The script was already three-quarters written. A lame duck NFL coach had barely limped into keeping his job for another season. It was an all-too-familiar story. It just needed its inevitable and predictable ending, which appeared to be approaching.
By the second week of January 2007, Tom Coughlin’s fate seemed all but sealed. He was closing in on the end of his third season as head coach of the New York Giants and had lost the confidence of the fans, the media, and, most importantly, many of his players.
A few weeks earlier, Coughlin had hit the rock-bottom moment of his tenure in New York. It was Christmas Eve, Week 16 of the 2006 regular season, and the Giants were sloughing through a humiliating thrashing by the New Orleans Saints. During the third quarter of what would eventually be a 30–7 Saints win, fans at Giants Stadium commenced a “Fire Coughlin” chant, which persisted throughout the rest of the game. When the game finally ended, Coughlin and his team were booed off the field by a majority of the 20,000 fans who remained. The Giants fell to 7–8 after the loss with only one more game left in the regular season. But despite the losing record, they somehow had a chance for a playoff spot. The Giants were hanging on by a thread.
“GUYS ABSOLUTELY HATE TOM COUGHLIN” (2004–2005)
The Giants hired Coughlin in 2004 to elevate a franchise coming off a 4–12 season. After winning the NFC Championship in 2000 under Coughlin’s predecessor Jim Fassel, the team’s progress stagnated. In the final few seasons under Fassel’s leadership, the Giants became undisciplined, made critical special teams’ errors, had trouble closing out games, frequently committed brainless penalties, and suffered defensive meltdowns.
One of the team’s principal motivations in hiring Coughlin was to reduce the mistakes that had been plaguing the team during the previous few years. As a strict, detail-oriented disciplinarian, Coughlin was touted as the perfect man to get the team on the right track.
As soon as he arrived in New York, Coughlin preached discipline. He came armed with a strict list of rules and requirements for his players, which included prohibitions against jewelry anywhere in the stadium and sunglasses on the sidelines, a traveling dress code, and, most notoriously, an ironclad timeliness policy that required players to arrive at meetings at least five minutes early. If a player ran afoul of any of these guidelines, he would end up with a monetary fine.
Over a year earlier, Coughlin had ended an eight-year stint as the head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars, where he built the team from an expansion franchise to a contender that twice made it to the AFC Championship game. However, by the end of his tenure, his players and coaching staff started to grow tired of his demanding personality. After going 6–10 in 2002, the Jaguars’ third straight losing season, Coughlin was fired.
During the 2004 off-season, Giants defensive lineman Michael Strahan, the heart and soul of the team’s defense and an eventual Hall of Famer, had begun to hear some troubling stories about his new coach. “At least 10 players who had played for him in the past talked to me about Coughlin,” he remembered. “Nine out of the 10 complained about his unusual rules and rigidity. One player called him an abusive warden.”
It didn’t take long for Coughlin’s authoritarian act to rub his players the wrong way. In September, three defensive players filed complaints with the NFL Players Association after Coughlin fined each of them $500 for not arriving at a meeting early enough. Strahan was fined $1,000 for the same reason. “I absolutely hated the man,” Strahan recalled.
Strahan wasn’t alone. “Guys absolutely hate Tom Coughlin,” one Giants player told the New York Post during the 2004 season. “He’s not the type of coach we’re going to go and put everything on the line for. Guys don’t play for him; we play because we have to play and you’re not going to win that way.” In early September, on the pregame show Fox NFL Sunday, analyst and Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw called Coughlin “mean,” “hateful,” and “a jerk.” That same Sunday, on CBS’s pregame show NFL Today, studio analyst Shannon Sharpe, a former NFL tight end, said that he “would rather die in an abandoned building alone, and my family not know what happened, than play for [Coughlin].” Around the same time, Coughlin was voted “NFL’s worst coach” by a Sports Illustrated poll of current and former players.
