Via – NJ.com

Ben McAdoo keeps finding weird and frankly hilarious ways to motivate his team.

The Giants head coach entered his second year with the team as their head coach, coming off an 11-5 record that earned the team’s first playoff birth since their Super Bowl victory in 2011.

McAdoo told reporters on Thursday that he didn’t just regale his team with Rudyard Kipling’s famed poem “If” but he also shared a special story about a sex-crazed lion from the 1970s:

Oh you’ve never heard the story of the old lion that was saved from a circus in Mexico in 1972, and then rallied to become a mating machine at a zoo in Los Angeles?

Here are the details, via Time Magazine:

At the age of 19 — the human equivalent of 75 — and no longer of use to the Mexican circus that owned [Frasier], he faced a preemptive death. But fate twisted kindly for the aging lion. In 1972, he ended up south of Los Angeles at Lion Country Safari, along with a group of other wild cats that had been sent north for a new life. Frasier was quickly placed on a special diet replete with vitamins, and he began to put on some weight. Much to his handlers’ surprise, he then became a hit with the lionesses. Within one day of meeting him, the same lionesses that refused to mate with several young guns “were sprawled protectively around Frasier,” bringing him choice meats at mealtime and waiting to eat until he was finished. Seven weeks later, they were all pregnant. Within 16 months, he had fathered 33 cubs.

McAdoo’s point of the story was to remind the older players that they still have plenty of time left, even if they are slowing down a bit.

Great tactic from the second year head coach who’s hoping his team can bring a fifth Lombardi Trophy to New York.