david dieHl - New York Giants

gets so hot that you’re concerned about the nature of making sure everybody comes out of the thing
feeling … the injury factor pops into your mind, but it’s very competitive.”
Q: Do you try to change it up as far as time remaining, field position, timeouts left?
Coughlin: “I always do. I change the whole thing up. I change up field position. I change up how many
timeouts. Normally I don’t mess much with timeouts because I do emphasize saving your timeouts, so I
usually stay relatively conservative there. But we move the ball. If I move it into plus-territory, I’ll cut the
timeout stuff and also the time. So it’s always a relatively minimal amount of time. It’s usually a lengthy
drive. It’s normally to be in position for a field goal and how that particular thing is managed. The
quarterback has a lot to do with the drill itself in terms of what he wants to call and also most of the
time I leave the timeouts up to him in that drill. Now in the regular two-minute drill during the season, I
take the timeouts.”
Q: You have the second fewest penalties and penalty yards in the league. You’ve been preaching
about penalties for nine years. How much of a factor has that been in your success?
Coughlin: “I think it’s a huge factor. When you indicate to your team from the get-go that, first, you have
to keep from beating yourself before you can appreciate the opportunity to beat someone else, it starts
with turnovers and penalties and all those things which reinforce the other guy rather than you. So
we’re still harping on that and I hope we’re getting to where there’s some consistency there. I do want
my finger on keeping that number low so we give ourselves the best opportunity to win. The concern
that pops up from time to time, like two weeks ago, when we had only three penalties, but two of them
were on special teams and you’re talking about a penalty on a punt return or a kickoff return that’s
devastating, because of what it does with field position. You go from the ball being at the 20 to the 10 or
inside the 10 and that’s an incredible, incredible distance to have to, percentage-wise, go score.”
Q: David Diehl had started every game in his career before suffering a knee injury that kept him out of
three games. He isn’t starting now and has a reduced role, but seems to be working at it without
complaint.
Coughlin: “David is a guy that’s going to do anything he can to help the team win. The thing is, you fight
your way back from something like that and you are also battling your physical stature, even as you
return, and your confidence. He’s done a good job with that, but it’s a process.”
Q: Hakeem Nicks said he’s been grinding through because of his knee injury. Eli said he noticed that
Hakeem looked better in practice. That he would go out there and grind when he wasn’t 100 percent -
do you admire that in players when they do that?
Coughlin: Absolutely. He’s very competitive and he wants to play and he wants to help his team win.
He’s a very, very dissatisfied guy when he’s on the sideline and he really doesn’t even like it when he’s
not practicing. So he really made a decision a week ago where he talked to the trainers about letting him
(practice) the first day of the week and the thing that was interesting, he was none the worse for wear.
When he came back Thursday, he was a little bit better and Friday was a little bit better. So the
continuation of that is very, very important to us. You’d like to see him at 100 percent. Whether he can
get there or not this year, I don’t know, but Hakeem at 95 percent and just playing really hard, we can
do some things to take some snaps off him in certain situations, perhaps. But the balancing factor of
how you attempt to defend us is in jeopardy when you have people that are performing at the level we
know they can play at.”
Q: Is Stevie Brown one of these guys that have a magnet that attracts the ball?