Height, weight, athleticism? Check. Lions looking for Giovanni Manu to tap back into intangible that added to draft appeal
Allen Park — The cliche that playing football is 90% mental is one of the more absurd you’ll hear out of an NFL locker room.
Attribution for these parroted phrases can be shaky. Still, it’s wholly believable this one evolved from a comment believed to be made by New York Yankees legend Yogi Berra — a noted master of the absurd quote. The Hall of Famer is credited with saying, 'Baseball is 90% mental. The other half is physical.”
That’s illogical for more obvious reasons, but somehow makes more sense than the modern variant being applied to football. You can't reasonably play the game professionally without eclipsing certain physical thresholds. Nonetheless, an inability to handle the mental demands of the game probably leads to something close to a 100% failure rate.
That’s the hurdle second-year offensive tackle Giovanni Manu is trying to navigate.