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For Jets, ex-apprentices now piloting franchise

WashPost: Mangini, Tannenbaum fresh faces in N.Y. after paying their dues
/ Source: a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/front.htm" linktype="External" resizable="true" status="true" scrollbars="true">The Washington Post</a

In the fall of 1994, Eric Mangini and Mike Tannenbaum, armed with prestigious college degrees and mountains of student debt, put their educations to good use running a copy machine in the old Cleveland Browns offices. They did this because they loved football and, being short of any ability to make the NFL as players, realized their only way in was from the bottom.

"Once I got my foot in the door, they were not going to kick me out," Tannenbaum would say years later.

They did not know each other despite the fact they grew up less than two hours apart —Mangini in Hartford, Conn., and Tannenbaum outside of Boston. But once they converged upon that copy machine, they were destined to be friends, they were so much alike. And as the blue light flashed and the copies piled up in trays, they talked late into the night; two interns lost in the tedium of their tasks, fantasizing about the day they would run a football team of their own.

The machine was called "the Queen Mary."

How could they know just how soon it would propel them to their dream?

Twelve years later they do have a team of their own — the New York Jets — and they operate it at an age when most men are only starting to build their names in the league. Mangini, 35, the head coach, is the youngest man currently holding such a position in the NFL. Tannenbaum, 36, is the general manager. In an NFL that puts a high price on dedication, lineage and many years of apprenticeship, having two men in their mid-thirties in charge of a team is not only unusual, it's almost unheard of.

Not that either of them sounds excited about the situation.

"Whether we're trailblazers or not, it's more about taking the opportunity and making the most of it and putting the best Jet team on the field," Tannenbaum said.

"I'd rather be the young guy than described as the old guy," Mangini said.

This is the way of the youngest management team in the NFL. Despite their sterling pedigrees (Mangini has a degree in political science from Wesleyan and Tannenbaum graduated from Tulane's law school) they were raised at the feet of Bill Belichick and Bill Parcells, two coaches who demanded ingenuity, perfection and little communication with the outside world. Talking openly meant revealing snippets of information and eventually those snippets of information could add up to bigger pieces that might make their way to other teams and could be used against them in a game.

In Parcells and Belichick's world, secrecy means winning. And nothing in that universe can be allowed to get in the way of winning.

Which, in part, is probably why Tannenbaum and Mangini are here at such young ages. While in the employ of Parcells and Belichick, they worked hard, brought good ideas and kept out of the public eye. They rarely spoke to reporters, never did television interviews or signed autographs. They just stayed in the office and worked until Tannenbaum was negotiating nearly all of the Jets' contracts as assistant general manager and Mangini was Belichick's defensive coordinator in New England.

And then when the Jets — desperate to recreate the magic of a few years back when Parcells ran the team and Belichick coached his defense — were looking for a new coach this winter, Tannenbaum was the most effusive in pushing his old friend Mangini. A few weeks after Mangini's hiring, Tannenbaum was promoted.

For both of them, it was a dream come true despite their outward lack of enthusiasm. Still, it was a dream that hasn't been without some awkward moments. Like the day before this summer's first exhibition game in Tampa when the baby-faced Tannenbaum was on his way up to his room at the team hotel, clad in an official Jets shirt. As he stepped into the elevator he was confronted by a group of teenage boys.

"What do you do for the Jets?" one of the kids said, looking at Tannenbaum's shirt.

"I'm the general manager," Tannenbaum replied "No, no, really," the boy persisted, "what's your job?"

"Really, I'm the general manager," Tannenbaum said.

Of course it is not a good team Tannenbaum and Mangini have taken over. Last year, New York lost quarterback Chad Pennington to a torn right rotator cuff and finished 4-12. And while this season Pennington seems healthy, star running back Curtis Martin could miss the year and might never play again because of a lingering knee injury. Their top draft pick, tackle D'Brickashaw Ferguson from Virginia, has been inconsistent. And the rest of the team is so young and mostly anonymous it might take two years to know if it will be any good.

It doesn't help that Mangini, still carrying the mark of Belichick, spent much of the summer conducting listless news conferences almost as a ruse and releasing training camp depth charts listing players alphabetically rather than by their status on the team (as in first string, second string, etc.).

The New York media, on their best day feisty beasts, have been especially unforgiving, mocking the new coach and general manager for not grasping the severity of Martin's injury and for not making a stronger attempt to move up in the draft to take USC running back Reggie Bush. Already Mangini and Tannenbaum have been scorched as a "barely out of diapers decision makers" in the New York Daily News while the New York Post termed their secretive headquarters a "gulag."

