Before Giants' players could scatter to their summer destinations for the next six weeks, coach Tom Coughlin left them with a message as mini-camp ended. Do not forget the disappointment of last season.
"The thing that we have tried to say was that you can never be satisfied and you can’t be complacent and you can’t say that because it was accomplished once that it necessarily happens again. What you had to do is bridge from one year to the next knowing that the values and the principles and the hard work and the effort and the team concept of "all for one" would come from a very successful accomplishment in a very short amount of time to the realization that it is a new team. It is a new year, it is a new team and we do have to basically start from scratch again. This year what I am saying is that, "stop and think about the bitter bitterness of the January situation" and then realize that as in, for example, the Laker team, you can focus on that as a primary motivational position to take. And let that be something that you train for over the summer – the idea of getting to and surpassing the circumstance that we were in a year ago.
TC apparently went on for 18 minutes. I love the guy, but an 18-minute Tom Coughlin speech? Sorry, Tom, that's not an easy listen. Here is one other notable remark from his Q&A with the media Thursday (full transcript).
I don’t have satisfaction. I just think we work – we create objectives, we create goals and we work towards accomplishing those things. Just like in anything else, perfection. But you know you are human, but let’s keep that as our goal regardless of that fact. So we have had an outstanding offseason program. We have had – I’m not going to tell you it was 100% in the beginning but it was 100% from roughly a weeks in right through. The attitude has been really good for all of the OTA’s, for the work here in the mini camp. The attitude has been great. I am disappointed in the number of injured guys. It’s not their fault. I’m not pointing the finger at anybody. I’m just saying for our team to have that many guys standing around watching practice in training would be a real setback. We couldn’t function the way we want to if that was the case.