Pat Shurmur made sure to honor the past before he looked toward the future.

The Giants coach knows what the relationship is like between coach and quarterback, and so he wanted to give former coach Tom Coughlin the courtesy of letting him know personally the team was sending two-time Super Bowl MVP quarterback Eli Manning to the bench before the news spread.

“Pat Shurmur actually said to me, ‘He’s your guy and I wanted you to know that I had a very difficult thing today,’ ” Coughlin, now the executive vice president of football operations for the Jaguars, recalled on Friday about Shurmur’s move to rookie first-round pick Daniel Jones at quarterback. “And I told Pat, ‘Yeah, he is my guy, and guess what? He’ll always be my guy.’ ”

Shurmur and Coughlin, in attendance for the 15th annual Tom Coughlin Jay Fund gala in midtown Manhattan, didn’t disclose details of their conversation, but Shurmur provided insight into why he made the call.

“He was his coach and it was a move that we made,” said Shurmur, who was one of the event’s honorees. “I felt it was the right thing to do to call. Tom and I have a great relationship. We’ve become friends in the profession. It was just one of those things. Eli and Tom are forever connected. They won two Super Bowls together. When you make a move like that, it was out of respect.”

Coughlin and Manning remain close, although it has been four years since they were part of the same organization. As Shurmur said, they won two Super Bowls together and Manning was Coughlin’s quarterback for 105 wins from 2004-15. When Coughlin stepped down as coach, Manning was seen holding back tears during the press conference.

“What I say to him is, I knew that when this happened, he knows he has my 100 percent support, that he would handle this with class and dignity and he will help the young guy just like Kurt Warner helped him,” Coughlin said. “That’s the way Eli is.”