Tom Coughlin's policy of punishing players for not arriving early enough to meetings has become a hot topic in New York City newspapers. Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

Will this be The Story That Will Never Die, or just a goofy footnote? I'm talking about the furor that captured so much attention last week: Tom Coughlin and his Magic Clock.

People have asked me why I haven't weighed in on the subject yet. I'll tell you what I've come away with so far. Writers with a right wing slant have written, "With all the money those guys are making, you'd think they could just show up five minutes early." Writers with a left wing slant take the position that the whole thing is demeaning, juvenile and insulting to hard working football players, to say nothing of infantile.

What slant do I take? Goofiness abounds, and I'm glad of it, because it makes for good story telling. The topic is coaches and their quirky rules and quirky habits, or, to quote an old Irish saying, "Every tinker has his own way of dancing."

Don Shula was very serious about curfew. Jim Mandich, the tight end on the Dolphins' unbeaten 1972 team, tells this story:

"We used to stay in this hotel that had an old elevator man who was on night duty. One time coach Shula gave him a ball. The guy was all excited. Shula told him to get all the players who came in on his shift, which began at 11 p.m., to autograph it. Our curfew was 11 p.m.

"Next time coach Shula saw the guy he asked to see the ball. Everyone whose name was on it got fined for coming in after curfew."

In 1992 Shula instituted a radical practice. He allowed the players who lived in the area to go home at night during training camp. He experimented with it the year before, but this was the first year he gave the policy full airing. Of course the fact that the living quarters at St. Thomas University, home of the team's camp, had really deteriorated might have had something to do with it. Shula had one proviso, though. If any of the players who either went home or remained at camp violated his curfew, then it would be the end of the new home billeting experiment.

Dan Marino called a meeting and stood up in front of the team and said, "We're getting a real break here. I don't want anyone to screw this up."

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It lasted about a week. Then a defensive end named Alfred Ogelsby made headlines by missing a full day of practice, claiming he had been kidnapped and driven out to the Everglades and left there to find his own way back. Shula made the announcement about the kidnapping at the press conference.

"I first heard about it when Richmond Webb told me Ogelsby had borrowed his car and the car was missing," said Stu Weinstein, who is still the Dolphins' director of security. "He said Ogelsby told him he needed it to go to the store, and then he never came back. I called the Miami Dade police and they put out an APB, an all points bulletin, and at noon they found the car in the worst area of Dade County.

"We went down there with Richmond and opened the trunk, expecting to find the worst, expecting to find Alfred in it. No Alfred. Finally he showed up after the afternoon practice. I questioned him.

"He said some girl approached him, and when he stopped to talk to her, the next thing he knew a guy jumped out of a car with a gun, and led him to an ATM machine and made him give them his money. Then they drove him out to the Everglades and said, 'Get out and start walking.'

"I told him, 'Listen, Alfred, you can walk backwards from the Everglades and get here sooner than you did. You might get away with telling me a story like this, or even telling coach Shula, but when you said kidnapping, that means the FBI is gonna be in on it. You lie to those guys, you go to jail.'

"His eyes got real wide. Then he told me the real story. He was partying with two girls and he passed out."

So the Dolphins held press conference No.2, and Shula was so mad that he had his PR man make the announcement. And naturally the new housing leniency was over. Next night Shula was walking back to his room and what did he see but Alfred Ogelsby taped to a tree. He kept walking.

"Alfred would have stayed there all night," Weinstein said, "except that his buddy, Shawn Lee, cut him loose. He was probably the only guy who would have."

There are tough coaches and easy coaches, men who are disliked by their players but end up with Super Bowl rings. And there are guys who are dearly loved by their troops, "players' coaches," they're called, who wind up getting fired. I've only seen one instance when players protected their coach because they knew they'd never have a nicer guy running things, and that was the old AFL Boston Patriots under Mike Holovak. Having some older veterans on the team probably helped.

Pete Carroll was a terrific guy when he coached the Jets' defense. His players would die for him. But he was easy going. When he became head coach I remember asking Ronnie Lott, who was closing out his long career in a Jets uniform if he weren't afraid of some of the younger guys taking advantage of Carroll.

"There are enough older veterans who won't let that happen," he said.

But it did happen, and after one 6-10 season, Carroll was fired. "I want to have some fun before I'm through," the owner, Leon Hess, said when the firing was announced. The fun he had was Richie Kotite, who coached the Jets to 4-28 until he, too, got the axe.

In Howie Long's eighth season with the Raiders, Mike Shanahan, a disciplinarian, replaced Tom Flores, a players' coach. Things got strained. Long told friends he was miserable, that he wasn't sure he wanted to stay in football. Then Shanahan was fired in his second season, replaced by Artie Shell, who had been Long's teammate.

"My career has been saved," Howie said. Shell was eventually fired. Shanahan went on to coach two Super Bowl champions with the Broncos.

Some players simply distrust all authority figures, assuming that the toughest ones are generally the dumbest. At least that was John Riggins' philosophy. He learned it at a very young age and he learned it the hard way.

"I was long jumping in a local junior high meet," he said. "I looked at the pit and I told the guy running the event, 'It's not long enough for me.'"

He had been an athletic phenom back in Centalia, Kansas, a big, fast kid who could do things other kids couldn't.

"The official told me, 'Just take your jump.' I told him again that I could jump far enough to end up out of the dirt area, onto the concrete. He told me to jump or I'd be disqualified. So I jumped out of the pit and broke my ankle. Since then I never trusted anyone in authority, coaches or anyone else."

Joe Montana, who went to Ringgold High in Monongahela, said that Western Pennsylvania was the cradle of crazy coaches.

"There was one guy who used to buy a whole bunch of dime store sunglasses," he said. "I think he paid a buck apiece for them. Then at practice he'd make a big show of getting so mad that he'd rip off the glasses and fling them to the ground and stomp on them. Then there was another guy who was quite famous for beating his players with a cane. Oh, we had some beauties."

Ohio State's Woody Hayes' rages on the practice field were famous. His trick was to rip off his baseball cap and tear it to shreds, that's how mad he was. The way he did it was to take a razor blade and carefully cut all the stitches apart beforehand, to facilitate easier ripping.

Coughlin's predecessor, Jim Fassel, was a nice guy, supposedly a players' coach, although he had his share of stormy sessions with them. Someone who was in the locker room the day he announced to his players that he was retiring told me that while he was announcing it, guys were dialing out on their cell phones, alerting friends and media sources.

So is Coughlin goofy with his Five Minute Rule? Who cares? He's no daffier than most of them.

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.