Mangini needs help, not a music critic

Someone has to rise to defend Cleveland Browns coach Eric Mangini after he was attacked -- not here or by another football publication but by Rolling Stone magazine. Perhaps the lyrics to his last album were pedestrian? Maybe so, but even a magazine better known for music reviews has to have limits of decency, and comparing Mangini to Augustus Gloop, the fat kid in the Willie Wonka films, is over the top.

APEven national music publications are criticizing Browns head coach Eric Mangini.

So let it be me to take up for Mangini, about whom I was once the subject of a “separated at birth” email after he took over the Jets. We do look a bit alike. We both played on the line for schools better known for their academics than their football. We both wrestled. We are Capricorns, we probably both like sunsets and we share a certain fondness for carbohydrates. Even our wives look a bit similar, both striking blondes. We both clearly “married up.” But having some Rolling Stone guy compare Mangini to a gluttonous German kid with “fat bulging from every fold, with two greedy eyes peering out of his doughball of a head” who falls into a chocolate river and is sung about by Oompa Loompas is way out of bounds.

Besides, Mangini is only a light-heavyweight by NFL standards. Like a lot of us, Mangini might want to consider some extra cardio and a salad at lunch, but he is no Andy Reid or Rex Ryan in the weight department. Heck, Mike Holmgren used to be a quarterback and he’s bigger. Green Bay’s Mike McCarthy used to be a tight end and he could easily be tipping the scales heavier than Mangini. It’s not as if Eric Mangini is Mark Mangino, the University of Kansas coach who is more than a bit weight challenged. But Mangino’s record is 5-1 (despite having played no one more formidable than Duke) and Mangini’s is 1-5, and that may be all that matters.

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi was also incorrect in saying that Mangini is failing in either having a plan or communicating it to his players. Mangini has a plan, it’s just not a good one. Sadly, as one NFL insider said, he is a decent enough coach who has “institutionalized all the things that got him fired from the Jets.” He is pushing the same mysteriousness, lack of communication and incongruous toughness in Cleveland that he did in New York. Except he clearly thinks because it didn’t succeed on the Hudson, if he turns up the volume even more, it will succeed on Lake Erie.

The one clear thing Mangini never learned from his lone coaching mentor, Bill Belichick, is the need for another way. Most people may have noticed that Belichick isn’t the most fun loving and easy going guy, but he does handle his team effectively. And he carries with him that little bit of extra gravitas that a bank vault full of championship rings provides. Mangini has none of that -- at least not as a head coach -- and the more he strains and presses, the harder it becomes for him to truly find another way or a variety of other ways. Albert Einstein said the definition of insanity “is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Rather than taking what he learned from Belichick and what worked in New York and putting it together in a style that works for him, Mangini seems to be trying too hard to be someone he’s not. If Browns owner Randy Lerner didn’t owe both ex-coach Romeo Crennel and former GM Phil Savage several more years of pay, Mangini might be in real trouble.

APMangini didn't learn everything from mentor Bill Belichick.

The legendary basketball coach John Wooden once said that when he started coaching he had “many rules and a few suggestions” and when he finished coaching he had “few rules and many suggestions,” and that seems to be the lesson Mangini hasn’t even considered. Mangini did a decent enough job with the Jets. If you’ve watched the Jets over the years, his record (two games under .500 with one playoff appearance in three seasons) is considered pretty good, even if he may have been overmatched as a 35-year-old facing the New York media, which actually drinks the blood of coaches who show fear. But he lost the locker room and the owner and his job.

Ideally, he should have taken some time to reflect on what went wrong and learned some new approaches, while vowing never to let history repeat itself. Belichick did that. So did Pete Carroll. They emerged changed and for the better. In fact, Mangini, who has a good relationship with Carroll, should have gone to USC and learned how to get the best out of players without making every day a knock-down drag-out fight about everything. But another NFL head job beckoned and no one could blame Mangini for jumping at it.

Wooden’s advice says that a veteran coach knows which battles to fight and which to avoid, and Mangini doesn’t seem to get that. Reinventing one’s self on the job is really hard. Arguably, only Tom Coughlin really has pulled off that trick, and it took the intervention of a sage owner in John Mara and a clear threat. Even Tony Dungy had to get fired to win.

Mangini needs to reinvent himself, and he can’t look to Lerner or newly hired consultant Bernie Kosar for help. He can, however, find himself some help in the form of a former NFL head coach or GM who has been there and done that and who has no desire to do it again. Spend time with him, alone at night in the office. Pick his brain and learn that suggestions often go a lot farther than rules. Smile a bit more. You’re a nice guy with a great family, and you’re good looking, since you look like me. There’s time to save this thing, but Rolling Stone was right in saying that it’s running out.

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