By 2006, Coughlin still hadn’t let up on his disciplinary approach. Once, during training camp, wide receiver Plaxico Burress told Coughlin two weeks in advance that he would be late to the facility on a specific Tuesday to attend his pregnant wife’s ultrasound. Coughlin still fined him $2,000 for missing a meeting.
“But I told you in advance,” Burress said to Coughlin.
“Yeah, but you were just telling us you weren’t going to be there. You missed a meeting and that’s a fine.”
After the 2006 season ended, another player spoke with the New York Post: “[Coughlin’s] a lot to handle,” the player said. “He just yells to yell. Everyone’s sick of it. When you win, you can deal with it. When you don’t win, you don’t want to deal with anything.”
And they weren’t winning. At least, they weren’t winning enough. In his first three seasons, Coughlin had yet to elevate the franchise to the heights expected when he was hired. The Giants lost 10 games in 2004. In 2005, they won the NFC East division but were dispatched by the Carolina Panthers 23–0 in the Divisional Round of the NFC Playoffs, and with a losing record going into the final game, 2006 looked like a dud as well.
Perhaps the most disappointing trend during Coughlin’s first three seasons in New York was that the undisciplined gameplay that had plagued the team during the previous regime persisted. The team continued to make mental mistakes and commit a boatload of penalties. From 2004 through 2006, the team finished as one of the top 10 most penalized teams in the NFL.
Coughlin’s militaristic style wasn’t the only thing that drew his players’ ire. His game planning and in-game coaching were also areas of concern. On a few occasions, running back Tiki Barber, the team’s most dynamic player, took shots at Coughlin’s preparation and strategy. One highly publicized comment Barber made was after the Giants’ shutout loss to the Panthers in the 2005 playoffs. Barber said that he thought “in some ways, [the Giants] were outcoached.” Star tight end Jeremy Shockey was also critical at times. In July 2006, Shockey professed how much he loved playing as part of his previous coach Jim Fassel’s offense before Coughlin came on in 2004. Later that year in September, after the Giants’ 42–30 Week 3 loss at Seattle, Shockey told the media that the Giants got outplayed and outcoached.
“[COUGHLIN] IS FIRED… HE LOST THE FOOTBALL TEAM AND IT’S JUST TOO LATE” (2006)
By the end of the 2006 calendar year, the Giants’ immediate future did not look bright. A few months earlier, Barber, only 31, and playing the best football of his career, shocked everyone and professed his intent to retire at the end of the 2006 season. In addition, concerns were growing about Eli Manning, the team’s franchise quarterback. Manning, who was in his third season in the league, possessed all the tools necessary to be a star NFL quarterback, but was plagued by streaky and unsteady play.
After a great start to the 2006 season, Manning struggled through much of the second half of the season, and the Giants ended up losing six out of their last eight games. During that eight-game stretch, Manning had a few awful performances. In addition to the Christmas Eve massacre against the Saints, where he completed only nine passes for 74 yards, he completed less than 50 percent of his passes and threw two interceptions during a 26–10 Week 11 loss at Jacksonville. From the (Westchester, New York) Journal News:
It has come down to a matter of confidence with Manning, something that has appeared in short supply over the 2–6 ending to the regular season. Mechanically, he is a mess, having reverted to throwing off of his back foot even when not pressured. Mentally, he has pressed to make throws, only to see them wind up at his receivers’ feet.
As for Coughlin, the debacle on Christmas Eve was the final straw for many in the local media. After that game, even though the Giants still had a chance to make the playoffs, the local media had seen enough. They led their own “Fire Coughlin” chant by way of the pen.
“Of course, Tom Coughlin should be fired,” New Jersey–based Giants writer Stephen Edelson wrote in the Asbury Park Press. “Regardless of… whether the Giants make the playoffs… it has become clear that it’s time to change the culture that exists within this storied franchise. Blow the whole thing up and start over if necessary.” New York Post Giants beat writer Paul Schwartz wrote that “the entire operation must be imploded.” In the New York Times, columnist Selena Roberts was also blunt: “You have to consider the judgment of [the Giants ownership] in placing this coach with this team.”
