Last September, we had he opportunity to talk to Tom Callahan about his book, The G.M. Tom had had a privileged view of the 2006 season, which he spent at the elbow of the New York Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi, a veteran football executive who had announced his retirement. From that vantage, Tom got to know many members of the now Super Bowl-bound Giants. He's also received a few text messages from Accorsi over the season. Here Tom takes a few of our questions and shares his views.

PLAYBOY: A lot of people thought the team would fall apart after running back Tiki Barber retired at the end of last season. Were you surprised that it didn’t?

CALLAHAN: Tiki was a terrific player, and not at all a bad guy. But he was a “me” guy in the clubhouse, one of three. Barber, defensive end Michael Strahan and tight end Jeremy Shockey had the hauteur of Super Bowl champions but no rings. Last year, they walked around the clubhouse like stockholders instead of employees. First by retiring,
then by ripping quarterback Eli Manning on behalf of NBC, Tiki did more for the current Giants than he ever could have done on the field, even though it took a committee of five backs to match his yardage totals almost to the foot.

Strahan threatened to follow Barber into retirement, hoping for a renegotiated contract. But Ernie Accorsi’s replacement, Jerry Reese, stared him down. That was a great start for Jerry. After Stray managed to blow off the entire sweaty ordeal of training camp, he returned for a 15th NFL season to learn that he was no longer either the first- or second-best pass rusher on the team. Osi Umenyiora and Justin Tuck had flown by him. And Mathias Kiwanuka was just off his shoulder. Finding himself a captain still, but a king no more, had a very healthy effect on Stray, who is also a good guy at heart when he’s not preoccupied with money. In The GM, Accorsi describes one of their negotiations: “Ernie, I don’t mean to be disrespectful to the organization,” Strahan said, “but your offer of an $11 million signing bonus doesn’t really excite me.” Later,
owner Wellington Mara told Ernie, “If he had to pay the $11 million, I bet it would excite him.”

As for Shockey, this is an awfully unkind thing to say. But I think it’s true. When Jeremy broke his leg before the Giants took off on this unexpected run, it wasn’t the worst break for the team. Just a few days ago, a member of the front office told me he was standing behind the bench at one of the playoff games – Tampa or Dallas, I can’t remember which – when, glancing around, it dawned on him: Something had changed. Something was different. “Then I realized what it was,” he said. “Shockey wasn’t there, calling attention to himself on the sideline.”

I like Jeremy, and I understand why many of the Giants players love him. The important players. The leaders, like the center Shaun O’Hara. This fierce talent and self-described wild child plays football as recklessly and loves it as desperately as anyone I’ve ever encountered. But when Jeremy comes back to the Giants, he’s going to have to be a slightly different kind of guy to fit in with this new team. That’s the word for the Giants now –  team. The Me Generation doesn’t live here anymore.

PLAYBOY: Do you think this is due to Tom Coughlin? The head coach was a polarizing figure during his first seasons with the team. What’s changed?

CALLAHAN: It’s absolutely due to Coughlin, and maybe the biggest change he made was in himself. As Strahan told me last year, “Tom misses the human element almost more than anybody I’ve ever been around. I think a coach has to show a human side.” This year, finally, he did. To the players, he did. He brought them in. He didn’t give them a veto power, but he gave them a say. The leaders. That’s all they were waiting for. Coughlin has always been one of those guys who got the big things right and the little things wrong. This season he started getting some of the
little things right, too.

Of course, the players could have fired Coughlin last year, when the Giants’ fans and the New York media were frantic for him to go. All that the players had to do was quit on him. That’s club president John Mara’s essential criterion. Readers of The GM will be able to tell that, at least by my lights, the closer you get to Coughlin, the better he looks. He isn’t really that ruddy-faced madman racing up and down the sidelines. He’s a gentleman, smart as hell, and another guy who absolutely loves the game of football. He has told friends that he would die without it.

I think Tom may have been scared at the end of last year. He was 61 and, if the Giants cashiered him, where would he go? The networks wouldn’t be bidding for his personality. “Here’s what’s going to happen next year,” Coughlin told me after the guillotine was rolled away,
“with me and with Eli. Here’s what’s going to prevail for both of us. Eli will look back on this year and realize that, next season, the first person that will be condemned to death is me. And the second person they’re going to come for is Eli. It’s going to toughen his ass up. I really believe that. I think you’re going to see a different guy next year, two different guys. We both might look back on 2006 as the season that made us. That’s what I think. People are always saying, ‘Fix Eli, fix Eli.’ Do you want to know something? Eli doesn’t need fixing. He just needs the maturity that comes with time.”

