There are coaching legacies at stake in this weekend’s NFL conference title games. Bill Belichick gets another shot at the title of greatest NFL coach of all time. With three Super Bowl championships on his resume, he is in that conversation, but he hasn’t won one since he was forced to put the video camera down.
The Harbaughs could become the first family of coaching in America — the offspring of Jack Harbaugh, who coached a national champion at Western Kentucky.
His sons, John and Jim, have a chance to make history if they face each other in the Super Bowl.
John, who has made four postseason appearances in his four seasons with the Baltimore Ravens, has a chance to win the AFC Championship on Sunday in New England against the Patriots.
Jim, who took a 6-10 team from a year ago and led it to a 13-3 mark in his first season with San Francisco, beat favored New Orleans on Saturday to put his 49ers in the NFC Championship game Sunday.
The most interesting legacy, though, is probably that of the least interesting coach among the four NFL finalists — the New York Giants’ Tom Coughlin.
We might just want to take a step back and realize that Coughlin is not just a good coach but a great coach. We might want to look past the humorless “Little General” persona and see that Coughlin may be the guy you want on your sideline coaching your team.
Why? Because Coughlin has his teams ready to play when it counts the most. Because Coughlin is two wins away from his second Super Bowl championship — the same number of trophies Bill Parcells won in New York.
Coughlin took his team to Green Bay on Sunday prepared for playoff football, outcoaching Mike McCarthy, whose Packers never seemed ready to play in a 37-20 loss in a divisional contest on their home field.
What makes Coughlin so compelling is that it seems like every year — at some point — he is on the brink of losing his job. In 2007, the Giants appeared to be falling apart, yet Coughlin pulled them together for a playoff run that led to an upset of the undefeated Patriots in the Super Bowl.
It was the same blueprint this season — certainly after Coughlin’s team lost to the Redskins for the second time, which put its postseason hopes in jeopardy. But here the Giants are. They knocked off the defending Super Bowl champions and will play for the NFC title this Sunday.
He did it in Jacksonville, taking an expansion team to two AFC Championship games. And he is doing it in New York, the biggest stage on which a coach can perform.
Rex Ryan is self destructing as the Jets’ coach on that stage. Tom Coughlin is New York football’s leading man.
Examiner columnist Thom Loverro is the co-host of “The Sports Fix” from noon to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on ESPN980 and espn980.com. Contact him at [email protected].
