As it turns out, former Jaguars and Giants coach Tom Coughlin met with the Bills. However, the meeting happened, according to his agent, “several months ago.”
Sandy Montag, who told PFT earlier this week that a report of a recent meeting between Coughlin and the Bills was incorrect, subsequently told Chris Mortensen of ESPN that a meeting happened in the more distant past.
Mortensen explains that Coughlin met with Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula, team president Russ Brandon, and coach Rex Ryan “around March or early April” to discuss a consultant-style role with the team. (It’s possible that the meeting happened in connection with the annual league meetings at Boca Raton, which occurred in late March.) The meeting lasted, according to Mortensen, “about an hour.”
“I can confirm that the meeting you’re talking about did take place, but it was several months ago and there have been no calls from any team about Tom’s availability to coach,” Montag told Mortensen. “He is fully engaged in his job with the NFL.”
Coughlin seemingly hopes to keep coaching; he interviewed with the Eagles for their vacancy before the team hired Doug Pederson. The Bills would make plenty of sense, for various reasons. Coughlin would arrive with a long track record of winning, he has twice beaten the Patriots in the Super Bowl, and he would be in many ways the exact opposite of Ryan. Given that NFL teams tend to hire someone completely unlike their most recent head coach, that could make Coughlin even more attractive.