Sept. 25 -- RIT football opens 2nd season under Tom Coughlin

From purely a football standpoint, the start of this New York Giants season has to rank near the bottom of veteran coach Tom Coughlin's many years of roaming the football sidelines.

The Giants, whose Super Bowl win over New England just two seasons ago made the now 67-year-old Coughlin, a Waterloo native, the toast of the Big Apple, hit bottom Sunday with a 38-0 loss to the Carolina Panthers. The loss dropped the once-mighty Giants to 0-3, and New York has been outscored 115-54, a points differential of 61. The only team currently faring worse is the Jacksonville Jaguars (92-28), coincidentally, the other team in the NFL that Coughlin has served as head coach.

In the early 1970s, though, the NFL was but a dream for Coughlin, who starred in football at both Waterloo High School and then nearby Syracuse University. Once his playing career at SU was complete, Coughlin served as a graduate assistant coach in 1969.

The next year, however, Coughlin's career changed forever when he was named the new head coach at Rochester Institute of Technology. Forty-two years ago today, Sept. 25, 1971, the Tigers opened their second season under Coughlin, playing to a frustrating 7-7 tie on the road at Plattsburgh State.

According to a short story in the Democrat and Chronicle the next day, the Tigers missed a field goal from the Plattsburgh 10-yard line in the final minute of play which prevented a raucous 320-mile bus ride home from Plattsburgh to Rochester.

Or at least as raucous as Coughlin and his well-known no-nonsense personality might allow.

Coughlin spent four seasons as RIT's coach before returning to his alma mater, Syracuse, as an assistant. In addition to his NFL head-coaching positions in Jacksonville and New York, Coughlin was also the head coach at Boston College for three seasons in the early 1990s.

But it was the RIT assignment that started it all so many years ago, as Coughlin recalled while attending a RIT football reunion earlier this year in New Jersey.

"It was a great experience," Coughlin told the website Giants.com about his time at RIT. "I was a GA at Syracuse and I got my graduate degree there. I go to RIT, which is a club football team transferring into Division III. So I have to do it all. First of all, I'm the only full-time employee. I have two of my Syracuse classmates who were also football players and a couple of local guys became my part-time assistants. I did scheduling, I did equipment buying. I scheduled the preseason scrimmages. I found the preseason dormitory -- we stayed in a fraternity house. I had to hire the cook myself.

"I did the fields. We made a great move at one point; we played our games in the back in the middle of the hinterland. We moved up to the main varsity field, which was a beautiful soccer field at the time. I scheduled hotels and buses -- everything you had to do, I did it. I scheduled the games. The AD, Lou Alexander, Jr. had me do it. It prepared me in a lot of ways for things that have come up in my career."