There are two different, distinct images of Tom Coughlin that both illustrate and explain so much about what he accomplished in 12 years as head coach of the Giants. It isn’t so much the disparity of the moments – one the nadir of his time here, one as he was approaching his greatest apex – as it is the fundamental change they represent.
Coughlin was a great coach here, in many ways the perfect coach for a time in Giants history when the franchise badly needed strength in character in that job. But what made him a Hall of Fame coach was an ability – a willingness – to roll with the times that has been a trap door that sabotaged so many other bright minds.
“People want to tell me that I’ve changed; I’m still not very comfortable with that notion,” Coughlin told me in a private moment in the summer of 2008, six months after the Giants won the first of two Super Bowls under his watch. “I do think I’ve adjusted. And don’t we always say that’s what a coach has to do, make adjustments? At halftime. At practice. In a two-minute drill. Really, that’s all this is. Adjustment.”
Coughlin never was much for deep introspection, so you can understand why he would shrug off the very thing that altered his career forever, that turned him from a successful football coach into one whose bust will someday be featured inside his sport’s Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.
The first picture: Here is a coach who has completely surrendered to his own fiery impulses. This is Coughlin on the visiting sideline at Nashville’s LP Field late in the afternoon of Nov. 26, 2006. The Giants had a 21-0 lead after three quarters, but Vince Young is leading the Titans on a desperate comeback.
On fourth down, guarding a 21-14 lead, Mathias Kiwanuka is about to sack Young and clinch the game for the Giants. Only Kiwanuka mistakenly believes Young has thrown the ball already and never bothers to tackle him. Young scampers free for 19 yards. The Giants lose the game, 24-21. And Coughlin loses his mind, exploding in rage at Kiwanuka in full view of the cameras, his eyes bulging, his face beet red, his anger as blind as it is bare.
This is the low point. The Giants already had no-showed the first playoff game of the Coughlin era the season prior, and Tiki Barber had famously observed they had been outcoached in losing 23-0 to the Panthers. Year Three would be a pedestrian 8-8 stroll to another one-and-done playoff loss. But what was clear was this: The players had grown weary of the Coughlin Rules.
Oh, you remember those, right? Show up early for meetings or not at all. The “no sunglasses” rule. The no-crossing-your-legs-during-meetings rule. The old “Concentration Line” he’d literally drawn in the sand in Jacksonville. And don’t forget the corollary Coughlin Beliefs, which included the notion that injuries were a “cancer” that were “mainly mental” (an observation that would haunt him later on).
All of that, captured in one furious snapshot.
But then there is the second picture, taken almost 14 months to the day later. Again, his face is a shade of red that healthy human flesh isn’t supposed to attain. This time, though, it is because he has worked a frozen sideline in Green Bay for three hours. This time, he is coaching a team stuffed with players who would rumble through snake pits for him. And together they will soon shock Brett Favre and the Packers in the NFC Championship Game, a prelude for what would follow two weeks later.
That is the version of Coughlin Giants fans will keep with them forever, because that’s the one who would deliver those two Super Bowls, who would take his place alongside – if not slightly higher than – Bill Parcells and Jim Lee Howell and Steve Owen in the pantheon of Giants coaches. Reaching that level because he was willing to make the kind of fundamental change – er, “adjustment” – coaches too often are too stubborn to make.
Make no mistake: Even after Coughlin softened his martinet rule following that ’06 season, even after the advent of the “Players Council,” even after he managed to turn a former enemy like Michael Strahan into a fervent acolyte, the Giants always knew he was in charge. He never lost that authority.
But he did alter his perception. If Coughlin only had left behind as a legacy a reputation as a disciplinarian, it would have been a sad miscarriage of standing. He deserved to be known as a football coach, and a great one, and that is what he allowed for himself by shedding his drill sergeant’s veneer and simply embracing his whistle and his bright, beautiful football mind.
Two images, two pictures, two facets of one brilliant coach. Let that be the gift Coughlin leaves behind to fresh generations of coaches. You can change. You can adjust. You can have a second act that fulfills every one of your ambitions. And every one of your dreams.