Upon his arrival way back in 2004, Tom Coughlin marched into the room like a drill sergeant and stated his intense desire to oversee, "the restoration of pride.'' Two Super Bowl titles later, no one denies what Coughlin has wrought.
In much more reserved tones, Coughlin on Monday revealed, "I did challenge our pride a little bit today'' as he addressed his listless and struggling team the day after a 38-0 loss to the Panthers that was alarmingly noncompetitive at almost every turn.
Coughlin has bobbed and weaved around many crisis points in his 10 years with the Giants but he has never been 0-3, a record that leads to an open-season assault on a team that dares to display a Super Bowl calendar in its locker room to remind the players how many days until the big game they once believed they were good enough to play in.
"Obviously when you lose 38-0, anything you say about us probably deserves to be said,'' Eli Manning said after absorbing a physical beating behind an inept offensive line. "It's something we're not happy about as players, you're embarrassed about it and we got to fix it.''
There are no easy answers heading into a game in Kansas City with the unbeaten Chiefs and there were few players willing to offer any suggestions in a sparsely populated locker room. Coughlin said his immediate message amid the carnage was to make sure the Giants, "stick together, that we stay together. That we act, that we speak, and that we are one. We don't finger point. We don't blame anybody either. There is no excuse for what happened. It happened.''
Oh, it happened all right. Coughlin said he may bring the team leaders in to brainstorm about what is going wrong.
"Those things can be good,'' Manning said, before cautioning, "you can talk and you can meet all we want, we got to play better, do a lot of things better than we are doing them now.''
Following Coughlin's assessment, the players met by themselves but this was not some specially called players-only team meeting. In fact, the Giants have a "debriefing'' players meeting almost every Monday, something they adopted during the dark days of their no-win November in 2011 after visiting Navy Seals gave the team the idea.
These are desperate times, though. Manning revealed he may step outside his personality comfort zone and get in someone's face if he sees the need, which would be a dramatic departure from his "Easy Eli'' demeanor.
"We'll see,'' Manning said. "Got to do something just to pick up our performance. We'll see in practice if certain guys need to be challenged. We'll see how it goes and do whatever I think needs to be done to get guys playing at a high level.''
There's not much that can be done to the lineup. The offensive line is the unit struggling most glaringly.
"Your team is your team," Coughlin said. "If there is something that we think we [can do to] help, then I would consider it.''
He said center David Baas and right guard Chris Snee are both having some physical issues. That could lead to finding a spot for David Diehl if he is recovered from thumb surgery.
Perhaps the entire operation overvalued the talent on the team.
"We're going to certainly find out,'' said Coughlin, who left the team Monday afternoon to fly to Waterloo, N.Y., to attend services for his brother John, 63, who died last Monday night after suffering a head injury in a fall. The funeral is Tuesday.
The approach in times of trouble, Coughlin said, has always been consistent.
"Ours has always been 'damn the torpedoes, full-speed ahead,' '' he said.
What has confounded Coughlin this season, as it befuddled him during the late-season 2012 meltdown, is the disconnect between quality practices and miserable games. In essence, he doesn't see any signs the shoddy play is lurking.
"This is a Sunday sport,'' defensive tackle Cullen Jenkins said. "Sometimes through the week we can have the best practices, but if you don't translate it, it doesn't mean anything. Maybe we're just a little uptight right now, maybe we just need to take a deep breath and relax a little bit and play like we know we can.''
Asked if he was taken aback Coughlin challenged the pride of the team, Manning was nonplussed.
"We saw the game yesterday. We were right there in it. We saw the film,'' he said. "It wasn't pretty. We got to do something.''
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