Tom Coughlin was the Giants wide receivers coach under Bill Parcells from 1988-90. Ezra Shaw/Getty images

In 1996 the Jacksonville Jaguars were in the second season of their existence. They had gone 4-12 the past year, their first, as an expansion franchise, and when they started the '96 season at 4-7, it seemed they were heading for another dismal year. Then things started happening.

They won their last five games, and snuck into the post-season as a wild card team when the Falcons' Morten Andersen sliced a 30-yard field goal wide left in the final game. In the wild-card playoff the Jags came from behind and became the first team to beat the Bills in the postseason in Buffalo's Rich Stadium. In the second round Jacksonville came back from 12-0 behind and scored on six straight possessions to beat the 13-3 Broncos in Denver by the scored of 30-27, the first home playoff loss the Broncos had suffered in 12 years.

The '96 Jags were a young, passionate team that played with an almost maniac intensity -- whether it was Natrone Means pounding the ball behind one of the most punishing drive-blocking lines in football, or Mark Brunell scrambling and bleeding first downs almost through sheer force of will. They were fun to watch. You couldn't help rooting for them. The season ended in the AFC Championship Game in frozen Foxboro, but my God, what a run they'd had for a second-year expansion team.

The guy who made it work, the man whose players seemed almost ready to die for, was a tough-looking, rather plainspoken veteran coach who after 25 years in the business finally got his first shot at a head-coaching job in the NFL: Tom Coughlin. A graduate of the Bill Parcells system in New York ... Coughlin had coached the Giants' wide receivers. Known as a man who liked to work his players. Took no guff. Better not get on his bad side.

It lasted through 2002 for him in Jacksonville, and during that period there were some pretty gaudy achievements -- three more playoff years after '96, the best record in football at 14-2 in '99. And then things started unraveling. Players were grumbling about his severity. People got old -- or injured. In 2003 Coughlin was out, an ex-coach looking for a job.

Well, he has found one in New York, coaching a team that was the worst in football for the last half of the 2003 season. The Giants lost their last eight games, seven of them by two touchdowns or more. No team had a worse offensive line in the NFL, their quarterback ended the year on the injured list. It was a demoralized and dispirited group and someone had to fix it.

"Completely different situation here than it was in Jacksonville," Coughlin said in his office on Tuesday, "but the approach is the same. You can't change your coaching philosophy to fit every condition. You do what you believe in."

Writers covering the club will not have it so easy. Access to players is more limited than it had been in the past. Assistant coaches are off limits except for four specified times of the year. I took Coughlin on regarding that one, which has always seemed kind of nutso to me.

"One voice," he said. "It's the old one voice approach. Bill Parcells does it, Bill Belichick got it from him. So did I."

"C'mon, I talked to you when you were a Giant assistant," I said.

"Not to me, you didn't. Maybe to say hello, but nothing about football, not under Bill Parcells."

For some reason this week's Monday and Wednesday mini-camps were open to writers, but closed on Tuesday. Why? Made absolutely no sense to me.

"We gave them access during the two double-workout days but not for the single workout day," Coughlin said. I said that I couldn't see the logic behind it and he shrugged. That was my problem.

His problem is a team that must be put together almost piece by piece. In Jacksonville it was different. There was youth, eagerness, players who practically begged for leadership.

"They started from scratch," Coughlin said. "They were a motley group, molded together by a common experience. It was a hard road. We played hard because we practiced hard. We went to camp a week early. Everybody was bitching about it. But they became a tough group of guys.

"When we started winning -- the seven straight in '96 -- we just built from there. We had belief in what we were doing, confidence, strength of purpose. There's no motivator like belief in what you're doing. I feel that a group has to be molded, and by today's standards, it's almost out of character. I believe nothing good is ever accomplished without a struggle."

It's a philosophy that obviously worked for Coughlin in Jacksonville, and I don't want to sound cynical but ... well, I've heard this before. It's fine as long as you have got a quarterback who can hit the proper receiver and offensive linemen who don't foul up and block the wrong guy. It's fine as long as your personnel department doesn't screw up and bring in people who were a lot better in college uniforms than in the livery of the NFL.

Right now the Giants' quarterbacking is on-the-come. Eli Manning, despite all the raves about how much he improved from Week 1 to Week 2 might not be anywhere near ready, once he leaves the cocoon of the controlled mini-camp workouts and faces a pass rush and an NFL defense. Despite all the pretty words about his dedication and redemption, Kurt Warner still hasn't supplied a definitive answer to why his game went south the last two years. We might find out only when the whistle blows for real this season.

In an effort to provide some semblance of order to their offensive line, the Giants brought in a couple of veterans from Cleveland, Barry Stokes and Shaun O'Hara -- hardly superstars but precisely the kind of people they should have found when things were collapsing last year. Guys who knew what they were doing, who could hold the fort while the situation hopefully righted itself. Instead the club kept its fingers crossed and hoped that somehow the O-line would come around, and of course it never did.

For the last few years, even when they had success, the Giants were known as a team of whiners, always distracted, it seems, by some sort of nonsense -- whether it was Michael Strahan's contract problems, or the fact that the coaches were trying to muzzle Jesse Armstead's right to free speech, or the stir Jeremy Shockey caused by his choice of descriptives. And then people seemed to line up and take sides and what you got was the high school debating society in full session.

Coughlin got his first taste of it when he caught some heat about exceeding his workout schedule, followed by a few "unnamed players" who said, yes, it seemed that he fudged a bit.

"A very small faction involved," he said, waving the thing away as if it were a fly. "Breakfasts, five minutes here or there, none of it really having anything to do with what we're trying to do ..."

Then there's the Strahan thing. One year it was his feeling that the club was going to try to stiff him on the final years of a long-term contract, and his public battle with Tiki Barber on the subject. Then there's his on-again, off-again relationship with the writers. This year he got things rolling by volunteering the information that his workout schedule had been erratic, and then getting furious with the writers who quoted him. He is currently in boycott mode. And how does this fit in with Coughlin's philosophy of total commitment?

He let out a sigh when I asked him. And then he said something surprising.

"With Michael Strahan ... well, I think I'm going to have to try to win him over."

Win him over? Does this come from the coach who'd been described at one time as the Captain Queeg of the NFL, the textbook martinet?

"Look, he's already done it, for a number of years," Coughlin said. "He isn't like the young guys I had in '96 who had to be shown. But he has to understand what I'm trying to do. People have to earn the right to win here. Work ethic and values have to be applied. Focus. The whole idea is to stay focused."

Coughlin paused for a moment, probably realizing that these were the kind of words one hears spoken in the NFL every day. How does he get across the fact that they are more than words to him, that there's a deep-seated belief involved here?

"Look," he said, "commitment is a difficult thing. When you're committed to something, you're totally exposed for what you are. When you totally commit yourself, you give everyone a chance to see that you can be either totally wrong or right.

"People asking me how I feel about coming here and having to rebuild. It seems that I've been involved in rebuilding and start-over programs all my life."

If Coughlin can somehow inject the spirit of passion into a veteran team such as the Giants that he did into his young '96 Jags, then it will be one of the great success stories of the season. But Giant fans are a cold-eyed group. They've enjoyed success, but they've also heard promises and seen them go up in smoke. It's a tough arena for Coughlin and his belief system, but somehow you get the feeling that he's going to make it work.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Paul Zimmerman covers the NFL for the magazine and SI.com. His Power Rankings, "Inside Football" column and Mailbag appear weekly on SI.com.