Tara Sullivan, a columnist for the (North Jersey) Record, was even more ruthless. “Barber is on his way out… Giants’ fans can only hope he takes coach Tom Coughlin with him,” she wrote. “Because it’s become painfully obvious that these players are done playing for [him]… They’re a joke. A disgrace to their uniforms.”
Some thought Notre Dame head coach Charlie Weis would be a better fit for the Giants. As the New England Patriots’ offensive coordinator, Weis was the architect of the offense that won three Super Bowls from 2001 to 2004. In 2004, before Coughlin was hired, Weis was considered for the Giants job, but he ultimately signed on with Notre Dame, where he went on to have success in his first two seasons. By 2006, he was a hot commodity and, to many, a great fit for the Giants in 2007. “[John] Mara and Steve Tisch, the [Giants] co-owners, need to find out what it will take to get Charlie Weis out of his Notre Dame contract,” wrote longtime New York Daily News columnist Gary Myers. New York Post columnist Steve Serby had the same opinion. “[The Giants should] go after Weis the way Lawrence Taylor went after quarterbacks,” he suggested. “Weis would be the closest thing to a young Bill Parcells.” This was not the first time Serby advocated for Weis. In December 2003, before the Giants hired Coughlin, Serby wrote, “[Weis] owns a genius offensive mind that is imaginative, creative, adaptable and versatile enough… to ensure that [the Giants] never underachieve again.”
Ultimately, the Giants were fortunate to have avoided Weis. He struggled at Notre Dame after 2006 and was fired at the end of 2009. After unimpressive stints as an assistant coach on the NFL and college levels, he went on to a disastrous two-and-a-half years (2012–2014) as the head coach at the University of Kansas. He hasn’t coached since 2014.
After the Saints drubbing, the Giants closed out the 2006 regular season with a convincing 34–28 win over Washington and squeaked into the playoffs with an 8–8 record. In what would be his final win as an NFL player, Tiki Barber ran 23 times for 234 yards and three touchdowns.
The Giants’ season ended the following Sunday in Philadelphia when they lost to the Eagles 23–20 in the NFC Wild Card Round on a last-second field goal. The loss further highlighted the lack of discipline that was supposed to have been corrected under Coughlin—the team wasted time-outs in crucial periods of the game, committed three straight fourth-quarter penalties on the same drive, and racked up five false starts.
After the playoff loss, many believed it was a foregone conclusion that the Giants would soon be looking for a new head coach. On Fox’s postgame show, Bradshaw agreed. “[Coughlin] is fired,” Bradshaw said. “He lost the football team and it’s just too late.” ESPN commentator Sean Salisbury also called for Coughlin to be fired. In a column later in the week, veteran Boston Globe scribe Dan Shaughnessy wrote about “The Final Days of Tom Coughlin in New York,” and lamented that longtime Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi, who had announced earlier in the year that he was retiring at the end of the 2006 season, would be “[finishing] a great career on such a low note.”
Once the Giants’ season ended, columnists throughout the area continued the fire Coughlin campaign. “No point in keeping Coughlin around,” was the headline on Keith Idec’s column in North Jersey’s Herald-News. Myers also suggested that the Giants should sack their head coach. “Coughlin must go,” he wrote. “Too many players have tuned him out. He has taken this team as far as he can.” Also, in the Record, columnist Ian O’Connor wrote that “Coughlin should be fired today,” and in the New York Post, Serby pleaded for the Giants to “fire him now!!!”
“SELLING MEDIOCRITY” (2007)
The discussion was all for naught. The Giants didn’t hire a new coach in 2007. Less than a week after the season ended, co-owners Mara and Tisch announced that they were extending Coughlin’s contract for another season. “Tom Coughlin is our coach for 2007 and hopefully for many years after that,” Mara said. In reaction to the news, Serby wrote in the New York Post that keeping Coughlin was a sign that the Giants were “selling mediocrity, and stiff-arming the notion that if you never dare to be great you will never be great.” New York Post columnist Mike Vaccaro wrote that it was the worst possible thing they could have done. The way he saw it, the team “was keeping their coach a virtual lame duck for another 12 months.”
