Tom Coughlin Has a Mouth and He Must Scream

It doesn't come across while watching him on the sidelines surrounded by pro football players, but Tom Coughlin is a big man by civilian standards. He is over 6-feet-tall and has an athlete's powerful bearing, having once played in the same backfield at Syracuse University as Larry Czonka and Floyd Little. In warm weather, when he wears shorts, you can see that his legs are pasty and piston-like, reminiscent of a high school gym teacher or a CYO coach. This makes sense given that Coughlin has always presented himself more like an uncomplicated Sports Man—forever extolling discipline, mental toughness, and the importance of finishing—than like a frontman for a $2 billion corporation.

In press conferences, like the one a week ago following a win over Washington, his first move is to clutch the podium and hunker down for the frivolous but mandatory task at hand, straining to peer under his baseball cap at the reporters asking questions. Coughlin is gruff after losses and cordial enough after wins. He assumes a tic of fluttering his fingers when questions go on too long for his liking, as if to say, "Hurry it along!" Call it a football coach habit. He is tired of helping the scribes with their celebratory narrative-fest. He just wants to go home so he can come back the next day and resume working.

Coaching is what he does, regardless of circumstance. There's a famous story from the year he was fired from Jacksonville and before he was hired by the Giants. That February, not knowing what else to do with himself, he went to the NFL scouting combine and sat in the stands taking notes by himself, despite the fact that he wasn't employed.

He hopes to be employed next year. Whether he will or won't be is still an open question: that's what happens when you coach a team that's currently 6-9, and went 7-9 last year. Overall, the Giants are 103-82 under Coughlin, including the playoffs. This averages out to less than 9 wins per 16 games, which means that Coughlin's legacy is currently murky: are his Giants a perpetually sound franchise always capable of Super Bowl contention, or are they a slightly-better-than-mediocre outfit fortunate enough to have played its best football at exactly the right times?

Projections about Coughlin's future have swung wildly of late. Four weeks ago, the Vegas odds of him keeping his job were less than 50 percent. But prior to yesterday's third straight win—a 37-27 penalty-fest over the Rams—Steve Serby of the New York Post quoted "a source familiar with the organization's thinking" saying that Coughlin has a 99.9 percent chance of coming back.

As for Coughlin's own assessment of his job security? He doesn't want to talk about it. He is a football coach, and as such, acts as if he is so consumed by the daily details of football so as to be contemptuous of discussing anything else. At his Wednesday press conference, he brusquely shot down questions about his future and insisted on discussing the 6-8 St. Louis Rams. When a reporter asked the benign question of whether the Giants had "something to prove this week," Coughlin shot back, "You've got something to prove every day you're on the face of this Earth!"

The Giants' ethos is rooted in a set of values that hearken back to mid-20th century Catholic New York. The team's longtime owner, the late Wellington Mara, was a devout Catholic, just like his son, current owner John Mara. (The Maras and the Tisch family, which is Jewish, each own 50 percent of the team, but Mara is the franchise's more prominent public face.) Coughlin, also a devout Catholic, fits perfectly into a organization that values hierarchy, rules, and firm discipline. It makes sense that the Giants have the football coach equivalent of a Catholic school teacher, who underscores his unquestionable authority by setting the clocks in the Giants' facilities five minutes ahead of the actual time. Both franchise and coach are formal and stuffy: this is what the Giants are signaling with the sign at the practice facility that says, "The New York Football Giants." Both evince a certain brand of noble masculinity, but one utterly devoid of cool.

"In so many ways, Tom represents to me who and what the head coach of our franchise should be," John Mara said two years ago after re-upping Coughlin's contract.

Thus, Coughlin's status as a franchise icon goes beyond the fact that he won two Super Bowls. He is enmeshed with the Giants' identity. This explains why the organization is looking for reasons to keep him rather than fire him, and two straight wins—even against the pathetic likes of Tennessee and Washington—are reason enough.

The fact that Coughlin's values dovetail with those of the Giants have helped Coughlin redeem his own reputation. When he coached Jacksonville, from 1995 to 2002, the common media portrayal of him was as a petty tyrant at best and a screaming sadist at worst: this is what happens when a coach installs rules like the one saying a player's feet must be on the ground during meetings. But the narrative surrounding Coughlin has shifted drastically in the past decade: now, he is known now as a tough but fair man, a man of integrity, his firm hand an extension of the values of a respected franchise.

Describing Coughlin to me, defensive tackle Cullen Jenkins said, "You know it's gonna be one way, the Giants way, and things are going to be consistent. It's not like one minute you're getting away with something when things are going well, but the next you're getting in trouble because things are going bad."

Coughlin benefits from his association with the Giants, but he also helped salvage his reputation—and career—with his now-famous personality tweak after the 2006 season. That season ended in a Giants collapse, after which ownership gave Coughlin an ultimatum: lighten up, or else.

The rest is the stuff of facile narrative: Coughlin mended fences with the media and his players. With their kinder, gentler coach, the Giants won two Super Bowls. An iconic NFL Films shot from after Super Bowl XLII shows Coughlin, a man known for his irate, scrunched-up faces on the sideline, beaming on the podium with impressive pearly whites. After Super Bowl XVII, he famously hugged Flavor Flav. Even though Flav initiated the hug and Coughlin had no idea who the man with the clock around his neck was, it seemed the perfect illustration of how much Coughlin had changed.

But Giants players told me that Coughlin's adjustment was more subtle than has been commonly portrayed. Fred Robbins, a defensive tackle from the Super Bowl XVII winning team, said, "He didn't change much, he just had a better understanding that guys wanted to win as badly as he did." Rich Seubert, a guard on that team, said, "It didn't make him 'soft.' It just made him a little more comfortable showing his human side. Like before, he'd walk by your locker and he wouldn't say good morning to you. But the next year, he'd ask, 'How's the wife? How's the kids?'"

So Tom Coughlin will never be warm and fuzzy. In fact, some of the most memorable Coughlin-rage moments have taken place after the 2007 transformation. There was the infamous on-field explosion in 2010 at rookie punter Matt Dodge, whose in-bounds kick enabled a shocking Eagles touchdown. There was his post-game locker room speech, at the conclusion of that season, when he told his players that his critics in the media could kiss his ass. In between, lots of screaming at refs on camera, including a gem—"That's fucking bullshit!"—against Tennessee two weeks ago.

He is entertaining to watch on the sideline. He hunches over, carrying the stress of his profession where his neck meets his torso. He walks flat-footed, birdlike, with gym teacher white sneakers. He is tense from head to toe, so everything he does is spastic, including his incredulous palms-skyward gesture, in which he looks like he's asking a higher power what he has done to be surrounded by such incompetence. Above all, he is engaged. The fact that Coughlin's face is as contorted with stress as it ever was is evidence that, even at 68, nothing is escaping his obsessively detail-oriented notice.

There is no letup to him whatsoever. The coach who believes you've got something to prove every day you're on the face of this Earth by definition believes you have something to prove whenever you're on a football field. This was illustrated the last time any Giant touched the ball a week ago against Washington: they were up 24-13 and set to receive a punt. The punt returner was Odell Beckham, Jr., who had just turned in perhaps his most spectacular performance in a season full of them. But Beckham let up on this final play, indifferently gliding over to the punt and letting the ball slip through his hands. At this, Coughlin ended a 24-13 victory in a way only he could: by turning to the special teams coach and screaming at him.