Tom Coughlin's firing in Jacksonville was so swift, so devoid of nuance and so utterly justified that it could undo his his entire career. That may be wrong, legacy-wise, but is is instructive as the thing that forced the NFL Players Association and Jaguars owner Shahid Khan to reject the admin of the past in the face of a more contemporary zeitgeist.
In other words, Coughlin demanded the confrontation with the collective bargaining agreement and must have surely been surprised when the blowback shredded his face.
This is not a matter of demonizing Coughlin as a caricature of the Lombardi School of Football Dictatorship. The times changed and Coughlin's attempt to middle-finger time ultimately failed — amazingly, with the decades of fear-as-HR at his back, in a sport that crushes the bold and fresh thinker who has read the collective bargaining agreement and wants it to be honored.
But in using the seizure of money he wasn't entitled to as the weapon to insure obedience, Coughlin ignored one essential truth above all the others, namely this:
The bully who never stops bullying never notices when the power shifts.
His intentions might have been old-school-coach benign, but discipline without respect is just thuggery. He acquired players whom he thought were best when they were punished and emasculated, and discovered that players are in fact best when they are valued and respected. Because ultimately, if you don't want to value and respect them, they will demand it of someone more powerful.
And Khan, as seemingly unaware of the rebellion fomenting beneath him, realized that even an inert union becomes powerful when it speaks to the employees and says, "You don't want to work there." Empowered players can be a difficult group — unless the players feel like they are being heard and protected. Football is stupidly cruel enough if your coaches and general managers have your back. When they don't, it is intolerable, and players can either slink off into post-career paralysis or rise and resist as a collective.
Maybe Coughlin's lessons had a greater purpose, but teaching without understanding the tools of the teacher isn't teaching at all. He wanted the '70s to never die, but worse, he wanted to ratchet up the punishments to meet current standards. He not only wanted the calendar to lie, he wanted it to lie when he needed it to while wanting the punishments to meet contemporary standards of size. He eventually positioned himself as the guy who hates his own players, whether he meant to or not. And now, he has lost most of his reputation in a strangely similar version to that of Woody Hayes, the old Ohio State football coach who didn't understand that punching an opposing players is intolerable in a septuagenarian coach. Whatever he may have stood for as a coach and as a man, his posture in doing so offended not only the underlings but the bosses as well.
The players will go on because they won. The team could use this as a teaching moment for future employees ("We heard you, and though we were late, we got there"). But Coughlin will be left alone, yelling at the ghost of Vince Lombardi, "I did this the way you did. What happened?"
And the ghost will respond, "You forgot that players have to love you to take all the brutality and hateful nonsense of football you're giving them."