Tom Coughlin, the Jaguars' first head coach who built an expansion franchise into a perennial playoff team in the late 1990s, will be inducted into the Pride of the Jaguars Sunday.
"I'm very honored," he said recently. "I'm humbled, to be honest with you."
Coughlin, who served as the Jaguars' head coach from 1994-2002 and Executive Vice President of Football Operations from 2017-2019, led the team to postseason appearances following the 1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999 seasons – and to AFC Championship Games following the 1996 and 1997 seasons. Senior correspondent Brian Sexton sat down with Coughlin recently. Here's the story.
Tom Coughlin's life in football spans decades, crossing from playing to coaching – and from high school through college and into the professional ranks, where he worked for some of the NFL's most storied franchises: the Green Bay Packers, Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants – and also the Jaguars. There, he invested more than time and talent. He invested his heart.
"[Former Jaguars Owner Wayne Weaver] owned the franchise, but I told him the football team was mine," he said with a slight smile. "I showed up here in February of 1994 and trudged through mud up to my ankles to a single trailer, that didn't even have a place for me to work. [Then Jaguars President] David Seldin's secretary pointed me towards a table where Wayne sat when he was in town.
"Imagine that today. I was maybe the fifth employee, and I honestly wondered at that moment what I got myself into leaving Boston College. There was nothing here and I went about bringing coaches and personnel people in to help me build from the ground up. It will forever be important to me."
Coughlin was also the general contractor, so to speak, which is a role most coaches know very little about. Most coaches are not Coughlin. He picked up the phone and called Tom Landry, who built the expansion Dallas Cowboys in the early 1960s. The legendary coach offered his learned opinion. Coughlin also leaned on coaching relationships with Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick. They were helpful, but neither man had ever tackled a project as big as an expansion team.
Coughlin's first job out of college, at the Rochester Institute of Technology back in 1970, ultimately helped him the most in building the blueprint from which to get started. While converting the Tigers from a club team to the NCAA, he literally did everything from the game plan to painting the field. Those years built the foundation and prepared him for the enormity of the job that he had in Jacksonville.
"Some people just want to coach, that's all they want," explained Coughlin. "But to me, the chance to take a blank slate, if you will – and take everything I had learned from everywhere I had been and build something lasting – was too good of an opportunity. You think about how we put it together and the people that we brought to Jacksonville to help lift this thing up in less than 18 months and it was a challenge that we all took on and succeeded in together. You can't help but have a sense of ownership even all these years later. I have always wanted the Jaguars to succeed, I always will."
Coughlin's passion hasn't ebbed at all more than thirty years after he put his feet on the muddy ground outside what is today EverBank Stadium. It didn't ebb when he left the franchise after the 2002 season and landed in New York, where he led the Giants to a pair of Super Bowl victories. It hasn't changed since 2019, when owner Shad Khan went a different direction after three years with Coughlin as the team's Executive Vice President of Football Operations.
"Because I started it, that transcends all of the disagreements and separations," Coughlin explained. "This community and the people who are so passionate about our team, about the Jaguars and what it means to have an NFL team in North Florida. We became a big-league city; we had one of 32 teams, and this is a town that loves football. Things change, you know that, but the team and the town and the people became one, woven together and the Jaguars represent something bigger than just Sundays."
"Look around and see the players like Tony Boselli, Pete Mitchell, Kevin Hardy, Don Davey and so many others who have made this their home and settled in and built businesses and raised their families and become part of the community. I am a big fan of the Jaguars, and I think Shad has put this team in a position to do some tremendous things on and off the field. My connection with the Jaguars will always remain strong, it's part of who I am."
Coughlin's no-nonsense, football first ways grated on many of the players he coached both in Jacksonville and New York. What's interesting is how all these years later those same players express such profound admiration for what he did for them on the football field and how he influenced their lives off it.
"He was tough, he was hard-nosed, but man, did he care about football and winning," said linebacker Jeff Kopp who played three seasons under Coughlin. "Now I can look back in it and see how much he loved his players and his team. I think I had the blessing of going to other organizations and then seeing how the locker room was, what the leadership was, what the coaching style was, and multiple organizations after the Jaguars. As tough as it was, he cared about you, kept that team together, and we won. So, I look back now, and I go, man, what an amazing experience. Was it tough? Yes! It was brutal. But how do you get a team to come together that quickly and to be tight? Those teams were tight and that's why we rebounded from 4-7 in 1996 to make the AFC Championship Game in only Year 2 and the Jags had a great run through 1999."
Former Jaguars running back Fred Taylor, a Pride of the Jaguars member and the franchise's all-time leading rusher who played for Coughlin from 1998-2002, tells a similar story.
