The QB The Making of Modern Quarterbacks

by Bruce Feldman

  “That’s not the Manning way,” said the former quarterback. “You’re a quarterback, and there’s a certain way you should act. And that’s powerful stuff. It’s not to say they’re all choirboys, because they’re not, and if you wanna go light up the town, that’s fine. Just be ready to go to work at 8:00 a.m., because you’ve got a station to work, and kids are counting on you.”

  Manziel wasn’t the first college QB to disappoint the Mannings with how he handled the late-night scene around the camp. He was just the first to make national news for it.

  9.

  OFF SCRIPT

  JULY 17, 2013.

  Three weeks before Texas A&M’s fall camp kicked off, Johnny Manziel had morphed into a de facto ESPN reality show. Rumors about exactly what happened at the Manning Passing Academy had become the hottest topic on the TV sports channels just as the Aggies star was about to walk into the biggest circus in college sports—SEC Media Days, a three-day event in Hoover, Alabama, at the Wynfrey Hotel—with over 1,200 reporters in tow. Making matters even messier, the story unfolded during the slowest news week of the season in sports and tied football’s resident “It” dude to the First Family of football, the Mannings. Beyond that, the story took on a life of its own in a farcical way, as if there was a congressional hearing on “Did or didn’t someone wake up another guy at a summer camp?”

  By this point of the off-season, the hype around Manziel had surpassed the hype around Tim Tebow at the peak of his media frenzy. Before Manziel was ushered around to a dozen different media platforms and interview sessions, he was brought to the main ESPN stage, where he was grilled by host Joe Tessitore for ten minutes. Manziel, after having spent much of the previous forty-eight hours with PR coaches, did his best to downplay the story. His answers were measured. His smile was ready. He repeatedly pointed out that he was still a twenty-year-old kid who could make mistakes and who still wanted to live his life. At one point, he told Tessitore that he sometimes felt like Justin Bieber—a comment that, no doubt, made NFL personnel men wince.

  “I’m not going to change who I am because of the spotlight,” he said, but he added that he would “adapt.”

  Later, he told reporters at the print-media session, “At the end of the day, I’m not going for a Miss America pageant. I’m playing football.”

  The SEC had seen more than its share of larger-than-life stories in recent years, but nothing quite like Manziel’s. His style and swagger had rival coaches reeling, not just trying to cope on the field but off it, as well.

  “This is a scary image for coaches,” one of the SEC head coaches said after asking what the scene was like around the Wynfrey for Manziel’s appearance. “Players look up to Johnny, and they see he can be wild and get away with it. And he’s thriving, man. So that’s negative reinforcement.”

  Weeks earlier, when he was told he was like a guy who is fifty pounds overweight and trying to diet, only he keeps breaking down and gorging on ice cream and sweets, reasoning to himself, “I don’t need abs. I already got the hot girl,” Manziel smiled and nodded. He was neither embarrassed nor proud of it. He seemed simply resigned to it. As if that was just how he’d been wired. Manziel knew he didn’t have it all figured out, he said. Many times he got angry at himself for how he responded to things, but it always seemed to work out. Somehow.

  Three hours after Manziel and the Aggies contingent arrived at the Wynfrey, he and head coach Kevin Sumlin and two A&M PR men were whisked off by private plane to Los Angeles for ESPN’s ESPY awards. At some point, while Manziel was probably flying over the Midwest, his pal rap star Drake tweeted to his ten-million-plus Twitter followers:

  “You handled yourself well today. Proud of you brother! @JManziel2”

  Manziel, who hadn’t tweeted in a month, retweeted the message.

  Manziel’s roommate from the Manning Camp, Alabama QB AJ McCarron, also seemed to have Manziel on his mind, tweeting a vague dig at the Heisman winner: “You’re right, I’m not at the ESPY’s! I don’t have to be at an award show to know what my team did. I’m back at school working to get another #16.” The “16” was a reference to the number of national titles the Crimson Tide was shooting for. McCarron promptly deleted the tweet, but the next day, when it was his turn at SEC Media Days, he repeatedly went out of his way to distance himself from Manziel.

  Asked about the tweet, McCarron said, “You know, everybody is a grammar teacher when it comes to Twitter,” he said, perhaps explaining his reasoning for deleting it. “I know when I step out of the door, especially in the state of Alabama, I’m always going to be watched. I feel like I’ve always handled myself in a first-class way. That’s the way my second dad, Coach Saban, and my coaches have taught me. That’s my thought process behind everything. I never want to bring any bad attention on anybody that’s close to me.”

