Tom Coughlin, New York Giants' Head Coach, Stresses Mental Toughness

“Mental toughness, resiliency, resolve. We keep playing, we keep fighting, and we’re highly competitive. We do have great trust in each other, great belief that we can finish, and that if we keep playing one play at a time as hard as we can go that we will find a way to win.

“I will tell you this: from the earliest part of camp moving forward, particularly what we went through seemingly every week, we would have an injury that would be, under normal circumstances, devastating, I think what would happen there is that the players fed off of me and I fed off the players.

“We never changed our objective. We never changed our goal. We never changed our attitude about what had to be accomplished and what we had to do. This is a great statement to our players as well as to our mental toughness. That’s what you have to rely on.

“Somehow, someway, you have got to answer these questions. The next guy has to come along, step up, play well and give you a chance to win. That’s exactly what we did. That’s exactly the approach we took. 

“Because of their mental toughness, because they hung in there, because they continued to believe, because we continued to be in the hunt for the NFC East title, that was always there for us.”

"We’re about team, we’re not about individuals. We’re certainly very cognizant of some of the superior individuals that we have on our team, thank goodness, but it is the team that provides us with our strength, and our ability to perform under pressure, whether it is good or bad, and that’s the way we think.”

Excerpt from sports.yahoo.com (02.06.2012)