"Coach, he's the reason I'm here – and a lot of the reason I became a player I turned out to be," Taylor said. "I didn't always understand what he was trying to do. But I've also told the story about meeting him after a preseason game between the New England and the New York Giants when I was sprinting across the field as a member of the Patriots and telling him, 'I understand. I get it.' It's much better for me to have someone like Coach Coughlin as a coach when I was a young player. Otherwise, I would have I would have been lost."
Said Pride of the Jaguars member and Pro Football Hall of Famer Tony Boselli, "The one thing I'll hang my hat on, there was never once in my career when I played here that we were not prepared to play. Not once. We didn't always play well. He might have had some bad calls and we got bad grades. But it wasn't because we weren't prepared. One of the things I've taken away from my time playing for this guy is 'Be consistent and be prepared.' Because he was like that every single day and that's how this team played."
Coughlin famously tells the story of that 1996 team with a self-depreciating sense of humor. "They were tight, close knit because they all hated me," he deadpanned. He often told his players that if they were late to a job at IBM they'd be fired by the third time and all he did was fine them.
Everything he did, even the most nitpicky of rules, he did for a reason and those players can now see that the reason was more than just about winning a football game. The relationships which he has with so many of those men offer him a profound sense of gratitude for the years he spent with them in the locker room, on the sidelines and in the community.
"That means the world to me," he said, his voice barely above a whisper and clearly touched by the feelings of his former players. "We went through a lot at the beginning, and we had to set a high standard, had the opportunity at the beginning to define ourselves and we wanted excellence, to really be the best. So many guys wanted to be a part of starting something and even though it demanded a lot from them it obviously gave them a lot also.
"They understand it now because, and don't forget I am a teacher by trade, but I wanted to demand the same qualities that I knew would make them great football players but also translate to being a great man, a great husband and father that will make the world a better place."
These days, Coughlin is as busy as ever, just not as focused on one thing as he was when he was the football coach. His four grown children and his 12 grandchildren keep him moving from sporting events to graduations and recitals from Florida to New Jersey to Michigan and back. Then there's his passionate collaboration with eldest daughter Keli to keep growing the Jay Fund which has raised and donated millions and millions of dollars in support of families with children suffering from childhood cancers.
"It's growing and growing and we're working to make sure it keeps growing," he said with emphasis. "The more we raise, the more opportunities we create for families to give it their best in their fight for their children's health. How would you like to be a two-income family that becomes a one-income family that has two other healthy siblings and one child gets sick and everything changes? How are you going to put gas in the car and keep food on the table and deal with everything else in life? It's a massive challenge and it's what drives the Jay Fund.
"We're going to keep people in their homes and we're going to help them feed their families. We're going to try and help them have a sense of normalcy because believe me, going all the way back to Jay McGillis, the child knows when he or she is a disruption to the family, and it becomes an obstacle to healing."
The coach is doing a bit of healing of his own these days. He's kept himself busy since his beloved wife Judy passed away in November of 2022. The kids and grandkids are a huge part of his world, but it is different without Judy's beaming smile and gregarious personality which always filled any room she was in.
"How am I?" said the man whose response to that question for ages has been 'never better.' "You know what? I'm good. I'm good. People ask me if I'm looking for a job and they're probably kidding but I am not. I'll always be there for [Las Vegas Raiders Head Coach] Antonio Pierce, and I was up with the Lions this summer and [Jaguars Head Coach] Doug Pederson has been great to me and I'll always be available to the Jaguars and the Giants. If they ask me my opinion, if they want the benefit of my experience, I will always share it and if they don't, I won't say a word. I could always do more, but how many times can you come back and be the leader of the band?"
In 2005 Waterloo Central High School named its football stadium 'Tom Coughlin Field' and in 2016 Coughlin was inducted into the New York Giants Ring of Honor and there's a call from the Pro Football Hall of Fame likely to come in the years ahead. In 2024 he joins Wayne and Delores Weaver, Tony Boselli, Fred Taylor, Jimmy Smith and Mark Brunell in the Pride of the Jaguars and Coughlin puts it right there with the greatest of honors from his legendary career.
"It's way up there to be honest with you," he said. "The reason it's so significant to me is the road we travelled, how we came to Jacksonville, what we did here and why we're still here, okay, and how this came to be home. I started this and I'm a historian of the game as you know, and I'm honored to have had a meaningful role and a meaningful place in the history of the Jacksonville Jaguars."
Meaningful, significant, substantial … choose your adjective, but what overrides all the words are Coughlin's actions, which built the foundation of a franchise for North Florida with a very promising future.
