The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Coughlin gets second chance
Solely an exec in his return, he’s built another winner.
It’s no exaggeration to say Tom Coughlin built the Jaguars from the ground up. It’s also no exaggeration to say Coughlin’s last piece of unfinished business would be bringing a Super Bowl title to the town he helped put on the map. The Jaguars play the Patriots on Sunday in the AFC Championship game.
JACKSONVILLE, FLA. — It’s no exaggeration to say Tom Coughlin built the Jaguars from the ground up.
It’s alsono exaggeration to say Coughlin’s last piece of unfifinished business would be bringing a Super Bowl title to the town he helped put on the NFL map.
Fifteen years after being unceremoniously booted by the franchise he shaped, Coughlin is back in the front offiffice, where he has helped guide the teamin one of the league’s smallest markets to within two win soft he championship he came oh-so close to the fifirst time around.
The 71-year-old executive VP of football operations started this franchise in1995, working from an offiffice in a trailer outside the stadium then known as the Gator Bowl. Hewas the headcoach
andthe one voice who made every decision — from who threw the passes to who ran
the calculator for the salary cap to what color paint was on the walls.
Denied not once, but twice, in the AFC title game where the Jaguars fifind themselves again this
week, Coughlin chased the final pieces of the puzzle too hard. He wrecked the salary cap and left Jacksonville with the reputation of a manwho had few equals on the sideline but lots of fl flaws in the front offiffice.
Now, with two Super Bowl rings from New York as a coach in his back pocket, Coughlin is working his magic this time from that same front office. He has shown no interest in coaching and has sought zero attention this season, and especially this week, as the Jaguars get ready to play at New England in the AFC championship game Sunday — 21 years after Coughlin took them to the same place for the same stakes in only their second year of existence.
Anyone who knows Coughlink nows what this means.
“Hewas the architect who built this thing, and he had his hands in every aspect of it,” said Tony Boselli, the Hall of Fame finalist who was the team’s first draft pick. “Knowing him and as competitive as he, I think he would love (it). It would be a really special, and almost a
fifinishing of what he started back in 1995.”
Of course, there are no regrets about the 12 years Coughlin spent with the Giants in between these jobs in Jacksonville. The league changed, and Coughlin changed with it. He shed there putation of the unbending taskmaster, dealt less with offffffffffff-the- fifield decisions and more with the Xs and Os, and won two Super Bowls, both against the Patriots, both as an underdog.
Coughlin’s mastery of the Patriots and Bill Belichick, with whom he worked as an assistant coach under Bill Parcells back in the day, has been no small part of the conversation this week. But if Coughlin will be calling any shots on game day — or has been at any point this season — nobody is the wiser. Doug Marrone is the head coach, although Coughlin is always around.
“I don’t think I can lean on him anymore because I’m a big guy,” Marrone said, only half-joking.
To focus on Coughlin this week is to focus on how he transformed this roster and made sure the franchise, in owner Shad Khan’s words , no longer “lacked football IQ.’” The smarter look helped push a team that fi fired its coach and went 3-13 in 2016 to within a game of the Super Bowl for the fifirst time since January 2000.
Coughlin was instrumental in signing the best free-agent class in franchise history. All-Pro defensive lineman Calais Campbell ranked second in the NFL with a team-record 14½ sacks. Cornerback A.J. Bouye and safety Barry Church helped make Jacksonville’ s secondary thebes tin the league.
Top pick Leonard Fournette and second-rounder
Cam Robinson reinforced the team’s new identity as a tough, physical group that expects to win every game.
All those moves allowed the Jaguars to win around quarterback Blake Bortles, who has been dreadful at times and effifficient at best. The defense ranked second in points, yards, sacks and takeaways.
In many ways, this season’s roster successes have mirrored those Coughlin produced during his first few years, when it seemed like he couldn’t miss.
He declared Boselli would serve as the franchise’s cornerstone at left tackle. He went-all-in with a little-known Packers backup quarterback named Mark Brunell and found receivers Keenan McCardell and Jimmy Smith.
The upset over the Broncos and John Elway in the 1996 playoff ff ff ff ff ff sis part of NFL lore, but coming up short that year — and in 1999 after a 14-2 season — sowed the seeds of Coughlin’s undoing.
Hardy Nickerson, Bryce Paup and troubled receiver R.J. Soward were among the players for whom he overpaid or over reached. The Jaguars became cap-strapped and talent- de fifi ci en ta nd went 19-29 from 2000-02.
There was only one person to blame for that roster: Coughlin. The owner who
fifired him, Wayne Weaver, enjoyed only onemore playoff win before selling the team in 2011. He later said getting rid of Coughlin was one of his biggest regrets.