VANCOUVER — Perfect team. Perfect time. Perfect fit.
So perfect, in fact, that you wonder if there had been more than a little divine intervention from the football gods above.
How else does Giovanni Manu wind up a fourth-round pick of the Detroit Lions this past April, thus becoming the first UBC Thunderbird ever selected in the NFL draft?
Of course what’s closer to the truth is the fact that Lions — who have made picks with surgical precision over its three prior drafts — saw in Manu not only the physical measurables they coveted, but the intangibles of team culture they have so lately craved.
This past Friday evening, after having hopped a plane back to Vancouver as part of a getaway weekend ahead of the start of the 2024 regular season, the 6-foot-7, 354-pound offensive lineman Manu was impossible to miss along the Thunderbird Stadium sidelines as he cheered on his former teammates in their Canada West season opener against the Alberta Golden Bears.
Now back in Detroit and ready to open his first season Sunday (5:20 p.m., NBC) when the Lions play host to the Los Angeles Rams in a rematch of last season’s NFC wildcard clash, it’s no stretch to say that over the past three seasons both the player and the team have been on a parallel journey of the most inspiring variety.
Just as Manu — coming off a 2020 season cancelled by COVID — began to truly come into his own in the trenches over UBC’s 2021 U SPORTS season, the long-struggling Lions were laying the foundation of what would come to define their re-build, drafting wunderkind tackle Penei Sewell near the top of the first round and instantly positioning him as a lynchpin alongside the likes of centre Frank Ragnow and tackle Taylor Decker as part of what is now considered by many as the best offensive line in the NFL.
And now, in the homestretch to Sunday’s opener, Detroit seems to have not only consolidated itself as the pundits’ pick in the NFC, but with growing frequency as potential Super Bowl champs.
So how’s that as a landing spot for Manu, who back 132 days ago at the draft, was still just a kid when measured by the metric of U.S. football years?
Well, actually, it’s the perfect one.
Just ask him what it’s been like to simply break bread in the same world as Sewell, Decker, Ragnow and Co., cast as that piece of figurative football clay ready to be moulded, and he lets you know that he’s going into this thing with a full realization of just how blessed he feels to have a seat at the table.
It seems, in fact, that his ’osmosis’ switch has been turned to the ‘on’ position since the day he first met his fellow offensive linemen.
“It’s been amazing,” Manu, 23, says of just being around the group in meetings, on the field or just hanging out together.
“I am like the youngest guy in the room, and I am just being a sponge around those guys like Penei and Taylor,” he continues of Sewell, who despite being just over three months older than Manu, is entering his fourth NFL season; and Decker, 31, the group’s veteran entering his ninth season.
“There’s around six offensive linemen who have been in the league for like five-plus years and so I just sit back. They all coach me up (along with) our O-line coach (Hank Fraley). I take everything from their game and I add it to my tool box, and it’s been an amazing experience.”
THE MEANING OF MENTORS
Giovanni Manu has had a couple important Dans in life.
There is of course Lions’ head coach Dan Campbell, a guy who these seems to define the very essence of team culture in the modern-day NFL.
And then there is his ex-UBC offensive line coach, the late Dan Dorazio, who succumbed to illness this past August, just months after helping Manu reach peak performance at his NFL combine workout in Vancouver… the one which ultimately opened Detroit’s eyes to his talents.
At last Friday’s game, a moment of silence was observed for Dorazio, 72, whose coaching tree carried both Nick Saban and Don James roots.
Manu and the rest of the ‘Birds sported commemorative ‘Coach Dan’ t-shirts, and after the game, a 42-28 Alberta win, Manu spoke to the influence Dorazio had on his game.
“He meant everything to me and he’s quite literally one of the reasons I am in the NFL right now,” he said of Dorazio, a sentiment surely echoed by his former UBC teammate and starting right tackle Theo Benedet, the North Vancouver native who last week was placed on the Chicago Bears practice roster.
“Great coach, great human being. I have told multiple people that hearing him pass was probably one of the toughest days of my life,” continued Manu, “but I am just happy he is in a better place because I know he was battling those last couple of days.”
Manu, a native of Tonga who starred both on the basketball court and football field throughout his youth, was never cast in the dream role of blue-chip, can’t-miss prospect coming out of high school at Pitt Meadows Secondary.
Yet if you were the coach able to spark that blue-collar, underdog wiring within him, you knew there was a force of nature just waiting to happen.
All of that, as part of bigger culture built on the camaraderie of sport is what eventually brought out the best of what Manu could give on the football field.
And finding that constant theme of connection between his university days at UBC and his new life in the NFL with the Lions has been a godsend since April’s draft, one which just happened to take place in Detroit.
“I would say it’s culture,” said Manu. “UBC has the same culture as Detroit… that old-school mentality where it’s ‘Go to work’. That’s the reason I fit in Detroit. We play an old school brand of football at UBC, and coach Campbell and Detroit preaches the same thing.”
Such sentiments are music to the ears of the man who brought Manu to the Point Grey campus as a raw 18-year old hopeful back in 2018.
“I like to think we run our program the way it’s supposed to be,” said UBC head coach Blake Nill, who carries his rough-and-tumble persona as well as any coach in the game, including Dan Campbell. “I always talk about protecting the integrity of the game, and football is supposed to be a game played with bumps and bruises, physicality, teamwork, you’re tired. I believe that you got to be in shape. … all that stuff. I think’s it’s fortunate for Gio that his new coach feels the same.”
