Mangini granted his second chance

By MARLA RIDENOUR

The Browns are hoping their new coach will be motivated after getting fired by N.Y.

BEREA — Several times during his introductory news conference Thursday, Browns coach Eric Mangini had a chance to lash out at the New York Jets.

“Did you feel betrayed by your friend Mike Tannenbaum?”

“Do you have a chip on your shoulder after the Jets experience?”

But each time New York came up, Mangini demurred, dancing around the subject of the team that fired him after he led it to two winning seasons in his three years.

“I feel really good about the things we did in New York; I feel really good about the organization we were building, the people we brought in,” he said. “I know how hard the coaches worked, how hard I worked, how hard the players worked and those are the things that I’m proud of. I’m going to work as hard here and obviously learn from mistakes we made and continue to grow.”

Browns owner Randy Lerner spent 20 hours with Mangini during the week before he hired him. He knows the chip is there.

“We call that hunger,” Lerner said.

When the Jets went 10-6 in 2006 and qualified for the playoffs under their rookie coach, he was dubbed “Mangenius.” He and his wife, Julie, made a cameo on The Sopranos in 2007, dining at Artie Bucco’s restaurant. When the Jets were 8-3 with a two-game lead in the AFC East this season, there was talk of extending Mangini’s contract that had one year remaining.

But after a 1-4 finish, including losses to the struggling San Francisco 49ers and Seattle Seahawks, Mangini was fired at 10 a.m. the morning after the final game. He was 23-25 in the regular season with the Jets.

Jets owner Woody Johnson and Tannenbaum, the team’s general manager, didn’t care that the Jets beat the New England Patriots in overtime and handed the Tennessee Titans their first loss in 2008. They didn’t care that 39-year-old quarterback Brett Favre turned up with a torn biceps after the season, which might have explained his two touchdown passes and nine interceptions in the last five games.

But Lerner knew Mangini was the youngest coach in the league when the Jets hired him at age 34. Lerner is banking on the notion that Mangini will do things differently the second time around, like his mentor Bill Belichick.

Asked what sold him on Mangini, Lerner said Friday, “Not one thing. He’s had a chance to learn and make mistakes, now we’ll see how that plays into his effort.”

When asked about the late-season slide, Mangini said, “There were definitely things I could’ve done better as a head coach. There were definitely things that the coaches could’ve done better. And there were definitely things that we could’ve done better as a group of players to achieve the goals we all had in mind. But it’s never one person or one play. It’s everybody collectively doing a better job than we did during that stretch.”