INDIANAPOLIS — At some point during the telecast of Sunday’s Super Bowl, the cameras will almost surely cut to a close-up of Giants Coach Tom Coughlin — his face red and his frustration evident — as he upbraids an unlucky player after a poor tackle or a missed assignment.

Coughlin’s intensity is famous. Announcers talk about it, fans laugh about it and players endure it, mostly because they realize it is genuine. Coughlin, the players say, is nothing if not consistent: the clocks have always been set five minutes fast at the Giants’ training facility, the road dress code has always been backed up by fines for noncompliance and the practice schedules have always been planned down to the very last second of the water breaks.

“You can’t have a problem with it,” tight end Jake Ballard said, “because it’s been that way for a long time.”

A very, very long time, actually, going all the way back to Coughlin’s first head coaching job at Rochester Institute of Technology — a medium-size college in upstate New York where students can occasionally be seen wearing T-shirts bragging about how the football team is “undefeated since 1978,” one year after the program was officially disbanded.