Giants Show a Confidence in Coughlin That Fans Lack

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The New York Sun

The Giants announced yesterday that they will retain head coach Tom Coughlin and even give him a one-year contract extension, conveying a measured vote of confidence to a coach who doesn’t have the confidence of the fans — or even some of his players.

Having Coughlin as head coach for 2007 means Big Blue will continue to be led by a man of contradictions — a coach who preaches “New York Giants pride” but often stands on the sidelines looking ashamed of his team, a coach who preaches discipline but can’t keep his troops from making the most basic of mistakes, a coach who preaches accountability but wasn’t held accountable for the team’s late-season collapse.

Coughlin likes to think of himself as a detail-oriented coach, but his problem is he focuses on the wrong details. He can ensure that his players show up five minutes early to meetings, but he can’t ensure that his quarterback gets the plays called on time. He obsesses about every moment of practice time, but he couldn’t persuade Plaxico Burress and Jeremy Shockey to take time out of their lives to run routes with Eli Manning during the off-season.

The team president, John Mara, said he believes in Coughlin when he announced the one-year contract extension yesterday, but that extension is mostly a formality. NFL teams rarely ask coaches to work into the final year of a contract for fear that the players will assume the coach is a lame duck and tune him out.

Many players already have tuned Coughlin out. Coughlin’s 25–25 record after three seasons as the Giants’ head coach makes him the very definition of a mediocrity, and for Mara to keep Coughlin in charge indicates that this is a franchise with no real direction. Why did Mara decide to keep Coughlin? Maybe Mara, a Boston College alumnus, still thinks of Coughlin as the coach who led his alma mater to a 1993 upset of Notre Dame in one of the greatest games in college football history. Maybe he thinks replacing the coach on a team already looking for a new general manager would cause too much turmoil.

Or maybe Mara looks at the Giants and sees a franchise heading in the right direction. If so, Mara didn’t watch the same Giants the rest of us watched. Big Blue went into free fall down the stretch, losing six of seven games between November 12 and December 24. Offensive linemen committed penalties. Manning regressed. Burress dropped passes. It was the one player some accused of quitting on his team, Tiki Barber, who never did quit down the stretch, turning in spectacular games in the season finale against the Washington Redskins and in Sunday’s playoff loss to the Philadelphia Eagles. With the retirement of Barber, the Giants’ best player from 2006 will not be on the 2007 roster.

None of that means Coughlin can’t have a successful 2007 season. After all, Coughlin’s style hasn’t changed since he came to the NFL with the Jacksonville Jaguars in 1995, and in his 11 seasons as an NFL head coach his teams have made the playoffs more often than not. But now that we know there won’t be a change at the top of the coaching staff, there must be changes elsewhere.

John Hufnagel, the Giants’ offensive coordinator, is already gone. Coughlin fired Hufnagel in December and promoted quarterbacks coach Kevin Gilbride to take his place. It’s unclear whether Gilbride will remain in place, but it’s hard to see how keeping him could be justified. His job the last three seasons has been to develop Manning, and Manning is nowhere near as good a player as the Giants thought he would become when they made a draft-day trade to acquire him three years ago.

Coughlin should consider David Cutcliffe, Manning’s college coach at the University of Mississippi, to take over the Giants’ offense. Cutcliffe, currently the offensive coordinator at the University of Tennessee, has a reputation for getting the most out of the quarterbacks who play for him by stressing the fundamentals of throwing mechanics. Combine that with his strong relationship with Manning, and Cutcliffe would be a good choice.

Coughlin might worry that hiring an assistant so closely aligned with his quarterback would undermine Coughlin’s own ability to take charge of the team. Cutcliffe has no NFL experience and has never worked with Coughlin, so hiring him would be a leap of faith for a coach who plays things close to the vest.

Any new coordinator would likely want to bring in his own assistants, which means several other offensive assistants could be on the way out. Receivers coach Mike Sullivan seems particularly vulnerable, as the Giants aren’t getting enough production out of that position: Burress has great talent but often looks undisciplined, and the Giants had high hopes for rookie Sinorice Moss, but he never developed. On the other side of the ball, defensive coordinator Tim Lewis has interviewed for the Miami Dolphins’ vacant head-coaching position. He’s a long shot for that job but could leave the Giants anyway, whether by his choice or by Coughlin’s.

But talk about the assistants only deflects from the real story. The Giants had an opportunity to respond to their disappointing season by starting over with a new coach, and instead they decided to stand pat with the coach who got them to 8–8. The good news for Giants fans is that a year from now, Mara will correct that mistake. And Bill Cowher will be available.

Mr. Smith is a writer for FootballOutsiders.com.


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