PLAYBOY: But even the truest Eli believers must have had doubts after his uneven play for most of the season.

CALLAHAN: Not Accorsi. Ernie never wavered. I knew that the players, especially receivers like Amani Toomer and Plaxico Burress, held Eli in much higher regard than the town did. Rich Seubert, the left guard, told me a story that described an Eli only the players see. In the Carolina game a year ago, a chain-reaction of injuries moved Seubert to center for the first time since the sixth grade. Rich was scared to death. When the opening play called for a shotgun formation, he said in the huddle, “Please Eli, can’t we have a couple of direct snaps to start?” Manning smiled and said, “Don’t worry, Rich, anywhere between my neck and my knees will be cool.” “That gave me so much confidence,” Seubert said.

Eli is never going to be as animated as brother Peyton, but he stood up to Tiki’s televised insults, and the Giants players cheered. At one point last season, I told Eli, “If Johnny Unitas threw a poor pass, prompting the intended receiver to toss up his arms in frustration, John’s next pass would hit him in the back of the head. And the one after that would hit him in the front of the head.” Eli laughed, but that’s not his way. Burress said, “His way is never to get too up, and never to get too down. Isn’t that how a quarterback ought to be?”

Many people say Eli and the Giants were changed when Coughlin listened to his leaders and played a meaningless Patriots game to win. But didn’t Eli really come of age driving most of the field in less than a minute in Dallas? At the end of the first half. “I missed it live,” Accorsi messaged me on his BlackBerry. “When the Cowboys went ahead, 14-7, I turned on the TiVo and went to church.” Ernie’s still as nervous as he used to be, watching the games from the end zone tunnel.

PLAYBOY: The new GM, Jerry Reese, has been one of the unsung heroes, hasn’t he? What has he been able to add?

CALLAHAN: A lot. A first-round cornerback named Aaron Ross. A second-round receiver named Steve Smith. A couple of discards off the waiver wire, fullback Madison Hedgecock and kick returner Dominek Hixon. Fifth- and seventh round draft choices Kevin Boss and Ahmad Bradshaw. Bradshaw is already a near-legend as the 195-pound lightning to Brandon Jacobs’ 260-pound thunder. Boss, the tight end filling in
for Shockey, was the 153rd player picked, from Western Oregon. Accorsi told Reese, “You not only picked a player I never heard of, you picked a player from a college I never heard of.”

Until Reese, the black executives in the NFL were former pro stars like Baltimore’s Ozzie Newsome. “Here’s a guy,” Ernie says of Jerry, “who wasn’t even a player in the league, who started off at the very bottom, like most of us, and worked his way up the same way, step by step.” Accorsi brought Reese to New York from Tennessee, groomed his as a scout, jumped him over more experienced men into first pro and then college personnel. Ernie taught him how to be a GM and then sold him to John Mara and Steve and Jonathan Tisch, the club’s co-owners. Mara wasn’t a hard sell. He was there every day. But one of the Tisches said to Accorsi, “I wanted to be wowed.” Maybe he is now. “Ernie won’t tell you,” Reese whispered to me the day he got the job, “but we both cried.”

PLAYBOY: More than once this season, I’ve heard Coughlin say in news conferences, “Talk’s cheap; play the game.” As a boyhood fan of the Baltimore Colts, I have a theory about where that comes from.

CALLAHAN: You’ve got a great ear. In the off-season, Tom read my last book, Johnny U, and on the first day of training camp he handed out t-shirts with that mantra on it to all of the Giants players. Before Colts games in Baltimore, the defensive captain would say a few words and then ask Unitas, “Do you have anything to add, John?” He always added the same thing. Talk’s cheap; play the game.

PLAYBOY: Okay, tell me about the big game. Who’s the MVP and what’s the final score? I have my bookie on hold . . .

CALLAHAN: Keeping in mind that I’m always wrong, that I went all of the way to Zaire to pick George Foreman over Muhammad Ali, and that I had the canyon against Evel Knievel, I’ll say the Patriots, Brady and 31-24. If the Giants play their best game, they could win. If the Pats play their best game, they’re a cinch.