Mike Celizic

So now Tom Coughlin has learned the monetary value of winning the Super Bowl. It’s $21 million for the next four years of his services. Even if he never gets to the playoffs again, he’s earned every penny of it.

Not that I’d worry about Coughlin putting his legs up and backing off the throttle. He doesn’t have any speeds but all ahead full on that transmission of his. But things happen in football. Players get injured or retire or leave as free agents. And winning the Super Bowl one year is no indication a team will win it again anytime soon.

And it doesn’t matter because he won the one he got to when everybody said he couldn’t even get to the playoffs. It doesn’t matter because he was flat on the canvas a year ago, picked himself up, and won the fight.

Not only that, but he did it with a level of dignity that is rare in sports or anywhere else in life. This is a man who had every reason to whine about the way he was treated before the season and gloat about the way he triumphed at the end of it. He could have spent the entire two weeks before the Super Bowl lecturing people about how they had treated him a year earlier and telling them how wrong they were.

And he would have none of it. This man who had been so often held up to be out of touch and too set in his ways and insensitive to others turned out to be not just a great leader, but also a great example to us all.

If anybody deserves a contract that looks like a lottery payout, Coughlin is it.

Rewind the tape to the end of the 2006 season, when the Giants, who had begun the year 6-2, ended it with a 2-6 crawl and a first-round playoff defeat. When the blood had been swabbed off the decks, Coughlin was left dangling in the wind, and it was no spring zephyr that wafted past but a howling winter gale.

He had a year left on his contract, but the fans and writers and talk-show hosts were had nothing left in their reservoirs of patience for what they saw as a cantankerous and uncompromising old coot who could not relate to modern players and, thus, couldn’t win.

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Get rid of him now, we sang in chorus. Bring in somebody young and charismatic, someone who understood the modern player, somebody who could win when it counted.

The Giants ownership didn’t fire him, but they hardly issued a vote of confidence. Instead, they did probably the worst thing you can do to a coach — they gave him a one-year extension. The message was clear: We sort of believe in you, but not very much; this is your last chance.

Coughlin could have complained; lesser men have wailed bitterly over lesser slights. But he held his tongue, accepted the one-year deal, and instead of looking at what the team had done wrong in finishing the 2006 season 2-6 after starting it 6-2, looked at what he did wrong.

Old dogs aren’t supposed to learn new ticks, but the 61-year-old Coughlin did. He opened up avenues of communication with the players, decided that fun and football were not mutually exclusive, and poured himself into the new season.

The season began with Tiki Barber, who had been the team’s best player before retiring after the 2006 season, disgorging the opinion that Coughlin tore the joy out of the game. And even then, the proud man on the shortest of leashes didn’t fire back.

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