http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/story/475309p-399798c.html
You walked into the Giant locker room yesterday and there was no open revolt, just the quiet seething. The players were angry with themselves, they insisted, and that was all they were going to say right now. They had been allowed to meet privately, after assuring the team's overbearing censor, Tom Coughlin, they would not say anything negative about him or each other. And now they weren't going to lay this crazy loss to the Titans on the coach, if only because that would get them nowhere.
"I don't think guys are quitting to the point where you can say he doesn't have control of this team," Antonio Pierce said about Coughlin. "He has a different effect on every player. Some guys might hate him, some guys might love him. "Let's put it like this," Pierce said. "It don't go uphill when the coach gets fired, it goes downhill. That's not something we should be talking about as a team."
So even after the kind of spectacle in Nashville they wouldn't dare show the Roman citizenry inside the Colosseum, these bad times yesterday didn't quite look like the death throes of the Coughlin regime, not like three years ago with Jim Fassel.
Maybe they are the final two months for Coughlin. But not the final hours.
For one thing, the Giants can lose on Sunday to the Cowboys and remain no worse than tied for a wild card spot in the woeful NFC. For another, Coughlin still has the support of his lame-duck general manager, Ernie Accorsi, who once did everything to undermine Fassel. Coughlin still has backing from ownership, too. You know John Mara would love to give Wellington's hand-picked coach an extension. It's just that Coughlin is making it awfully tough right now for everyone, especially himself.
"I don't think about that," Coughlin said about his job security. "A lot of people had their hearts in their mouths. The entire Giant organization is upset. I don't understand what that has to do with anything."
He's a stubborn man. But much worse, in the end, he is a charmless alibi guy. On a day when Coughlin might have finally accepted some blame for another Sunday of self-destructive decision-making, for the devastating 24-21 loss, he instead talked around the subject with football fragments and ungracious finger-pointing.
It's fine when a coach rips into a malingering player. But it only works when that coach admits to his own shortcomings. On the one hand, Coughlin said the defeat was his responsibility. But when it came down to specifics, he dug up a flimsy rationale for each of his lunk-headed moves and quickly blamed his players.
He said he didn't try a 49-yard field goal in the fourth quarter, the one that might have made the score 24-0, because "it was too long" for Jay Feely. Somehow, Coughlin didn't think that 52 yards, against a much stiffer wind, was too long against the Bears.
Coughlin insisted he didn't overextend Eli Manning on the two interceptions, that the quarterback's throws were lousy. Well, yes, they were typically off target. But in both instances, especially the first, a run was the proper clock-killing move.
"I know you want to zoom in on one play," Coughlin said. "A lot of plays were extremely well-called."
This is the problem with Coughlin, and why he comes off more as a bully than as a strict taskmaster. He admits to no errors. His staff, particularly John Hufnagel, is immune from second-guessing. And then Coughlin goes after the easiest target, the rookie Mathias Kiwanuka, humiliating the defender with a made-for-TV tantrum along the sideline. Meanwhile, Coughlin lets Plaxico Burress jog off the field, unchallenged, after the receiver fails to hustle on the key interception.
"You're not going to get a stuffed shirt on the sideline when you get me," Coughlin said, as if that excused his abuse of Kiwanuka, his very different treatment of Burress.
Kiwanuka accepted the blame for his aborted tackle on Vince Young. Manning admitted fault, too, with just a hint of annoyance at Burress. It was Burress who sounded most like Coughlin, still thinking he had done nothing wrong.
"I didn't make the play. Get over it," he said. "He (Pacman Jones) gets away from a lot of people."
After an impossible defeat and in the midst of a late-season crisis, Burress and Coughlin came off awfully small yesterday in a Giant locker room that was still too big to pin this mess on the coach.
Somewhere out there is the next Giants' general manager, who may not be as generous.
