Mike Celizic

New York Giants linebacker Antonio Pierce couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It was back in March, when the team started off-season workouts at Giants Stadium. As expected, the team’s coach, Tom Coughlin, was there to oversee the program. But it wasn’t the same Tom Coughlin that Pierce and his teammates had come to know and fear over the previous three seasons.

“He was smiling, joking, personable,” Pierce said, a tone of wonder still in his voice a whole season later. “I was waiting for him to take the mask off.”

Old dogs don’t learn new tricks, and leopards don’t change their spots. And Coughlin, who was then 60, every one of them seemingly spent as a humorless martinet, qualified on both counts. And yet this unyielding and impossibly demanding coach, a man who most Giants fans wanted run out of town, had remade himself. He was still the same stickler for details and demanding boss, but he discovered how to smile. And he accepted the idea that the players should have a say in what they were doing.

“Before, it was a dictatorship,” Pierce said bluntly of Coughlin’s first three years.

The words “fun” and “Tom Coughlin” had never been used in the same sentence, the team’s veteran leader, defensive end Michael Strahan, added. And suddenly, they did.

Like Pierce, Strahan minced no words. “If he didn’t change, we wouldn’t be here,” he said of his coach.

But, if he didn’t change, Coughlin wouldn’t even be with the team, and he knew it.

A lot of people, myself included, said that Coughlin had to go after the 2006 season, when the Giants started out 6-2 and then, after a rash of injuries to key players, went 2-6 in the second half of the season. They made the playoffs with an 8-8 record, but lost in the first round for the second straight year.

There was never any question about his grasp of the game. In his first job as head coach, at Boston College, he turned that program around. Then, as the first coach of the expansion Jacksonville Jaguars, he took the team to the AFC championship Game in its second season — something no one had ever done before or since.

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In Jacksonville, he was finally done in by his unbending style, and the complaints that the Jaguars had about him were soon being repeated when he arrived in New York to replace Jim Fassel in 2004 with with a book of team rules thicker than “War and Peace.” In his world, if you were four minutes early for a meeting, you were late. On time was five minutes early. He had dress codes and rules for the proper way to sit during film sessions, and violators paid for their omissions.

Football wasn’t life and death to him. It was nowhere near that frivolous.

Tiki Barber, the team’s best player and the league’s premier multi-purpose back, quit after the 2006 season, saying that Coughlin sucked the joy out of the game. Clearly, many of us thought, here was a man from a different era who had lost touch with modern players. To bring him back would be sheer folly, because at 60, he wasn’t going to change.

We weren’t just wrong, we were spectacularly so. After the season, he sat down with team owner John Mara and told Mara he knew he had to do things differently.