Mara’s statement about retaining Coughlin was an example of a “dreaded vote of confidence.” It had the opposite effect intended and crystallized the fact that Coughlin’s job status was tenuous at best.
Precedent has long established that a coach who produces a lackluster season following a dreaded vote of confidence almost always receives a pink slip shortly thereafter. Often the coach doesn’t even make it through the next season. Coughlin’s story seemed destined to end in that fashion.
“[HE] ROBBED ME OF THE JOY I FELT PLAYING FOOTBALL” (2007)
After the playoff loss to the Eagles, Barber followed through on his plan and officially retired. One of the most prolific offensive players in Giants history, Barber still holds numerous individual Giants franchise records. He concedes that much of that success came during Coughlin’s tenure, part of which he attributes to Coughlin and his staff and their work with him, including helping him hold onto the football better, as Barber fumbled the ball at least eight times each season from 2000 to 2003.
In February 2017, just over a month after the Giants playoff loss to the Eagles, Barber signed a multiyear, multimillion-dollar contract with NBC as a year-round correspondent on the Today Show and as an analyst for the Sunday night NFL pregame show Football Night in America. When he was introduced by the network at a press conference, Barber immediately took shots at his former coach and his coaching style. He intimated that it was Coughlin’s unyielding personality, along with the constant, physical grind from the coach’s demanding practices, that had driven him out of football. Predictably, the media rolled with it, and it became a frequent topic of discussion the following week.
Barber later admitted that he made a pointed effort to talk about Coughlin at the press conference in order to generate buzz for the launch of his NBC career. “I knew enough about New York sports media to know that anything I said would get played up in columns and news stories the next day,” he recalled. “I needed to make a little splash.”
A couple of months later, before the start of the 2007 season, Barber released his autobiography Tiki: My Life in the Game. In it, he elaborated further about Coughlin. Among many other thoughts about his former head coach, he wrote that Coughlin “robbed me of what had been one of the most important things I had in my life, which was the joy I felt playing football,” and that “if Tom Coughlin had not remained as head coach of the Giants, I might still be in a Giants uniform.”
Barber wasn’t done dishing on his former team. A few months later, he turned his attention toward quarterback Eli Manning.
Just over three years earlier, the Giants had acquired Manning during the 2004 NFL Draft, at which point he was essentially anointed the franchise’s future savior. The San Diego Chargers had selected Manning with the first overall pick. But not long thereafter, they traded him to the Giants. In return, San Diego received the player the Giants selected at No. 4 overall, North Carolina State quarterback Philip Rivers, along with four future draft picks. It was a hefty price for the Giants to pay for one player, and through the 2006 season Manning had not lived up to the billing.
Manning was a man of little emotion. “[He] never uttered a single curse word in the huddle the three years I played with him,” Barber remembered. He was practically unflappable, even during the worst situations on the field. It was an asset much of the time, but when the team was struggling, the perception that Manning had a laid-back attitude led to questions about his competitiveness. Fair or not, to some in the media, his demeanor did not exude leadership.
During his first Football Night in America broadcast, before a Giants preseason game, Barber drilled down on Eli. “He hasn’t shown leadership,” Barber said. “[Manning’s] personality hasn’t been so that he can step up, make a strong statement and have people believe that it’s coming from his heart… Sometimes it was almost comical the way that he would say things.” The comments really pissed Eli off. So much so that he responded to them publicly, something he rarely did. “I guess I could have questioned [Tiki’s] leadership skills last year with calling out the coach and [discussing] retiring in the middle of the season, saying he lost all the heart,” Manning said.
A SOFTER TOUCH FROM COUGHLIN (2007)
During the off-season and training camp, Coughlin made a series of adjustments to his coaching style. He replaced his defensive coordinator and defensive backs coach. He also made Kevin Gilbride, who took over temporarily at the end of 2006, the permanent offensive coordinator. But the most surprising and noticeable change was the fact that Coughlin came into camp with a softer personality and exuded a genuine intent to be nicer and warmer to his players. He was committed to becoming more approachable and making players feel more comfortable in reaching out to him.
