Sean Payton is staying put in New Orleans as the Saints’ coach, and it may leave the Giants wishing they hadn’t gotten rid of longtime coach Tom Coughlin.
Payton, who has ties to the Giants dating back to the early 2000s, was widely viewed as a top candidate to take over for Big Blue. Now that he’s off the market, the pool of potential candidates is looking very shallow.
Potential Jobs For Tom Coughlin, Who Wants To Keep Coaching
So far the Giants are looking at their two internal candidates – offensive coordinator Ben McAdoo and defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo – as well as Bengals offensive coordinator Hue Jackson and Panthers defensive coordinator Sean McDermott. Not one of those candidates has a resume approaching Coughlin’s, which has two Super Bowl victories on it.
Chip Kelly is available, but unlikely to be palatable to Giants fans who have rooted against him for the last three years. Stanford coach David Shaw and Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly don’t seem eager to leave their NCAA posts, and it’s even more unlikely that Ohio State’s Urban Meyer or Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh will leave their kingdoms either. Alabama’s Nick Saban could be an option, but at 63 years old, he might not excite the Mara’s because he is so near Coughlin’s age.
Nick Saban May Be Too Old To Replace Coughlin
Suddenly, letting go of Coughlin looks like a bandaid, when the Maras indicated that the Giants’ are suffering from a gaping wound. John Mara criticized general manager Jerry Reese for putting together an insufficient roster, yet dismissed Coughlin for failing to coach up underwhelming talent, and kept Reese, who assembled it. The Giants stopped short of making sweeping changes to a team that has missed the playoffs for four consecutive seasons.
If they didn’t believe in the Coughlin culture any longer, it’s a bizarre move to chop off the head and not discard the body. Unless there’s a candidate the Giants truly believe in – that wasn’t Sean Payton – letting Coughlin go will go down as a major error.
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