Manu hears the chatter associated with his Canadian background and his status as a project player, yet none of that has done anything to alter the height of the personal bar he has set for his football future, which begins in earnest this week with him battling to earn every snap and every consideration from a coaching staff that has preached patience since selecting him.
“You know, obviously they knew I was a bit of a project,” he says. “But I know within myself I love hard work, and once I get a grasp of the speed of the game and all that, it’s going to all come together.”
That’s Little Gio’s way of saying that his urgency won’t wane regardless of his station on the depth chart.
THE ROOTS GO DEEP
It’s been over six years since chronicling, here on the pages at Varsity Letters, the fact that Giovanni Manu grew five inches — from 6-foot-3 to 6-foot-8 — between his Grade 9 and 10 fall/winter sport seasons.
Over the years that followed, Manu made constant progress on the left side of the UBC offensive line, and I would often look back on the words of ‘Birds football boss Nill, and confidence with which he answered when I asked him specifically what he thought this gigantic kid with a lot of rough edges to his game, but an all-world smile, would bring to his football team.
“Giovanni’s potential is obviously due to his physical size and his genetics,” Nill said in that story from April of 2018 , immediately following Manu’s signing at UBC. “But more important and more impressive are his movement skills. They are above average. We have recognized Giovanni as one of the top (high school senior varsity) athletes in Canada for the last year-and-a-half, and his ability to move means he is going to be able to compete right away on the field because of his ability to keep up with the speed of the game.”
Although basketball was left behind after high school, Manu also credits an influential high school teacher-coach of his at Pitt Meadows Secondary.
Rich Goulet, who passed away in March of 2021 at the age of 74 and is remembered as one of the most enduring coaches over the entire history B.C. high school basketball, not only coached Manu on the court, he also, in his dual duties as the school’s athletic director, happened to launch a high school football program in time for it to indoctrinate Manu to the sport and all of its possibilities.
As Thunderbird Stadium emptied last Friday, Manu was clearly charged up to reminisce about his roots in sport, and how, on the eve of his first NFL season, they seemed more meaningful than ever.
“Honestly, I dedicate a lot of my success to him, too,” Manu said of Goulet. “He’s another old-school kind of guy. He reminds me of coach Nill. And when I came to UBC, how they were coaching here, I fit right in. Goulet was the same kind of coach. Different sport, but the same kind of coach. Guys like that… like Nill and Dorazio, I dedicate all of my success to them. They’re the reason I am here today.”
FINDING HIS FEET… AND HIS FIT
Trading a 2025 third-round pick to move into a position for the chance to draft Giovanni Manu in the fourth round (126th overall) last April represented Detroit’s deep commitment to the future.
And, after perhaps the most enviable draft haul record in the league over the first three seasons (2021-23) of the coach Campbell-GM Brad Holmes regime (Sewell, Alim McNeill, Ifeatu Melifonwu, Amon-Ra St. Brown, Derrick Barnes, Aidan Hutchinson, Jameson Williams, Kerby Jospeh, James Houston, Jahmyr Gibbs, Jack Campbell, Brian Branch, Sam La Porta), perhaps the first sign of management’s realization that they’d reached a stage where an incubation phase could be put into play if the right player came along.
And while some football grading outlets may have tended to not agree, Manu’s performance in the preseason was more than encouraging to those eyes based who properly considered the trajectory of his learning curve. And by the fact that he was amongst the team’s overall snap leaders during three preseason games in which he basically played eight of its 12 quarters, including the entire game in the exhibition finale against the Steelers.
“I felt like every game from the start of the preseason to the end, I grew a bit every game, every rep” Manu explained.
“And it all came together after the Kansas City game,” he continued of the second preseason contest. “I was told I was going to get a starting role (against Pittsburgh). I was a bit nervous, a bit scared but I went out there, put my best effort forth and you know, I was told the next day that I made the 53 (-man roster). That was just as great news as being drafted.”
Butterflies were understandably his most constant companion during much of training camp, especially when he had his number called to start the second half of the team’s first preseason game against the New York Giants.
“I remember jogging out there being so nervous and scared, but as soon as we broke the huddle and I blocked my guy pretty well, I felt like this is where I belong. Right away. As soon as I blocked him, I said ‘This person is just a human being like I am, and I told myself ‘I belong here.’”
Of course there is still a huge learning curve ahead as it pertains to the work required to get snaps during the regular season against first-string defences.
Manu has made that his challenge for the season.
“I am going to work towards it,” he explains. “It might not come the first couple of weeks, but I am doing everything in my strength to make sure that I see the field, and you know, even if I don’t, I am doing everything in my power to stay ready so that when my name is called, I am ready to go.”
Perfect team. Perfect time. Perfect fit.
A GIOVANNI MANU PRIMER
Key stories (click on the bold-faced live links) from the Varsity Letters Archives on the Detroit Lions rookie left tackle during his high school and university days:
Bidding farewell to basketball and starting a full-time football career at UBC
Gio and Theo get ready for the NFL draft
(Varsity Letters is appreciative of all those who helped make this story possible, especially to Len Catling, my analyst on Canada West TV’s UBC football broadcasts, for his post-game video work; and to Greg Maiola and Natalie Sturgeon of the Detroit Lions for their assistance in providing photos of Giovanni Manu taken during the preseason.)
If you’re reading this story or viewing these photos on any website other than one belonging to a university athletic department, it has been taken without appropriate permission. In these challenging times, true journalism will survive only through your dedicated support and loyalty. VarsityLetters.ca and all of its exclusive content has been created to serve B.C.’s high school and university sports community with hard work, integrity and respect. Feel free to drop us a line any time at howardtsumura@gmail.com.
