Jags’ Coughlin has unfinished business
Team’s first coach gets another shot to help win title.
JACKSONVILLE, FLA. — 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 NFL map.
Fifteen years after being unceremoniously booted by the franchise he shaped, Coughlin is back in the front office, where he has helped guide the team in one of the league’s smallest markets to within two wins of the championship he came oh-so close to the first time around.
The 71-year-old executive VP of football operations started this franchise in 1995, working from an office in a trailer outside the stadium then known as the Gator Bowl. He was the coach and the 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 find 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 man who had few equals on the sideline but lots of flaws in the front office.
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.
He may be deflecting the credit, but anyone who knows Coughlin knows what this means.
“He was 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 finishing 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 the reputation of the unbending taskmaster (though clocks are still set 5 minutes ahead), dealt less with off-the-field decisions and more with the X’s and O’s, 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 past week.