Super Bowl XLVI – Tuesday, January 31, 2012(on if he had been hopeful of being considered for an NFL head coaching job) “There were certainly some worthy deserving candidates. Certainly I was hopeful of getting a look and a chance to talk to some people. You hope that they (other teams) look at what you’ve done and say that we’d like to have something like that with us. That they’d like to have someone who is a good teacher with young guys, a disciplinarian, someone who can take us to where we’d like to be. I’m very proud of what we did this year. We started with five new starters on offense. To be able to develop the group that we developed is very rewarding and it’s a tribute to the good offensive staff that I have with me.”
(on the intensity of coaching in the New York market) “You know it’s funny. Wherever you’re at, you think that no other place is as bad as that place, but the reality of it is that’s the way it is. All 32 teams are enduring the same scrutiny, the same questioning, the same second-guessing. It’s intrinsic in what we do.”
(on quarterback Eli Manning’s ability to hang in the pocket and maximize every available second) “I think it’s a combination of two things. First is his continued growth. He has a great mastery of where the protections are, where the strengths and weaknesses are. He has steadily evolved. The guy has worked at it. I don’t know if people appreciate that. He’s listened to me for eight years now. He told me the other day that I start the sentence and he finishes it before I can complete it. He’s grown that much in terms of having a feel for what we want to do. He has a great sense of things. He has a lot of courage and also a lot of knowledge.”
(on Manning and the special skills that it takes to play quarterback in the NFL) “When people talk about toughness, they talk about linebackers or a fullback---they don’t think of the quarterback. But it’s a totally different makeup. You’re not inflicting the blow. The willingness to stand in there and focus on your job, which is delivering the pass, and knowing that you’re going to get hit is a different kind of courage. And Eli definitely possesses it. As a coach, you appreciate the toughness that he shows and his willingness to do whatever it takes to win the game.”
(on reflections of his time as the head coach of the San Diego Chargers) “Sometimes it seems like a very long time ago, because it has been. You know, the opportunity to be a head coach is a special one and those memories are still very vivid. It (San Diego) is a great city and a great place. It’s just unfortunate that it didn’t work out. It was a lot shorter (stint) than I wish it was. We had a young quarterback (Ryan Leaf) that wound up struggling in this league and never quite made it. But quite honestly, I always felt that if I had had a chance to stay, I would have gotten him going.”
(on his Connecticut roots and the number of coaches and players in the NFL from that state) “I think it says great things about the state of football coming out of Connecticut. I take a lot of pride in that. When I first started 23 years ago, there was only one guy coaching in the league from the state. Then I was able to bring (current Titans offensive coordinator) Chris Palmer into the league, and other guys like Paul Pasqualoni and Tony Sparano and lots more have come into the NFL. As is usually the case, somebody gets in, and they start helping some of the other people who they have respect for and who they know will do a good job for them.”
(on what it means personally to be back in the Super Bowl) “You realize how fortunate you are. I said to my son (Kevin Jr. who is an offensive assistant for the Giants), ‘How lucky are you? Two years in the league and you’re in this thing.’ It took me 17 years before I got in. And we had some good runs in Houston (Oilers) when we were in the playoffs every year. But you realize how special it is to make the advancement necessary. You realize how little the difference is between the teams that make it and the teams that don’t make it. Everything has to fall into place in order to get here. For us, to see how it’s come together over the last two games of the regular season and then the playoffs, you really realize how lucky you are.”
(on if he has been surprised at the success of wide receiver Victor Cruz) “I didn’t know that he would be a great player. I knew he looked like a guy who could play the position. We were devastated when Steve Smith went down. When we lost him, we weren’t able to replace him. Hakeem Nicks and Mario Manningham are outside guys and never felt comfortable and efficient enough to do the things that we needed them to do to be successful as an inside receiver. We had Victor last year and we saw something. You don’t know that he’s going to be a great player, but he was quick enough, he looked powerful enough, he looked courageous enough to play in there. Then he went on IR and he came back this year and he was struggling. He wasn’t playing real well. We brought in Brandon Stokley--that’s how much he was struggling. Then Brandon got hurt and Victor got a chance to play. Then after a while, he started to do some of the things that we thought he could do. As I have said about him, he giveth and he can taketh away on a play-by-play basis. He’ll go out and make a great play and then he’ll screw up. We just hoped that he would reduce the number of errors that he made and he did. And that’s what I’m most proud of him for.”
(on Giants Head Coach Tom Coughlin) “Even when there was a big to-do made about the creation of the players’ committee and people saying that he’s taken on this softer approach--I don’t see it. I think he used that players’ committee as another avenue to get his message across. People see a certain side of Tom. When you get him away from the football field, he’s family-oriented, he’s a fun-loving guy and he’s a great person. I think what happens is if you get the right guys, they appreciate those things. They don’t see the tough guy, the hard-nosed disciplinarian, the task master. They see the other side and they realize that what he’s demanding of them is to make us a better team. It takes a quality guy to see that. If you have the wrong guys, then they resent it and it turns them off. What he asks of the players is the positive things that help us win.”
(on what stood out about quarterback Eli Manning when he scouted his career at Ole Miss) “First, he was an accurate passer. And secondly, you looked at his ability to elevate the people around him. I don’t think his team was necessarily as talented as lot of the people they were playing, and yet they were always very competitive. When you’re going against the Alabamas and the Auburns, I don’t think Ole Miss had as many talented players. That kind of guy who is able to get other players to play better than one would normally expect, that’s the kind of guy that you’d like to have as your quarterback. Eli is a great catalyst to help us play better.”
(on how many of the current offensive passing game trends in the NFL were being used by him 20-plus years ago with the Houston Oilers) “I think that’s a good thing and I’m proud of it. At one time (with the Oilers), it (four-receiver base offensive sets) was considered gimmicky. Now you see everyone going to three and four receivers. It’s almost standard operating procedure now. I think the fact that people are willing to be open, spread out and take advantage of athletic mismatches is something that we were doing 23 years ago.”
(on if that three/four receiver trend that he helped start in the 1980s died too soon before ultimately again becoming in fashion) “That offense at the time seemed to receive undue criticism. It seemed that no matter what you did, that people would find reason to criticize. If we turned the ball over that week, people would say, ‘See, that’s a high-risk offense.’ Then maybe you wouldn’t turn the ball over for the next six weeks but you would score too quickly and they’d say, ‘See, you put your defense on the field too much.’ So it was always one thing or another. I think the only thing that would have dispelled that would have been to win in the postseason, and we (Oilers) didn’t win in the postseason. But if you looked at the team success and the offensive success, it’s hard to argue with what was taking place. I think we were the first team to use those formations consistently in the league. When I first got to Houston in 1989, (then Head Coach) Jerry Glanville called it the Red Gun and it was only a portion of what we did. When Jack Pardee became the head coach, he went exclusively in that direction, and we were ranked first or second in the league in offense every year, and we went to the playoffs every year.”
(on if the Giants’ passing game has overshadowed the running game) “Well, we haven’t run the ball very well. And that’s why it’s been overshadowed. We haven’t been as successful as we’ve been in the past with that. It’s something that we’re not happy with and something that we continue to try to get better with. I would say that at the end of the year, we’ve gotten a little bit better. We’re trying to do better to get closer to where we were in 2008 when we led the league in rushing.”
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