Keidel: Tom Coughlin's Coaching Life
By Jason Keidel
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The Giants did more than win a football game on Christmas Eve. They harpooned a million hearts in our city, made half the Big Apple bitter – Gang Green with envy, if you will.
Now the Giants bear the burdens of needing to beat the Cowboys on Sunday and representing the Tri-State region, keeping the area's aorta pumping a few more weeks, before winter slides a white lid over us until baseball begins.
And while any real New Yorker will tell you that you can't arrange your sporting allegiance by geography – show me a Yankees and Mets fan and I'll show you a moron – New York will be an oddly silent city should Big Blue blow it versus Dallas. So let's say it's good for business for the G-Men to defeat the Cowboys.
The Giants need to give the Meadowlands one more playoff-worthy performance, be the Anti-Rex: creep like ninjas and carry nunchucks to the ballgame. A team couldn't have more incentive than the Giants' players, or their head coach.
Tom Coughlin's career could pivot on this game, and it's fitting that Dallas, their eternal tormentor, is the membrane between Coughlin's playoff run and a somber meeting with the Mara family, getting the Gold Watch, pension plan, and a framed letter of acknowledgement for time served.
Those moments are always awkward, once both parties agree to monetary terms and the speechwriters scribble the negotiated sentiments: the platitudes about teamwork, loyalty, and family values, while a solemn son nods in the background. Coughlin is a football lifer, and like all in his ilk the ink never dries on his next play. He, like his predecessors, will probably leave football feet-first. If Sunday's game is Coughlin's final game, it won't be because he wanted it that way.
The jettisoned coach always says it's time to spend more time with his family, when we know darn well Coughlin's family resides on a football field. Always has. And it doesn't take a CIA interrogator to see a newly retired coach's stomach boil while he says all the right things. If you think Coughlin doesn't want to coach this team next year, I've got some tornado insurance to sell you in SoHo…
What if this indeed is Coughlin's final game? Will he be remembered for losing to the loathsome Cowboys with the playoffs on the line? Or for beating the unbeatable Patriots in the desert, where they were expected to die in the cacti before Eli and a fearsome foursome assaulted Pretty Boy Brady all night and ruthlessly appropriated the Lombardi Trophy?
It says here that the latter is the lasting visage of Coughlin, far more winner than loser – the brooding, tight-lipped coach whose face is eternally reddened from marching into a thousand winter winds on the sideline, his crow's feet and plum-colored cheeks emblems of the battle between his nature and Mother Nature.
Coughlin, though decidedly and ardently old school, was pliable enough to adapt to the nouveaux athlete – an emotional hybrid, a paradoxical, super-sensitive beast who is far more Freudian than their gridiron forefathers. The millions he makes to play football aren't enough to coax and coach him to victory. He must also feel wanted, if not loved. And here marched Coughlin, following player-friendly Jim Fassel, with his Stone Age missives and the silly maxim that injuries are a thing of the mind.
He could have lost the team right there, and when the 2007 bunch backed into an 0-2 hole with Antonio Pierce acting the fool with an air horn and a reporter. Coughlin took a tuning fork to that team and turned into a champion. Yet for all the glory of that season, Coughlin's tenure is also defined by sizzling starts and sputtering finishes – like this year, when, after a 6-2 start, the Giants went 1-5.
But you can't pry that Super Bowl ring from Coughlin's finger, and that most precious metal separates him from Marty Schottenheimer, Dan Reeves, and Marv Levy. Being the "greatest to never win a title" isn't a handle anyone covets, from the aforementioned coaches to Dan Marino and Barry Sanders. And you can't mention historic seasons and Super Bowls without a nod to 2007 and, by default, Coughlin's masterful job.
Perhaps the narrative is more profound than Coughlin's career arc clamping down. Should the Giants lose and then lose Coughlin it might represent the end of an era. Perhaps it's the death of the old prototype, the baby boomers who won the Lombardi Trophy the Lombardi Way: hold onto the ball, run the ball, stop the run, and make fewer mistakes. Bill Belichik aside, there are no current NFL coaches whose sideline attire used to include plaid, bellbottoms, or Chuck Taylor.
The new breed of coach – from McCarthy to Payton to Tomlin – isn't soft, but is way younger by a wide bottleneck of multiple decades and, equipped with a new temperament and more testosterone, better able to keep up with a star, his entourage, and his suitcase of social networks. And it's no accident that the best teams over the last decade are more Bill Walsh than Don Shula.
With pass-happy rules, gelded cornerbacks and d-coordinators, quarterbacks with no pitch counts who are coddled like priceless paintings from the league's brass down to the refs, there aren't too many coaching slots open for ball-security, Social Security recipients. Coughlin's departure (whenever that is) signals the changing of the philosophical guard, the Drill Sergeant with a whistle dangling from his neck, preaching basic training as though his mentor, Bill Parcells, were still sermonizing from West Point.
Much will be determined on that rectangle of turf in East Rutherford – 120 yards long, 53 yards wide – a vibrant, verdant stage where myriad football fates are to be scripted on national television. Will MetLife double as a springboard for another unlikely Super Bowl run, or as a graveyard for the Giants' 2011 season and their coach's career? The team will tell us a lot on that lot in New Jersey.
Most of us think he needs to beat Dallas to retain his job. But is Coughlin worth keeping today? Without knowing the result Sunday night? Has he done enough? His regular-season record (141-114) is quite respectable, as is his playoff mark (8-7). He has seven division titles and is one of just 26 coaches to win a Super Bowl.
In the interest of candor and consistency, I said the team needs a change, no matter the results on Sunday. I said that his sport hasn't passed him by; his team has. But I'm not a Giants fan. This week it's your team, your town, and your time. What say you?
Feel free to email me: Keidel.jason@gmail.com