Coughlin’s personality change was likely a directive straight from the top. “[Mara and Tisch] were going to fire Coughlin, even after he got into the playoffs, unless they heard the right things from him in the postseason interviews,” remembered Myers. One of those things was that Coughlin would try to loosen up a bit. “They told him,” Myers added, “we see how you are with your grandchildren, we know that there is that side of you.” Coughlin seemed to get the message.
“THE HOUSECLEANING’S COMING. BRINGING COUGHLIN BACK… HAS MERELY EXTENDED THE PROBLEM” (2007)
Despite Coughlin’s gentler approach, the 2007 season started disastrously. The Giants gave up a whopping 80 points and 846 total yards in their first two games, both losses. The defense was porous, and the team continued to rack up bad penalties.
After the Giants’ second loss, a 35–13 blowout by the Packers at the home opener at Giants Stadium, Coughlin’s job status looked bleak. “How fired is Tom Coughlin?” longtime Denver Post sportswriter Jim Arsmtrong asked rhetorically in his Monday column. The Asbury Park Press’s Stephen Edelson, who had written nine months earlier that Coughlin should be fired, still felt the same way. “The housecleaning’s coming,” he wrote. “Bringing Coughlin back for another season has merely extended the problem another year, rather than giving the fresh start everyone deserved.”
The following Sunday, on NFL Today, former NFL quarterback and CBS analyst Boomer Esaison wrote off the team’s playoff chances:
How are the Giants going to get back to the playoffs? I don’t see it… If you can’t get off the field on third down, you can’t stop the opposing team’s passer, you can’t stop their big running backs or their tight ends, you know what? That’s gonna continue the rest of the year and I think this team is heading south.
But the Giants were a better football team than they had shown those first two games. Beginning a few weeks later, the team fired off a six-game winning streak. New defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo transformed the Giants’ defense into the team’s best unit. Additionally, Coughlin’s changes to his approach were noticeable. He was having fun, and the team was more relaxed on the field. “Tom lightened up,” Plaxico Burress recalled. “He was like the total opposite of what he had been before.”
When Mara and Tisch had met with Coughlin at the end of the 2006 season, an important topic of discussion, other than Coughlin needing to lighten up, was the team’s franchise quarterback. In his first three seasons, Eli Manning had shown potential that he could become the star quarterback they all thought he would be when they drafted him. But he wasn’t there yet. He was inconsistent and had as many bad moments as good. The owners wanted Coughlin to assure them that he had a plan in place for Eli to progress to his full ability.
To work with Manning, in addition to the permanent appointment of Gilbride to run the offense, Coughlin also brought in quarterbacks coach Chris Palmer, considered a “quarterback guru.”
Eli had played adequately during the team’s six-game win streak despite playing in pain with a separated shoulder. But on November 25, Eli had a nightmare game that gave even the most confident supporters second thoughts. In a 41–17 shellacking by the Vikings at Giants Stadium, Manning threw four interceptions, three of which were returned for touchdowns. It was the Giants’ worst home loss in eight years.
A day later, Manning was grilled by the press, who asked him why, during such an embarrassing performance, he was so calm and didn’t scream at any teammates or show emotion. The following Sunday, on ESPN’s NFL Countdown pregame show, panelist and former NFL wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson rhetorically asked, “What quarterback in the National Football League has won anything quiet, just walking into the line of scrimmage quiet?”
Doubts about the Giants’ franchise quarterback were at an all-time high after the Vikings game debacle. A few days later, Giants general manager Jerry Reese said that “Eli Manning has gotten skittish, for whatever reason.” Esaison, who in addition to being a CBS commentator, was (and as of 2022, still is) also a local radio host in the New York market, started to wonder whether Eli could handle playing in New York. “Maybe he should be in Jacksonville. Maybe he should be in Atlanta or New Orleans,” Esaison said. “New York is going to chew him up right now—and it has chewed him up for the last four years.”
