Tom Coughlin: You Know Who Won the Super Bowl Even If We're Not on Front Page

The New York Jets, as is their custom this time of year, have been grabbing all the headlines, taking up all the space on the back pages of the New York tabloids, what with their infighting and their trading for Tim Tebow, you'd think they were the only team in town.

Of course, there is another team in New York, and they just happen to be the reigning Super Bowl champions. 

Asked at the NFL owners meetings about all the attention being paid to the Jets recently, Tom Coughlin delivered one of the better lines of the offseason (via Jorge Castillo of The Star-Ledger):

"

You know who won the Super Bowl, even if we’re not on front page. New Yorkers know.

"

The rivalry between Jets and Giants fans is a very visceral thing that I didn't fully understand until moving here over a decade ago. Families are divided, friendships are won and lost over the two teams and there is a very real sense of the Jets being the little brother, continually being disrespected by the older, more mature brother, that being the Giants. 

Obviously, this goes all the way back to the Jets' AFL days, when the rival league to the NFL was viewed as an inferior product and that their teams had no business hanging with the NFL. This all changed when the Jets shocked the Colts in Super Bowl III, the game Joe Namath famously guaranteed the Jets would win. 

Since then, however, the Giants have won multiple Super Bowls while the Jets have been almost annual disappointments. Sure, there have been bright spots, such as Bill Parcells taking them to the doorstep of the Super Bowl, but mostly the Jets have had to stay entrenched firmly in the shadow of the Giants.

While some of this perception may have started to change when the Jets brought Rex Ryan in to coach and found immediate success, getting to two AFC Championship games in his first two years, the Giants winning the Super Bowl, with the Jets not even qualifying for the playoffs and basically falling apart at the end of the season, has restored the natural order of all things football in New York City/New Jersey. 

As was the case when the Giants won their last Super Bowl, when the Jets were the talk of the offseason when they traded for Brett Favre, Woody Johnson's team has once again grabbed the headlines after a Giants Super Bowl victory by trading for Tim Tebow, ensuring that they are the talk of the town in March.

Coughlin and the Giants are content to keep quiet and try to be the talk of the town when it counts—in February.