In preparation for what I hope will be a fairly expansive post about football in general and the NFL more specifically, I’ve doing a lot of thinking about the game - while RealGM forum activists take shots at our rebuttal to the LeBron column - and, currently, I’ve been considering the role of the head coach.
This brings me to Eric Mangini (or “Alpha Dog” as my dad likes to call him).
There have already been a few rumblings about players being irritated by Mangini’s method of running training camp, which is typically described as “disciplinarian.” More often than not, Mangini is talked about like a Bill Belichick wanna-be. It’s a pretty fair assumption to make then that Mangini’s method of madness is similar to Belichick’s.
If I was writing for a major daily newspaper, this is where I’d define Mangini’s coaching style with a cliche like “my way or the highway.”
Obviously, it’s easy to understand why players would hate this kind of coach. How many of you would like to have a domineering boss? How many of you would like to have a domineering boss that’s about your age or younger? How many of you would like to have a domineering boss if you made millions of dollars, had been treated like a phenom your entire life, and suddenly were being told to run a lap every time you made a mistake?
I could go on, but I won’t because I’m supposed to be at the club with Stallworth and Vick. But you get my point. The instant “I hate you” reaction makes a lot of sense.
At the same time, I also understand why a coach needs to take this kind of stance. A football team has to be ordered. There are, after all, 53 players when the season starts. That’s a ton of bodies, and the game those 45 active guys take part in on a weekly basis is incredibly complex, 11 men on each side of the ball rampaging through an extremely violent and dangerous environment while operating within the “constraints” of playbooks filled with hundreds of pages.
For all of these mental and physical pieces to fall into place, the coach needs his guys - all of his guys - to execute at an extremely high-level.
You can’t have an offense with one guy who’s focused like Albert Pujols and ten guys who are focused like Sasha Pavlovic. Not only will it not work - it will be a total f’ing disaster.
I believe then that a head coach in the NFL does need to place high expectations on his players. In order to win, he needs to be demanding.
But I also believe it’s very, very hard to find a large number of guys that are capable of meeting those demands and fulfilling those expectations. Not everyone wants to go through what you have to go through to be great.
Just think about all of the bozos you work with.
What interests me then is how a coach can make the transition from “my players hate me” to…let’s not say “my players love me”…but to “my players are buying what I’m selling.”
Realistically, let’s also admit that this will never be every player. But it better be a large majority of them.
Having said that, I suspect the answer is two-fold. The first thing is to win as quickly and as much as possible. The second is to acquire as many players as you can that want to be great (we’ll rate these players “all about greatness” or AAG). This will also entail cutting a whole sh*tload of guys that just like to “make a lot of money and get theirs.”
This second component should be pretty self-explanatory. I assume it’s why Mangini brought in a bunch of former Jets, released guys like Shaun Smith, and traded down in the draft to acquire as many players that, either were AAG or could be molded into that by Mangini, as rookies, from the very beginning.
(Of course, if this season ends with both Derek Anderson and Brady Quinn looking like scrubs while Mark Sanchez has a phenomenal year…well, that trade may end up being a franchise killer).
The first concept - winning as quickly and as much as possible - deserves a little more of an explanation. But not a lot…
If players start to see rewards from following Mangini’s program, it’s going to make them want to continue following the program. And if those rewards are big - like winning the Super Bowl (what Belichick did in his second year as Patriots head coach) - then they’re really going to buy in. You may even end up with players from outside of the organization, i.e. free agents and guys who want to be traded, pining to come play for you.
To a certain extent, the buying in process feeds itself. Accumulate AAG players, start to win. The AAG guys care the most about winning as a reward (as opposed to individual accolades), so they keep wanting to win. You win more. The AAG guys help bring in more AAG guys. They also infect other players with the AAG disease, especially young players who maybe look up to them.
What I’m ultimately saying then is that for the Browns to truly become Mangini’s team both of those processes - winning and re-tooling the roster - need to occur, and the tricky part is, that they need to happen in tandem, at least to a certain degree.
Belichick, for example, went 5-11 the first year he coached the Patriots. That year, he also drafted Tom Brady. The following year, they won the Super Bowl.
You see how this is going…
Bottomline: give Mangini some time to stock AAG personnel. But not too much. Because results also build AAG’s.
