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New York Giants extend Tom Coughlin

By Stanford Crissey

Dec 21, 2014; St. Louis, MO, USA; New York Giants head coach Tom Coughlin looks on as his team plays the St. Louis Rams during the first half at the Edward Jones Dome. Mandatory Credit: Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports
Dec 21, 2014; St. Louis, MO, USA; New York Giants head coach Tom Coughlin looks on as his team plays the St. Louis Rams during the first half at the Edward Jones Dome. Mandatory Credit: Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports /
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The New York Giants and head coach Tom Coughlin have agreed to a one-year extension.

Time goes by, coaches come and go, but Tom Coughlin remains that steady constant, the Methuselah of NFL coaching.

Coughlin is now

7,000

68 years old, and the winds of time have ravaged the veteran coach’s already red face to the point that when the Giants visit a team with a red logo, he’s in danger of disappearing into it. But that hasn’t stopped him from signing on for another year with New York’s least depressing team.

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Coughlin and the Giants have agreed to a one-year extension that will keep him on the Giants’ sideline until at least the 2016 season.

The news of Coughlin’s extension first appeared on Giants.com.

In an offseason in which players 42 years younger than Coughlin are hanging up their cleats retiring from football, Coughlin would not have been blamed for hanging up his… uh, clipboard?… and riding off into the sunset.

On the other hand, it’s probably worth coming back just to see what Odell Beckham Jr. will do.

Coughlin has been the Giants’ coach since 2004, making his the third-longest tenure for an NFL coach with one team (behind the immortal Bill Belichick and the apparently unfireable Marvin Lewis). Coughlin has 93 wins in his 11 years with the Giants, placing him second in franchise history. He has also brought the team two very memorable Super Bowl victories.

Coughlin has been an NFL head coach for 19 years, getting his start with the expansion Jacksonville Jaguars in 1995. He took that team to the AFC Championship in 1999 on the heels of a 14-2 season (handing Dan Marino perhaps the most ruthless goodbye in NFL history in the process, a 62-7 playoff defeat). His 164 NFL regular-season victories are good for 13th in league history.

Over the past two years the Giants have slipped considerably, posting two straight losing seasons despite the continued presence of many of the stars of the Super Bowl team, most notably Eli Manning. With that in mind, the timing of Coughlin’s extension may seem odd, but it mostly provides the benefit of not having the team’s coach enter the season as a lame duck (fans of the 2010 Panthers, to name one example, can tell you how that goes). Plus, those two Super Bowls definitely have to count for something.

Now, with 2015 on the horizon, it’s time for the Giants to fulfill their destiny of sneaking into the playoffs then beating the Patriots in the Super Bowl every four years. If that happens again, Coughlin won’t be signing a one-year extension next spring; he’ll be signing a 100-year extension. And he will honor that extension until its end.

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