“This isn’t about me,” he said once, twice, 500 times in the days leading up to that season finale against the Redskins. “This is never about me.”
He is right and he is wrong, of course. Everything the Giants have become and been since Coughlin was hired has been about him: the attention to detail, the respect for opponents, the fervent belief that all talking should be conducted through action on the field. If you think that it isn’t about Coughlin, you don’t remember the country-club culture that used to exist inside the walls of the old Meadowlands, under past regimes.
And you sure don’t pay attention to that other football chorus in town.
But the part where Coughlin is correct is this: He has never — not once — used his job status as a motivation, as a ploy for public sympathy, as a debate for just how small the town’s attention span can really be. Look, it is possible to like both Coughlin and Rex Ryan, it is; just because you enjoy Rex and his look-at-me vaudeville act, it doesn’t mean that’s the only way to do business. Or, even with two AFC title games to show for it, the proper way.
Because it is very easy to forget one small fact:
Coughlin may only have one NFC title game under his belt. But he won that one. And the game that came after it, too.
“My ego . . . I have no ego in terms of what I have to accomplish with regard to him or anybody else,” Coughlin said a few days ago, before his fruitless meeting with Burress. “I’m willing to listen.”
If he had an ego, it would’ve been bruised enough to spend three seasons on IR already. What he does have are more important: a track record, a value system, and another football season ahead in which the Giants will win some, lose some, and always do things his way. Which is to say, the right way.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com