Tom Coughlin couldn’t find his car keys.

It was 1974 and Coughlin, the 27-year-old head football coach at the Rochester Institute of Technology, had to leave his house for the biggest interview of his life. He was a Division III head coach hoping to return to Syracuse, his alma mater, as an assistant. He felt he was ready to make the jump into Division I coaching, so he got ready to head east on Interstate 90 for the job interview — only his keys weren’t where he’d left them.

Coughlin scrambled. He looked everywhere. About an hour after he was supposed to be in Manley Field House for an interview, Coughlin called then-head coach Frank Maloney. He needed to reschedule.

“He felt terrible,” Maloney recalled last month. “Then he told me what really happened: His kids were playing with his car keys. I had kids the same age, so I understood.”

Coughlin, 72, serves as the Jacksonville Jaguars executive vice president for football operations. He lives in Florida with his wife Judy, whom he married in his hometown of Waterloo before his senior year at SU. During his time at SU, he worked long hours at a desk in a corner room of Manley Field House, designing drills and studying personnel back when a pencil was still one of a coach’s most important note-taking tools.

“I thrived in that environment,” Coughlin said last month. “Syracuse was the only college I wanted to go to. My greatest sense of pride associated with having played and contributing to my university comes from all of the great players we had, guys I had the chance to develop.”

Coughlin played halfback for the Orange. In 1967, he set the school’s single-season pass receiving record. Courtesy of Syracuse University Archives

As a senior, he set what was then SU’s single-season pass receiving record. He stayed with the program as a graduate assistant in 1969, then returned five years later to embark on a seven-year tenure with the Orange that shaped the coaching style he had over the ensuing three decades as an NFL coach. After he left SU in 1980, Coughlin was Boston College’s quarterbacks coach from 1981-83. Then he left for the NFL, where he’s been ever since.

Coughlin grew up in Waterloo as the oldest of seven children. He spent downtime swimming in the Erie Canal and playing sports. Because of Coughlin’s talent, high school teammates called him “Ernie,” a reference to Syracuse legend Ernie Davis, the first African-American Heisman Trophy winner.

One of Coughlin’s fondest memories of upstate New York occurred 38 years ago — “thank you for reminding me how long it’s been,” he joked — and involved SU men’s basketball head coach Jim Boeheim. Coughlin first encountered the then-tall, skinny guard on the Lyons Central High School basketball team in 1961, when Boeheim was a senior and Coughlin a sophomore at nearby Waterloo High School. That season, they played twice. Both times, Coughlin recalled Boeheim “shot the lights out” and Lyons picked up two Section V victories.

At Syracuse four years later, Boeheim became Coughlin’s resident adviser on Sadler Hall floor three. Boeheim remembered Coughlin was unwaveringly self-assured and kind and serious, traits that later helped him lead the New York Giants to two Super Bowl wins over the New England Patriots.

“He’s one of the greats to have come through here,” Boeheim said. “Fortunate to have known him.”

Coughlin was hired to the Jaguars front office in 2017. Courtesy of the Jacksonville Jaguars

 With the New York Giants, Coughlin once fined players for being two minutes early to team meetings, explaining they should have arrived at least five minutes early. At SU, he was a similarly detail-oriented, stern disciplinarian: He measured the steps of running backs in the backfield so he could tell his offensive linemen exactly how long they’d need to hold blocks for runners to get through.

During one game in the mid-1970s, a Syracuse running back took off for a long run. But Coughlin fumed. He scribbled on his grading chart, which he used to evaluate and teach players what went well and what didn’t in a game, a “minus” grade.  He’d noticed — in real time, with no replays — that the running back stepped with the wrong foot when he received the handoff.

“Tough, though not in a bad way,” Maloney said. “No smiling. Just a dogged worker with strong opinions.”

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Coughlin’s last collegiate game came against No. 4 UCLA, a 32-14 Orange victory. He said he’s happy to see the program exceed expectations in 2018. It reminds him of the coaches meetings in Manley, long bus rides and walks past Sadler Hall into Archbold Stadium for home games, many of them victories: SU went 23-7 in the three seasons he played. He developed a reputation for physicality and toughness, which he said came from the coaches he worked with at SU.

Coughlin doesn’t have any Syracuse apparel besides an alumni sweatshirt sitting in his bedroom. He jokes with Jaguars head coach Doug Marrone, a former Syracuse player and head coach from 2009-12, about how Syracuse led them to the same place.

Last year, when Coughlin was interviewed for the Jaguars position, he reminisced about New York. Specifically, his years in Waterloo, where he had a paper route and worked at a local grocery store. He became the head coach at the RIT at only 23, when he developed a 5-3 defense. Soon, he was on SU’s staff for seven seasons. He coached alongside Maloney, Nick Saban and others, but learned to forge ahead on his own accord.

“I told them I’d seen a lot of what I’d see there,” Coughlin recalled of his Jaguars interview. “The experience I had in central New York was an opportunity that built me, because I was around top-class players and coaches who showed me the way.”

Published on November 25, 2018 at 10:16 pm

Contact Matthew: mguti100@syr.edu | @MatthewGut21