Dan Campbell the coach same as Dan Campbell the player

Amani Toomer has a ton of great NFL memories. Wins and catches and celebrations from 13 seasons with the Giants.

Meetings are generally not among them. And training camp meetings? More than a decade removed from those tedious gatherings, his eyes still glaze over with boredom.

But there is one moment that stands out from all of those endless gabfests and video sessions. It was the start of the 2000 season. The team had just reported to camp at the University at Albany. The offense was in its own room and coordinator Sean Payton ceded the floor to a player who had something to say.

It was Dan Campbell, the second-year tight end.

“He gets up and he gives this speech about how we should be better and all this stuff,” Toomer said. “You’re not thinking about the big picture, you’re just thinking about how to survive training camp and guys are trying to make the team and not thinking about winning. But he really put it into perspective, how everyone should focus on winning and focus on getting better every day.

“It really changed the whole tenor of training camp. I remember him speaking and thinking: ‘Wow, this guy is fully, fully committed.’ ”

He still is.

Campbell no longer is that third-round pick of the Giants from 1999, a blocking tight end from Texas A&M they thought (and rightly so) would help their offense. He now is the head coach of the Lions and is returning to face the team with which he got his first glimpses of the NFL.

Those who knew him back then will tell you he hasn’t changed a bit. Same pro wrestling stare. Same voice of a rottweiler in need of a Ricola. Same nuclear intensity.

“I don’t know if I remember that specific speech,” Jason Garrett, the backup quarterback on that 2000 team and a future head coach for the Cowboys, said of Toomer’s recollection, “but I remember that happening a few different times. He was very passionate and was someone who wasn’t afraid to step up and challenge his teammates and lead. Hold everybody accountable to a standard and remind them of what was required to go have the success we all wanted to have.”

There were a lot of future head coaches among the Giants in those days — Payton, Garrett, defensive coordinator John Fox — but Campbell?

“I didn’t see that one coming, no,” said Kerry Collins, the starting quarterback then.

Collins has been won over.

“You can see all those things that he was about as a player come through as a head coach,” Collins said. “What’s struck me is the way he can communicate that now to players and the respect that he commands from his players because they know what kind of player he was and they know what he embodies. You can see it in the way the players respect him and respond to him. His communication ability, I think, has been something that I probably didn’t see when he was a younger guy, but it’s really come through and it’s been fun for me to watch him become the person and the coach he is.”

Collins played with Campbell. Would he have enjoyed playing for Campbell?

“Absolutely,” he said. “I’m watching ‘Hard Knocks’ [this past summer] and I’m ready to call my agent and get me on the team . . . I’d love to play for Dan Campbell, man. I would play for him any day of the week.”

These days, Campbell is more well-known for his antics than his successes with the Lions. In a year and a half there, he has won only six games, three last season and three this season. While things are going in a good direction for his club lately — the Lions have won their last two games — his renown comes more from his soundbites.

Whether it was his introductory news conference in Detroit in which he said his team would “kick you in the teeth, and when you punch us back, we’re gonna smile at you, and when you knock us down, we’re going to get up, and on the way, we’re going to bite a kneecap off” or huffing and puffing through the conditioning up-downs he did with the team in training camp this summer (which was featured on “Hard Knocks”), Campbell is a colorful personality in a landscape of coaches who typically try to keep things as bland as possible.

He gives the Lions their roar.

“That’s the same guy,” Toomer said. “Exactly the same guy. I’m like, Yep. That’s Dan.”

Those aren’t just hamming-it-up-for-the-camera moments, either. In 2011, current Giants coach Brian Daboll was the offensive coordinator for the Dolphins. He interviewed Campbell for the team’s tight end coaching job.

“He’s slamming chairs on the ground and hitting walls and going through all these drills,” Daboll said. “It was an entertaining interview. [He] knew a lot. Obviously, he was very passionate, tough as nails, you could tell. He was out of breath in half that interview with the stuff he was doing. Great guy.”

Daboll and the Dolphins hired him and gave him his first full-time coaching gig.

“And he was there the next day at 5:30 power cleaning and squatting,” Daboll said. “I loved working with him.”

Howard Cross, who was a veteran tight end for the Giants when they drafted Campbell, said he was shocked when he ran into Campbell on the sideline during a Giants-Dolphins game.

“I was like, ‘Wow, you’re coaching?’  ” Cross said of that reunion. “He was like, ‘Yeah, man, this is kind of cool.’  ”

Like others, Cross sees the parallels between Campbell’s playing days and coaching style.

“It’s like the old-school ways of coaching, almost what they would call the blood-and-guts kind of way,” Cross said. “That’s the old-school ways of how guys talked. It’s a militaristic way of approaching the opponent and how tough you want your men to be. It’s fun. Guys need to be led. They need somebody to stand up and say something for them.”

“That’s an authentic part of his personality,” Garrett said. “He loves football. He’s an intense guy. He has a passion for coaching and for people and for the game and all of that.”

It was enough to help spur the 2000 Giants toward the Super Bowl, at least how Toomer remembers it.

“The first couple years I was in the league, everybody was just trying to get by,” he said. “It was, I’ll do my job, you do your job, and hopefully we’ll come together and we’ll do something special. But when he spoke in that meeting, it brought the team together in a weird way.”

We’ll see what it does for the Lions, who have never been to a Super Bowl, haven’t been to the playoffs since the 2016 season and haven’t won a playoff game since the 1991 season.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.