Always Being Prepared

The following comes from a small piece on ESPN.com about the Greatest Coaches in NFL History. This caught my attention, not only because I am an avid Giants fan, but because I have tremendous respect for Coach Coughlin and his coaching philosophy. Eli Manning talks about his Coach and what he has learned from him. The full article can be found here.

After the second Super Bowl, Coach Coughlin and I had kind of a unique moment. I hadn’t seen him right after the game with the hoopla and then doing interviews. So now I’m dressed and I’ve done all my interviews, and I’m leaving the locker room and realize I haven’t talked to Coach Coughlin. So I knock on his door and go into the his office, and right away we both start analyzing what we should’ve done in that last minute [against New England].

So after the game, Coach Coughlin and I started analyzing it. We knew they were going to let us score. Do you take a knee? Do you kick a field goal? Do you try to score? We start dissecting that, thinking into it. I threw in my theory. He gave me his theory. What’s the best possible way? It was a unique situation. You’ve got to score. You don’t want to settle for a field goal in that situation. How do you possible handle that situation if it ever happens again? We do situations on Saturdays. That would be a good situation to think about and go over. It was second down, and they’d just taken a timeout. We were thinking they have one timeout left, we’ll run it again, let the clock run all the way down, then kick a field goal to take the lead. But on second down they let us score, saved a timeout and got the ball back with 50 seconds rather than getting it with 15. Of course, they needed a touchdown now to win the game instead of a field goal.

And I think he’s ingrained that in me, to always be planning, always be thinking, and to be prepared for every situation. You watch things happen, whether it happens to you or another team, and you learn from it and you can be prepared for it. He wanted to talk about what happened at the end of the game, but I did, too.