  After the ESPYs that night, Sumlin walked into an after-party where Snoop Dogg was performing, and Dwyane Wade, Gabrielle Union, and LeBron James were hanging out in a private room along with Manziel, who was walking around holding his ESPY trophy. The coach noticed there were two huge portraits in the background. One showing LeBron James. The other, Johnny Manziel. Asked, how does all this not mess with the head of a twenty-year-old, Sumlin laughed. “It messed with my head.”

  The day after the ESPYs, Manziel arrived back in Texas late that afternoon. His teammates were already conducting a 7-on-7 session when he arrived wearing a polo, khakis, and untied Air Jordans. He walked onto the field with the other Aggies, moved the ball back to the 10-yard line (instead of the normal 30-yard-line start) and picked apart the A&M defense to lead the offense on a touchdown drive, punctuated by a perfect pass through tight coverage. As his teammates gathered around him, one senior defensive back yelled out to Manziel: “Listen. We don’t give a fuck what people are saying. We don’t care about what you’ve done this summer. We would’ve all been doing the same thing if we were in your position. All we care about is that we know if we ever need you to make a play, shit like that is going to happen, and we will always love you!

  “ ‘Family’ on three … One. Two. Three. Family!”

  “That was a big thing for me,” Manziel told me later. “That really showed me how the guys on the team felt about me, especially at such a time when I was so criticized.”

  The real Manziel drama, though, was only just beginning. Later in July, ESPN posted a story, “The trouble with Johnny,” on its website from the ESPN The Magazine college football preview issue. In the story, Manziel’s dad, Paul, was quoted saying that the NCAA and A&M—including coach Kevin Sumlin—were “starting to get under our skin,” because they were “so selfish.”

  The ESPN The Magazine story, which kicked off a couple more days of intense Johnny Football coverage on ESPN’s various TV channels, provided a snapshot of life with the Manziels back at their home. “His parents wanted to get jffmom and jffdad on their license plates—[referencing] Johnny ‘F—ing’ Football, as the name was originally coined on the A&M message boards; they were so caught up in the mania that it took their seventeen-year-old daughter, Meri, to point out the bad example that might set for kids who looked up to her brother,” wrote ESPN The Magazine’s Wright Thompson. Paul Manziel, in NFL personnel men’s eyes, also basically said his son was a ticking time bomb: “It could come unraveled. And when it does, it’s gonna be bad. Real bad. It’s one night away from the phone ringing, and he’s in jail. And you know what he’s gonna say? ‘It’s better than all the pressure I’ve been under. This is better than that.’ ”

  That colorful portrait, which also included a scene of the Manziel clan gathering for a family dinner and of Johnny Football snapping at his aunt, telling her to “Shut the hell up,” framed the Aggies quarterback, at the very least, as the anti-Tebow.

  In truth, Manziel’s on-the-edge persona probably wasn’t all that different from that of many other standout athletes or star quarterbacks, including one of his own idols, Brett Favre. What was different, though, was th
at Manziel came from money, had way more access to celebrity stuff, and was in a new kind of fishbowl, thanks to social media, smartphones, and round-the-clock sports channels covering—and regurgitating—“stories,” whether it was the twenty-year-old’s tweets or Instagram photos of his travels to big sporting events or late-night partying or his dad’s distressed comments, which came together like some version of The Real Quarterbacks of the SEC show.

  The folks at A&M already knew that at the core of Manziel’s belief that what made him so special on the field and in the clutch—his reckless, brash, “loose cannon” persona—was the same thing that was causing him, his parents, and the Aggies’ brass so many headaches off the field.

  Less than a week later, ESPN published a more troubling story for the Manziels and Texas A&M, regarding whether the Heisman Trophy winner was paid for signing hundreds of autographs on photos and sports memorabilia in January. Two sources told ESPN’s Outside the Lines that Manziel had agreed to sign memorabilia in exchange for a five-figure flat fee during his trip to Miami for the Discover BCS National Championship Game, but neither of the sources said they actually witnessed the exchange of money. Day after day, more details and more anonymous sources surfaced. An ESPN reporter claimed he had watched video showing Manziel signing white Texas A&M helmets and footballs laid out on a bed in a hotel room in New Haven, Connecticut, while the QB was attending the Walter Camp Football Foundation event. Manziel was allegedly paid $7,500, but the video didn’t show Manziel accepting any money, and the broker and his partner originally requested money to release the videos for use on ESPN, which ESPN said it declined to pay.