Approaching the regular-season finale at New England, the Giants were 10–5 and had clinched the fifth seed in the NFC Playoffs. Thus, from a playoff seeding standpoint, the game was meaningless because the Giants were locked in the fifth spot and would remain there regardless of the outcome. However, contrary to conventional wisdom, Coughlin did not bench his starters. It was a plan with which many disagreed. “[Coughlin] needs to take advantage of being locked into the No. 5 seed by sitting guys who could benefit from a week off,” wrote Myers in the Daily News. Bob Glauber, in a Newsday column, wrote that playing the whole game at full strength would be “foolhardy.” (Rochester, New York) Democrat and Chronicle columnist Bob Matthews felt the same way. “Anything beyond appearances by [Giants] star players would not be reasonable.”
The Giants lost to New England, 38–35, but the Patriots didn’t cruise to victory as they had during most games that season. Coughlin’s squad actually outplayed New England for the first three quarters and led 28–14 in the fourth before the Pats pulled away at the end. Manning, who had been struggling since the end of November, threw four touchdowns and went toe-to-toe with the league’s MVP, Tom Brady. The performance gave him a jolt of confidence, and plenty of reason for optimism going into the playoffs. It set the tone for the most improbable postseason run in NFL history.
“THE GIANTS HAVE NO CHANCE WHATSOEVER”: A PLAYOFF RUN FOR THE AGES (2008)
On the Tuesday before the Giants’ first playoff game, a wild card contest at Tampa Bay, Bucs cornerback Ronde Barber told his twin brother Tiki on The Barber Shop, their weekly show on Sirius Satellite Radio, that he was happy about the matchup. “Of course we want to play the Giants,” he boasted. The message was clear: The Giants were not a team to fear. Tampa, unlike the Giants, rested many of their top players before their last game, a fact that former NFL head coach Jimmy Johnson could not overlook. “Tampa rested their players, and they are healthier,” he said when he predicted that the Bucs would win on Fox NFL Sunday the morning of the game. His fellow co-hosts, Howie Long, Terry Bradshaw, and Frank Caliendo, all agreed.
The Giants turned out to be a tougher opponent than Ronde Barber thought. His brother’s former team eliminated the Bucs 24–14. Next, despite Johnson, Long, Bradshaw, and Caliendo all quickly and decisively picking against them, the Giants traveled to Dallas and avenged two regular-season losses by beating the Cowboys 21–17.
The following week, in Green Bay, playing for the NFC Championship, the Giants beat the Packers in one of the coldest games in NFL history. The wind chill at kickoff was—23 degrees Fahrenheit. The game turned out to be Hall of Famer Brett Favre’s final game with the franchise.
The Giants arrived in Glendale, Arizona for Super Bowl XLII as 12-point underdogs against what was generally thought to be an invincible New England squad. The consensus opinion was that, while the Giants had made a valiant effort in the postseason, the game would be the end of the Giants’ fairy tale playoff run.
Some of the most prominent people in the media thought the Giants didn’t have a prayer. Bradshaw, who hadn’t been shy in taking potshots at the Giants and their coach, unsurprisingly proclaimed that he thought “The Giants have no chance whatsoever of winning this football game.” One confident New England fan started a website called 19-0.org because he was so sure the Patriots would win and complete the season with a perfect 19–0 record. The site started selling Patriots T-shirts that said 19–0, with the words PERFECTION and DYNASTY below. They sold 700 shirts in the week leading up to the Super Bowl, before the NFL shut it down.
During media day, five days before the game, Plaxico Burress predicted that the Giants would win 23–17. When word about that reached Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, he laughed, and said, “We’re only going to score 17 points? OK. Is Plax playing defense? I wish he had said 45–42 and gave us a little credit for more points.”
