Ivy League football coach under fire for pushing players to lose weight

The Columbia University football team lost every game they played this season but apparently, and maybe noticeably, that's not all the Lions were losing.

They were losing pounds.

Columbia  alumni are blasting football coach Pete Mangurian’s strategy to slim down his offensive line — an odd reversal on the usual strategy of beefing up blockers, reports the N.Y. Post.

“You might think this is a wimpy Ivy League thing, but you can’t do that on any level of college football,” said Jake Novak, a ’92 alumnus who runs the fan blog Roar Lions 2013. “We are very much the lightest O-line team in the Ivies, and this is by design,” he added. “It’s not working.”

The Lions went 0-10 this season for the first time in 26 years, and critics say the coach's slim-fast program has much to do with the embarrassing skid.

While nobody ever confused the Ivy League school's linemen with the behemoths battering each other the SEC or the Big Ten trenches, Columbia's linemen averaged 262 pounds at the end of the season — compared to Princeton’s 284 pounds and Dartmouth’s 282, according to the teams’ rosters.

The Post said:

Some players are as much as 40 pounds lighter than their corn or cheese-fed counterparts, and sources say Mangurian ordered a number of his athletes to lose 50 to 60 pounds.

“It does have an effect on your confidence when you’re smaller,” one player said. “He’s teaching to be healthy. Most other coaches will have you fill up on burgers and shakes.”

But not everyone agrees that drastic weight loss is safe.

“The players burn a large amount of calories and are not necessarily allowed to replace them,” said one player's parent. “I don’t think they have much guidance with this.

“At one point in the spring, my son told me that they were out in the freezing cold practicing, all emaciated from the weight loss. He said they looked like a bunch of refugees in a prison camp.”

Rich Forzani, a ’66 graduate and former player, said the parent of another player told him his son lost 30 pounds over the summer and passed out in the bathroom.

Forzani is teaming up with Novak and 65 other alums for the Committee for Athletic Excellence at Columbia — which officially formed last week and is demanding the university fire both Mangurian and athletic director Dianne Murphy.

Mangurian was hired in December 2011 after being fired as an assistant by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He spent more than a decade in the NFL, including a stint as offensive-line coach with the New York Giants in the ’90s.

Back then, center Brian Williams reportedly clashed with Mangurian because the coach criticized players for being overweight.

In January 2013, Lions staff released an update on Mangurian’s efforts to make players “lean and mean.”

“We are already making significant progress,” they wrote. “From . . . last summer to the end of the season, we saw our players improve their lean muscle mass and decrease their body fat.”

Sounds like they could use a few more bakers uptown at old Baker Field.