Should Coughlin stay or go?

I think Coughlin should go.  Wonder thinks the Giants can still win with Coughlin as long as he replaces Sheridan and Gilbride.  Peter and Motown also think that Coughlin needs to go.  What do you think?

My reasons for firing Coughlin are simple- he has now squandered not one but TWO seasons where the team could have vied for a championship.  We understand the patience and deliberate nature of Giants management.  They are the anti-Snyders, moving like the supertanker with slow and measured changes in direction.  We all respect that structure.  Just because something goes wrong at work does not mean you get fired.  But when it happens again and again there is a problem.

1) Mara warned Coughlin once before.  With that warning came a mandate for better communication betweek players and coaches.  How well do you think the players and coaches are communicating this season?  This has all the holiday trimmings of Old Tom.  If the players were made into owners of the process like they were in 2007, maybe you would have seen them playing for their coach on Thursday.  They were not.

2) The 2008 Season.  We have chronicled the 2nd and 3rd Eagles games from last year too many times to want to dredge it up in all its regal implosion.  For those here who were not around last January, we simply saw the playoff game as a wonderful opportunity to address the mistakes made in Week 14 and capitalize off of advanced knowledge of what the Eagles did with proper adjustments to win  the game.  That loss represented a travesty right there with “Flipper Anderson” for a title left on the table.  The Giants had beaten the two teams who played in the Super Bowl, BOTH on the road, during the season.  To not be at that game was PALPABLE UNDERACHIEVEMENT.

3) The 2009 Season.  We have a month and a half living through this latest collapse.  This blog did not wake up on Friday morning and become all-knowing seers of this demise.  But we did understand the myriad issues and noted them WHILE THE TEAM WAS WINNING 5 straight.  We saw the problems.  Hell, we saw the problems with Gilbride, dare I say, before ANYONE ELSE (except Oiler fans, Bills fans, Charger fans, Buddy Ryan fans..) when we were critical of Gilbride during the 11-1 run last season, WHILE WE WERE WINNING THEN ALSO.  The comments from this blog were lost when we moved to bloguin.com on October 1st of this year.  But back when we ripped apart Gilbride after the Steeler victory, saying we were winning DESPITE that piece of terd, there were loads of people who questioned our insight and our loyalty to the Giants.  There was one commenter who (now long gone, probably) psychoanalyzed and implied we were not going to be happy unless we were complaining about something.  Well, for the record, we will ask any of you to find ANY complaints on this blog about Steve Spagnuolo.  We complain about underachievement and anything in our way to getting another championship title.  We praise effort (Webster, as an example of many), we praise acknowledgement of effort (Reese locking up Webster before he hit the market, one of many), we point out untapped potential (Boss, one of many) etc…

Call me crazy, but I believe the Giants could have won  FOUR TITLES:
a) 2006- beset by injuries, and then the team caved on Coughlin. (Remember back when they beat DAL and ATL on the road.. they were the best in the league.  “Not For Long.”)
b) 2007- overachievement, and a few miracles splashed in.
c) 2008- the best team cannot make the adjustments to the loss of ONE player, despite 5 weeks warning.
d) 2009- beset by injuries, and then the team caved on Coughlin.

Here is where Wonder’s point naturally flows… that in 2007 Coughlin, w/ 2 new coordinators, he took his 2006 core, added a great Reese draft class and went all the way.  So the extension is that 2009>2010 can be a 2006>2007 repeat, where Coughlin gets two new coordinators and takes the 2009 core to the promised land in 2010.

The teflon from 2007 is not working.  The only thing I see not sticking is additional championships.

There is one way we’d ALL agree- give us Cowher.  His teams do not underachieve.  Reese and Cowher together in the same building?  Whew- dangerous.  A lot more dangerous than Reese and Coughlin, that much we can all understand.