Remarkably, Burress ended up overestimating the point total. In one of the greatest upsets in NFL history, the Giants made Bradshaw and others eat their words by defeating the Patriots 17–14. Manning threw two touchdowns, including a 13-yard pass to Burress with less than a minute left in the game. The most notable play of the game occurred on the Giants’ final drive with the Giants down 4 with just over a minute remaining in the fourth quarter. On third and five from New York’s 44-yard line, Manning escaped a sack and threw a prayer to wide receiver David Tyree in the middle of the field, who caught the ball for a 32-yard gain, using his helmet as support. Four plays later, Manning threw the game-winning touchdown to Burress, and the rest was history. Coughlin and the Giants were Super Bowl champions. Manning was named Super Bowl MVP.
Despite being awarded MVP honors, Eli Manning’s performance may not have been the best of the night. Some bestowed that distinction on defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo and the Giants’ defense. Spagnuolo changed the Giants’ defensive front throughout the game. He had defensive end Justin Tuck line up in different spots on the line of scrimmage and ran creative blitzes on almost 30 percent of the Patriots’ snaps. The different looks and constant pressure confused and frustrated Tom Brady all night. Spagnuolo also devised clever coverage schemes to keep Patriots wide receiver Randy Moss, the best pass catcher in the NFL at the time, in check. Although Moss was able to catch a touchdown in the fourth quarter, he finished the game with only five total catches, far below his season average.
Many media folks had been critical of Coughlin’s plan to play the Giants’ final regular-season game at full strength. But it paid off. Besides injecting confidence into Eli Manning, it allowed the Giants’ first-team defense to gain experience playing and understanding the Patriots’ offense, which likely played a big part in the coaches’ development of the defensive strategies that were so successful in the Super Bowl. Myers, one of the scribes who was critical of Coughlin’s strategy for the regular-season finale, later admitted the head coach’s shrewdness. “With [that] three point loss, the Giants convinced themselves they could play with anybody,” he wrote a few days after the Super Bowl triumph. “As it turned out, Coughlin made the smartest move of his career.”
“TIKI BARBER WATCHED HIS FORMER TEAMMATES WIN THE HOLY GRAIL” (2008)
For both Coughlin and Manning, the Super Bowl win was a spectacular triumph over their critics. Ironically, their most prominent critic was there, front and center, to watch the entire thing. Tiki Barber was in attendance covering the game. When Barber retired, he may have anticipated that NBC would send him out to Arizona to cover the Super Bowl, but there was likely very little chance he expected to witness his former coach and quarterback hoisting the Lombardi Trophy.
After the game, with ticker tape and confetti spread across the field, Tiki interviewed numerous celebrating Giants players. When he caught up with Eli Manning, he was in the stadium’s tunnel, still in uniform and wearing a SUPER BOWL CHAMPIONS hat and oversized novelty T-shirt over his shoulder pads. Despite the awkwardness of the situation, Barber and Manning were respectful toward each other throughout an uneventful interview.
At 5:00 a.m. the following day, on a rainy and windy morning in Glendale, Barber stood across the street from University of Phoenix Stadium for a live hit for NBC’s Today. From the studio in New York, host Meredith Viera introduced him: “Our own Super Bowl vet, Tiki Barber, watched his former teammates win the holy grail.” She then offered him congratulations, as if he were still a member of the team.
For a situation akin to covering the joyous wedding of a recent ex-girlfriend, Tiki handled himself with class. He praised Manning’s performance during the game and throughout the playoffs and described how he was rooting for his former team in the press room.
COUGHLIN’S GIANTS AFTER 2008
After the glorious night in Glendale, there was much optimism for the Giants’ future. However, winning the Super Bowl did not catapult the franchise as most believed it would. In 2008, the Giants were the No. 1 overall seed in the playoffs, but were upset at home by the Eagles in the Divisional Round. They proceeded to miss the playoffs the following two seasons. By the end of the 2010 season, Coughlin found himself in an eerily similar predicament to the one he had faced just four years earlier. He had come practically a full circle and was back in the hot seat.
In 2011, entering Week 16, the Giants had lost five of their previous six games. Then, like déjà vu, they squeaked into the playoffs and went on another magical playoff run that culminated in a 21–17 victory over the favored Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI. Eli Manning, who threw for almost 5,000 yards and 29 touchdowns that season, won his second Super Bowl MVP award.
