National Football League training camps opened this week, a welcome sign for the millions of American football fans who still believe sports begins and ends with their crappy fantasy teams the NFL. One camp worth watching will be the New York Jets’ camp, as 2nd-year head coach (and new USA Football spokesman) Eric Mangini returns from a season in which he turned a sad sack 4-12 team into a playoff-bound 10-6 squad — a turnaround that surely would have won him NFL Coach of the Year honors if not for Hurricane Katrina Sean Payton.

How did Mangini manage to turn things around in New York so quickly? I found out from one of his former players — in Australia.

Jethro Lamb played center for the Kew Colts of the Victorian Gridiron Football League in 1992. He stumbled upon this blog a few weeks ago when he found this photo of Mangini here:

“That’s actually me on the right holding up Eric’s left leg,” Lamb wrote in a email. Lamb played for the Naval Academy before finding himself in Australia, where he met Mangini, who was studying abroad at the time and immediately took up coaching while he was there. Under Mangini’s watch, the Colts, a semi-pro team that was based in Melbourne, won the VGFL championship in 1992 and 1993. As Lamb said in an email conversation, Mangini had a way of getting the most from his players.

Eric was a very very good motivator. He didn’t do a lot of training different than most coaches in relation to fitness and drills but he had a way of getting that extra out of you and also instilling pride in whatever you did and whoever you played…

His aim was to take fear out of the equasion. There was no one that could outplay us on the field and he made sure we knew that.

Interestingly enough, though, Mangini’s philosophy wasn’t centered around scoring points, but around play execution.

His philosophy was the way to win the game was play more perfect plays than your opposition and the points would come. He would sacrifice points for perfect execution. It was our pride that brought away the points for HIM. We felt if we didn’t score after playing perfect plays we let him down. And we never ever wanted to let him down.

Obviously, the competition in Australia wasn’t as good as the competition in the NFL, but according to Jethro, it wasn’t as bad as most people might think.

It doesn’t have a huge following here but I have seen it progress over the years and the standard is very good. Past junior college at least.

So for all intents and purposes, Mangini got to coach at something just above the junior college level for two years and won two titles by age 23. He parlayed that experience into a job with the Cleveland Browns, where his 18-hour workdays caught the eye of Bill Belichick, who hired him as a film editor for the coordinators. The rest, as they say, is history.

Sadly, so are the Kew Colts, who disbanded a few years ago after Gridiron Australia increased the insurance requirements for their clubs. Still, when people ask where “Man-genius” got his start, it wasn’t in Cleveland. It was in Melbourne.

Interestingly enough, the special teams captain of the Jets is punter Ben Graham, a longtime Geelong Cats star who became the first Australian to captain an NFL team. As Jethro points out:

With Basketball as big as it is (here), there are more aussies in the NFL than in the NBA. That’s a very nice stat to include.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Graham was “Geelong’s ‘Best First Year Player’ in the reserves team of 1992.” Geelong, of course, is a suburb of Melbourne. Graham was already a Jet when Mangini arrived, but I wonder if those two ever crossed paths back in the day…