So where does Cowher go now?

Carolina? The Jets, if they struggle this year?

penn st?

All that cash for the worst super bowl team ever? If the Giants didn't go 3 for 3 on fumbles, Coughlin would be out 5-10 million, easy! (And the pats would be best ever)

Crazy- one can play the "yeah, but" game ad infinitum. Every championship team every year wouldn't have won if it weren't for events going their way at the right moment.

No way, man. Some of those Superbowls were won 55-10. Fumble luck didn't have much to do with those.

#3: So you're saying that getting his team to the Super Bowl and having them play well, even in a losing effort, would have put him out of a job?

Sorry, I meant #4. I saw #6 refer to #3 and messed up.

Crazy, saying it over and over and over wishing real hard just won't make it true.

You have to click your ruby slippers' heels together while doing it.

Once the Giants got the first playoff win, it was pretty much assured that Coughlin would be extended. The size of the contract was dictated more by the size of the extension that the team gave Steve Spagnuolo than it was by the Super Bowl win.

troll alert. You know he's not a Patriots fan. Don't bother responding to him.

Cowher was never an ideal fit for the Giants. I always thought the next HC was going to be John Fox.

#10: And if the Giants hadn't been on such a losing streak before the playoffs either, even a first-round loss probably would've gotten him an extension, too.

A first-round loss after the second-half of the season might've gotten him canned, though. It would've looked like a pattern at that point.

First round win/loss still would have earned him 9 mil 3/years or something. Its the extra 5-10 million that DVOA disapproves of. Except for luck, it wasn't a win. No high end contract deserved.

If the Giants didn’t go 3 for 3 on fumbles, Coughlin would be out 5-10 million, easy! (And the pats would be best ever)

Yeah, and if I didn't eat so much, I wouldn't be fat. Any more stunning revelations for us?

Coughlin earned his extension. He stopped alienating his players, and they got a Super Bowl win. And it's not like that money is part of the salary cap, so it won't hurt the team to pay him more.

Funny, elsewhere you see comments implying that if a team outperforms its DVOA, it's just good coaching. Now, it's a reason to fire a guy. Whatever.

Coaches don't get paid to have a good DVOA, they get paid to win, and Coughlin won. Whether the Giants were good or lucky is irrelevant, they won the Super Bowl. Coughlin did his job and is now rewarded.

"Except for luck, it wasn’t a win."

I nominate this as the early front-runner for the 2008 Worst Thread Response of the Year.

I must say, the logical counterpart of the 'Marty is an elite coach and his playoff record is bad luck' arguments so often proffered in these parts - with some justification - is 'Coughlin should be paid based on his good but not great regular season performance, not his Superbowl ring'.

Re 19:
True, but in this case, I think there's reason to reward Coughlin. Over the last three years, his team has been top-10 twice, and the other time, they won the Super Bowl after a mediocre regular season. That's a pretty good record, by conventional measures and by DVOA. He corrected his only major problem as a head coach (alienating his players with picayune rules), and that coincided with the team doing very well that season. And it's important to note that, while it might be lucky that the Giants won the Super Bowl this year, it's not such a huge coincidence that they've won a Super Bowl in one of the last three years. Teams that are top-10 in DVOA for two straight years despite winning zero playoff games are underachieving.

4: uh huh, and if the Pats had a little less luck in any one of their close games this year they wouldn't have been 18-0 anyway. Such as the Ravens game.

Honestly I'd rather we'd tossed Coughlin and hired Spags as the HC. He'll (spags) be gone next year, unless the defense really regresses. In my opinion Spags was the difference maker as far as coaches go. His first two games were rough, but they were against two of the best offenses in the conference and the players were learning a new system.

Coughlin deserved this, and I say that as a Skins fan. He's gotten the Jints to the playoffs the last three seasons, for any and all flaws the team has. They did a good job plugging players in to replace injured players, and most importantly, they won the Superbowl! And they did it all playing above their statistics. While I hate seeing them win, its because they're a division rival. Not because it goes against DVOA.

Oh, don't get me wrong. Obviously the Giants were right to give Coughlin a new deal, and I don't think it's outrageous money for him. A .536 career winning percentage over 12 years and two clubs, one of them an expansion team, is fairly impressive. But, on the flip side, he has only produced one dominant regular season team in those 12 years (the 1999 Jaguars), and the truly elite coaches tend to post regular season records above .600. He has a worse career win percentage than, for example, Denny Green.

Regardless, the point is that Coughlin deserved a new contract primarily for making the Giants a consistently good regular season team, not for winning the Superbowl.

21: Didn't Spags just sign a 3 year contract? Do the rules let assistants under contract leave? I suppose it depends on how its written, but I assumed based on how well he was being paid that it meant he'd be around (hope hope)...

24: An assistant can leave for another team to accept a head coaching position regardless of NFL contract, per NFL rules.

I must say, the logical counterpart of the ‘Marty is an elite coach and his playoff record is bad luck’ arguments so often proffered in these parts - with some justification - is ‘Coughlin should be paid based on his good but not great regular season performance, not his Superbowl ring’.

Why? No one's suggested that Marty should be paid like a coach who's had ridiculous playoff success, like Belichick, for instance.

They're just suggesting he shouldn't be fired.

Coughlin never should've been fired at all, either. Consistent 8-8, 9-7, 10-6 performance is not the kind of coach you want to fire.

Giants win superbowl, coaches and QBs get credit for playoff wins. Caughlin sucked before, and he sucks now.

as for the whole fumble luck thing, it just goes to show that any team needs luck to go all the way, even the patriots. Giants won, they went all the way, and it wasnt because of the coach, and it wasnt *only* because of luck.

"Consistent 8-8, 9-7, 10-6 performance is not the kind of coach you want to fire."

But one lone bad season will get you the ax. Ask Messrs Wannstedt, Sherman, Haslett.

Tom Coughlin's career winning percentage .536 Wannstedt's .485. Not to mention Wannstedt has destroyed every team he's coached. Please never refer to him as an anything like an average coach again.

I agree Wannstedt is a bad coach. I wanted to temper Pat's point that consistently having a narrow winning record is (or should be) the grounds to retain a coach who hasn't produced a "great" team. Wannstedt was .500 in his first four seasons in Chicago, and almost .600 through four years in Miami.