There is an excellent article in Newsday about one of the reasons that Coach Coughlin is legendary at BC. Here is an excerpt:

“America is … locked into this image of [Tom Coughlin] as a hard-boiled boss whose heart rarely flutters. … Jay McGillis [is] the player Coughlin will never forget. … He played safety for Boston College in 1991, Coughlin’s first year as [head] coach at the school… Jay was Coughlin’s kind of player because he squeezed every bit of ability he had. He was 5-9 and weighed less than Michael Strahan’s wallet, yet he put his body on the line for his school and his coach. He constantly tried to compensate for size and strength with eagerness…. Not only did Jay McGillis survive Coughlin’s system, he thrived in it and forced Coughlin to keep him on the field. There was a point, however, midway through that sophomore season, after the Syracuse game, when he came home with flu-like symptoms. Everyone thought it was mono. Or the mumps. Jay McGillis kept playing football while awaiting the results of a routine test, which arrived just before Thanksgiving: Leukemia. The doctors said it wasn’t good. He needed a bone-marrow transplant. Then that didn’t help. He needed more tests and soon, prayers. He also needed a good pep talk now and then, and that was the easy part, finding a donor for that. Coughlin was at his hospital bedside, almost constantly, doing what he does best: coaching….There are at least four days out of the year when the McGillis family phone will ring at the crack of dawn. One is Thanksgiving, the other Christmas. One is Oct. 17, Jay’s birthday, and July 3, his death. Each time, the soft voice of a hard-line coach will be on the other line. ‘It’s been 15 years, and he’s constantly checking on us,” Pat McGillis said. “He could’ve forgotten all about Jay and our family. He’s a busy man. He has his own family. I just heard from him last Saturday. He says, ‘I’ve been thinking about the virtues that Jay possessed.’ He’s getting ready for the Super Bowl, and he’s calling us.’ The Tom Coughlin Jay Fund, formed by the coach, is designed to help families cope financially and spiritually when a child is diagnosed with cancer. It’s not designed to make the public think twice about the image of a football coach who comes across tough, although one family thinks it should.”  There is also a Boston Herald story on the same subject.

In a comment to my last post on Coach Coughlin one of our SIMP colleagues — who thinks the only thing Coughlin did at Boston College was win one game against that non-Jesuit Catholic school in the rust belt city of South Bend — asked “… why is Coughlin so revered? After all, he never won anything else…” Here is just another example of how not everything in life is measured on the gridiron (or for that matter by its relationship to or effect on the University of Notre Dame).