updated 3:19 a.m. ET Jan. 31, 2008

PHOENIX - Tom Coughlin was never one to sit in the stands at the Super Bowl, the way some coaches do. If there’s no one to coach, to harangue, to lead, what’s the point?

The last time he subjected himself to that was 13 years ago. He had recently been hired by the expansion Jacksonville Jaguars. He was still working out of a doublewide trailer in the parking lot and assembling his roster.

Coughlin sat next to Bart Starr that Super Bowl Sunday. He said it was “an honor” and “interesting.” It was also something he never wanted to do again.

“The goal, always the goal, was that the next time I went back to a Super Bowl, it would be with my team,” Coughlin, now the coach of the New York Giants, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The 61-year-old coach has been painted this week as a changed leader as he approaches a game against undefeated New England in his first Super Bowl as a head coach.

He’s the “kinder, gentler” Tom, the once-unbending taskmaster who knew he had to change or else.

He sort of laughs at that notion, insists he doesn’t know what “kinder and gentler” is supposed to mean. That he’s gone soft? That he doesn’t believe in structure and rules? That he’s thrown away everything that’s worked for him over a 38-year coaching career that has been, by every measure except maybe the one that counts the most, a success?

But something did change.

“He is smiling,” Michael Strahan said. “He uses the word ‘fun’ and ‘enjoy’ and it blows my mind. When he first came here, I said to myself, ‘I have to be here this year, but after this, I can’t play for this man. He’s crazy’ He has come around.”

He created the players leadership council this year to give his players a voice, and some naturally viewed it as little more than a ploy for Coughlin to hang onto his job. It almost certainly wouldn’t have worked had his team finished 8-8 again, or been bounced from the playoffs in the first round — or both, as happened last season.

Instead, New York made it to the Super Bowl, in large part because of a new sense of unity and “team,” as Coughlin calls it, that the leadership council instilled. So now, with perceptions being what they are in the NFL, Coughlin is a genius and his leadership council is all the rage.

“His personality has always been, ‘It’s my way. That’s the way I was brought up, the way I was taught,”’ said Coughlin’s wife, Judy. “But he’s always been open to change and listening. He just doesn’t always take your advice.”

It wasn’t so much his message that changed with this so-called epiphany, only the way it’s delivered.

Coughlin said as things deteriorated during his first three seasons in New York, he found himself shocked at the way his prodding and coaxing, messages he viewed as straightforward and logical, could be interpreted 53 ways. One for every player in the locker room.

He realized something really did need to change.

“I wanted to let the players know that it wasn’t about me,” he said. “I don’t have this huge ego. I feel strongly enough in my beliefs and principles that I had no problem sitting down with a group of guys who also have the No. 1 interest in mind. Which is winning.”

And so, instead of Strahan being a divider in the locker room, he’s now the No. 1 uniter. Instead of second-guessing their coach, they circled around him after the 0-2 start. Tiki Barber, who caused more dissension than anyone in the locker room last season, is gone. Now, instead of bickering and trying to force their coach’s retirement, the Giants have delivered him to the Super Bowl.

He has reached the pinnacle of a career that began soon after he graduated from Syracuse, where he played alongside Larry Csonka and Floyd Little, and got his first head coaching job at Rochester Institute of Technology in 1970.

He studied the coaches he met along the way — most notably Mike Ornato at Greenwich High School and Bill Carey, “a basketball and baseball guy,” as Coughlin calls him, at RIT.

“You knew your best interests were always going to be served when it came to those guys,” Coughlin said. “I liked watching what they did for a living and how they did it.”

He poured everything into his chosen profession, so much so that when Judy went into labor with the first of their four children, Keli, Coughlin rushed to the delivery room only to find that he was at the wrong hospital.

Stories like those seem funnier now than they did at the time. While he’s surely proud of this latest accomplishment, the Super Bowl, he insists this trip isn’t as sweet for him as for the family that labored with him through the job changes, long hours and years of nonstop work.

Don’t let all that selfless oratory fool you, Judy Coughlin said.

“I believe he’s enjoying this. How could he not?” she said. “Sure, he’s happy for the family. We rode along the way. But he’s taken the same road. We’re living our dream. All of us.”