The Giants never made the playoffs again under Coughlin. After the 2015 campaign, the team’s third straight losing season, the front office finally pushed Coughlin out. He had caught lightning in a bottle twice, but he couldn’t do it again. Eli Manning retired four years later.
While his Giants’ tenure didn’t end well, Coughlin’s legacy was cemented by the 2007 and 2011 seasons. The first Super Bowl was his ultimate vindication. His willingness to make changes in his personal approach was a major factor in the 2007 playoff run. “Right after the [2006 season] I began evaluating and trying to find ways in which I could be better,” he said in 2007, a couple of days after his first Super Bowl triumph. “You have to learn and be prepared to make the adjustments and change.”
Tiki Barber’s relationship with the Giants’ organization and its fans hasn’t been the same since his retirement. His productivity on the field will always be overshadowed by his exit and his polarizing comments shortly thereafter. In 2010, Barber was named one of the annual inductees into the Giants Ring of Honor. By that time, morale around the franchise was at a low ebb. They had missed the playoffs in 2009 after finishing 8–8 and were off to a 1–2 start in 2010, including two straight bad losses in the previous two weeks. In the days leading up to his Ring of Honor induction ceremony, which would take place during halftime of the Giants’ Week 4 home game against the Bears, Barber told the media that Coughlin’s control of the team was “slipping away,” and that the coach’s job was in “crisis.” It was no surprise that he was loudly booed by the Giants faithful at the induction ceremony. By 2011, Barber’s TV career had fizzled out. Soon thereafter, he tried to make a comeback in the NFL, but no team was interested. Currently, in 2022, Barber co-hosts a national sports radio show in New York for CBS Sports Radio that airs every weekday afternoon. Also, since 2019, Barber has been a broadcaster for weekly NFL games on CBS as a color commentator.
Barber has said numerous times that he has no regrets about walking away from the game when he did. Regarding his comments about Coughlin and Manning in the months after his retirement, Tiki said in 2013, “Maybe people weren’t ready to accept strong opinions from recently retired athletes.” He also contends that if he had come back, the team probably would not have gone to the Super Bowl. “The dynamics of the team shifted when I left, and Eli became that guy who had to take all the pressure on his back,” Barber said. “And at the time, incorrectly, I didn’t think he could handle it.” In December 2008, he sat down with Eli for a one-on-one interview for NBC and admitted that Eli proved him wrong.
Tara Sullivan, one of the columnists who on Christmas Day in 2006 called for Coughlin’s firing, also admits she was wrong, but stands by what she wrote in her column. “It was entirely based on what I was seeing on the field,” she said in 2020. “The whole narrative [when Coughlin was hired in 2004] was that ‘We are going to make these guys tougher… they are going to be disciplined,’ and then to watch that product, in that New Orleans game… it looked like it was going in the wrong direction.” The fact that Coughlin flipped the script in 2007 turned out to be a good thing for local columnists like her. “I love the fact that Coughlin proved me wrong… because it meant that I got to cover one of the greatest stories.”
Myers, who covered the Giants for the New York Daily News for 29 years before retiring in 2018, also has no regrets about his column. “I still contend that what I wrote in 2006 was right on the money [at that time],” he said in 2021.
Often, people are bewildered by poorly aged sports commentary, and think, “How could he or she have actually thought this?” That being said, folks may be lenient in judging the criticism levied at Coughlin during his first three seasons with the Giants—after all, by the end of 2006, his tenure with the team looked hopeless and his fate seemed inevitable. The local media was calling for his ousting, and as the 20,000 people at Giants Stadium on Christmas Eve 2006 made clear, Giants fans wanted him to be shown the door, too. By then, few, if anyone, predicted that Coughlin would be around after 2007, much less win a Super Bowl. It is a feat even the Giants players would never have guessed. “We even shocked ourselves,” Michael Strahan said after the Super Bowl XLII triumph.
Hindsight is rarely forgiving, but at least those who whiffed on this story are in good company.