Giants' Grant sees Coughlin as a mellowed coach

ALBANY - The Giants have been at training camp for a week now. They obviously haven't won anything yet. But perhaps more importantly, they haven't lost anything, either.

Too early to lose, you say? Don't tell that to one of the newest Giants, Deon Grant, who was with the Seahawks last season when new head coach Jim Mora Jr. took over.

According to Grant, Mora pushed the team so hard in the first few weeks of the preseason that by the time the games started for real, some of the players already had checked out.

"A lot of guys were fatigued out, a lot of guys were lost mentally because they didn't expect the camp to be as long as it was as far as how long it went on and the amount of breaks we didn't receive," Grant said. "We didn't receive any breaks. You have to find something within you to make it fun and enjoy what you do, but a lot of the fun was gone from it because of how hard camp was."

Grant said he and other veterans tried to keep the players together. He said he approached Mora about the heavy workload of full-contact practices and two-a-days; they had a good relationship from working together the previous two years, when Mora was the assistant head coach and worked with the defensive secondary. But though Grant praised Mora for having his door open to him, he found that Mora's ears were not.

Mora had a reputation for being a coach who catered to the players when he was a head coach in Atlanta. But when Mora took over in Seattle, Grant said that changed.

"I guess from his experience in Atlanta and him being in the position he was in, I don't know if he really knew which route to go," Grant said. "When he went another kind of way, they gave him [a hard time]. That's what a lot of people applauded him for, especially guys who played for him. And he still was a players' coach in Seattle. It was just, he had his mind set on one particular way."

Now Grant is playing for a coach in Tom Coughlin who has a reputation for demanding camps. His aren't as physical as some - the Giants weren't in full pads until late last week and have been given time off between two-a-days - but his expectations are high in terms of intensity and attention to detail.

Still, it's a lot easier than the way Coughlin used to run the Jaguars. Grant arrived in Jacksonville as a free agent in 2004, two years after Coughlin was fired there, but there still were horror stories about the way Coughlin treated players.

"I heard it was bad, I heard it was terrible," Grant said. "I love the game, but how they talked about how bad it was, whew, I don't know if I could have experienced that one."

And as for playing for the Giants now? Coughlin may not be the taskmaster he was in Jacksonville, but he's still a strict head coach. Has he lost the team already? No, Grant said.

"There are some things that I can still see that he still has from how he used to be in terms of how he wants his meetings and how he wants his dress codes and all that stuff," Grant said. "He still has his ways. But from what they told me [in Jacksonville] and what I'm seeing out here, he's totally different."