The irony is that Mangini seems very much unlike his public persona. With an easy smile and a slightly moon-shaped face, he looks uneasy trying to assume Belichick's dour scowl. He starts each news conference with a thought of the day — a book he had recently read or a high school coach's philosophies he wants to share with players. To illustrate the way he is trying to get his defensive players to catch balls that come their way in games rather than simply deflect them, he showed them tapes of Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, telling them how Jeter never gave up on a play.

But as soon as he is done with the thought of the day, he lulls reporters back into a haze of coy non-answers— an act that is almost endearing when Belichick does it, but seems forced from Mangini.

This belies the interesting life he has lived, one that changed when he was 16 and his father died of a heart attack. The death instilled in him both a maturity and a determination, one friend said, making him realize that he couldn't squander opportunities because you never know how long you have to live. After high school, he took out loans and went to Wesleyan, where he starred as a defensive end at the same school that produced Belichick.

Upon his graduation from Wesleyan, Mangini moved to Australia with his older brother and he coached a club team that played American football. He loved the experience and upon his return to North America, he wrote every NFL team looking for work. The Browns responded, some surmise because he mentioned his Wesleyan ties, and he was offered an unpaid position as a ballboy.

The dream may well have ended there had Browns public relations director Kevin Byrne not spotted Mangini, who was significantly older than the other ballboys hustling after errant passes and offered him a job as his intern. Mangini jumped at the chance, never balking at the menial tasks such as photocopying and handing out releases to the media.

But as luck would have it, the Queen Mary rested in a hallway inside the coaches' corridor. Mangini needed a special pass to get into the area and it put him in proximity to Belichick, whom Byrne (now with the Baltimore Ravens) figures must have been impressed by Mangini's dedication. When the PR internship ended, Belichick took him for his own, making him a low-level assistant with a primary task of fetching ribs for players and earning him the nickname "Rib Boy." Mangini went to Baltimore when the team moved, then joined Belichick with the Jets, where they worked for Parcells, and eventually in New England, where he rose from a defensive backs coach to defensive coordinator.

Tannenbaum, on the other hand, never had delusions of playing. He decided at a very young age that he wanted to be a general manager of a pro sports team. He and his mother, Marilyn, read the Boston Globe at the breakfast table when he was a child. Tannenbaum would always ask for the sports section, she remembers. He called it the Bible as in "could you pass me the Bible, please?"

"You know there is more to life than just sports," she would say.

He became obsessed with the idea of building a franchise. In college, at the University of Massachusetts, he wrote a term paper on putting together a team. He chose the 49ers of Bill Walsh, researching Walsh's drafts, signings and even the assistant coaches he hired. He still has the paper.

After college, Tannenbaum enrolled at Tulane's law school because it had an emphasis on sports law. While in New Orleans, he began hounding the local NFL team, the Saints, for a job. Bill Kuharich, then the team's player personnel director, finally agreed, assigning him to a single task for six months: shredding paper.

"He was testing me," Tannenbaum said. "He was trying to see if I would hang in there, so I was committed to being the best shredder in the country. I graduated from that to getting his dry cleaning. It went from that to getting people from the airport. It was just paying my dues and they weren't going to break me. I was not going to be broken because I had a dream and I wasn't going to lose it."

When he got his law degree, Belichick hired him to study contracts for the Browns. Tannenbaum was largely invisible around the team's headquarters and there was a suspicion he wasn't even on the team payroll but was instead paid under the table by Belichick. And when the team moved to Baltimore, Tannenbaum was left behind -- only people with full-time jobs could move on to the new home.

Marilyn Tannenbaum took this opportunity to suggest to her son that he use his education in a far more stable profession than professional football. But Tannenbaum's father, Richie, kept saying, "Follow your dream."

Mike Tannenbaum followed it all the way to the Jets, where he became one of Parcells's most trusted advisers.

Now Mangini and Tannenbaum have a team of their own.

Asked if he thinks they have to prove something because of their youth, Tannenbaum smiled. "I think there's a little bit of that. But at the end of the day we're going to be judged on how good this team is."

So far, it appears that the team is listening to its new coach and general manager. Mangini seems to have retained Belichick's gift for simplifying team lectures and film presentations to a point where everybody can easily grasp the concepts being presented. And the players say they respect Mangini's preparation and enthusiasm despite the fact he is barely older than some of them.

"It's a little unique," said guard Pete Kendall, just three years younger than Mangini. "I think we have these preconceived notions of what our coach is supposed to look like. My kids are older than his kids, but I don't think he's coming up to me asking for parenting advice."

That wouldn't be his way.