  Inside the A&M football offices on the third floor of the 125,000-square-foot “Bum” Bright Football Complex, Manziel prepared as if he wouldn’t miss a game. On a mid-August afternoon, he sat in the office of Jake Spavital, the Aggies’ new quarterbacks coach and co-offensive coordinator, watching tape of the 2012 LSU game, his worst performance of the season.

  “I didn’t know where I was looking last year,” Manziel said, studying his actions as Tiger defensive linemen maneuvered up field, opting to hem him in rather than aggressively rush towards the QB.

  Manziel got upset at himself every time he watched plays from this game, as if he was seeing it for the first time. “Oh, shit!… That was the stupidest fucking read ever!… Throw it! Throw it!” After getting sacked by an LSU defender he never saw, he banged the clicker on the desk.

  The 2013 season, he believed, would be different. He knew the offense, he had a better grasp on coverages, and, thanks to his work with Whitfield and his coaches at A&M, he was more comfortable setting his feet and stepping into his throws. But heading into the Aggies’ final scrimmage of fall camp, no one inside the building was sure he would get the chance to show how much he’d improved.

  “HE’S FIFTY FEET UNDERWATER with chains around his ankles, but you know you just can never count out this rascal,” Whitfield said of Manziel.

  Six days before the Aggies kicked off the 2013 season against Rice, Manziel met with NCAA investigators for five and a half hours. Throughout the meeting, which was focused on the quarterback’s financial records, Manziel told the NCAA that he did not accept money from memorabilia brokers for autographs, according to sources. Less than seventy-two hours later, the NCAA opted to suspend Manziel, but for only the first half of the Rice game. That was for an “inadvertent violation” of NCAA rules, A&M associate athletic director Jason Cook explained, and that the “NCAA found no evidence [that] Manziel received monetary reward in exchange for autographs.”

  Manziel’s reaction to the news: “Time to play some fucking football.”

  Manziel entered the Rice game with the Aggies, a 27-point favorite, up just 28–21. The staff had called a play that would’ve turned into an easy long touchdown pass, but Manziel was so wound up, he bolted out of the pocket as soon as he felt a bit of pressure from his left, squirted through a crease, and out-sprinted three Owl defenders to the sideline for an 11-yard gain. It didn’t take long for Manziel to get rolling or to give his critics more fodder—whether it was his old hand gestures with his teammates (that everyone outside the A&M team assumed was a brazen reference to making money) or trash-talking to the Rice players. After he scored his third touchdown, Manziel was flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct on the way back to the A&M sidelines. Before he made it there, he was greeted by Coach Kevin Sumlin, who let him know he wasn’t happy with his QB’s antics. Manziel didn’t appear to say anything and kept walking, which only seemed to give his critics, who took that as an indication that he was ignoring his coach, more ammo. Sumlin didn’t allow Manziel back into action for rest of the game.

  Whitfield, Manziel’s personal QB coach, also had seen his own platform raised with the start of the 2013 season. ESPN’s College GameDay hired him to be an on-air analyst, which increased his visibility among potential clients about a hundredfold. His reaction to his star protégé’s behavior: “He has rabbit ears. He’s kicking their ass. The moment he hears, ‘Man, you suck,’ he gets crooked. It’s the same as Twitter. I tell him, ‘You’re the heavyweight champ. You gotta be bigger than that.’

  “I want to point out how ridiculous it is. It just looks so small-time. I have to figure out how I can say it. In a weird way, it’s as if the suspension emboldened him. After all that he went through, and it was almost gone, and then he just got [suspended] a half.”

  ESPN’s Mark May, who had ripped Manziel on Twitter several times before, said the QB’s actions were indicative of “a very selfish player who doesn’t care about his teammates.” May’s colleague, Lou Holtz, said, if he were Manziel’s coach, he “would have grabbed him by the throat.” Sumlin later said that a lot of folks commenting on Manziel’s reaction to him had no clue what they were talking about.

  “When he came off the field, basically I made two statements to him, neither one of which should he have responded to,” Sumlin said. “They weren’t questions. They were direct statements that I can’t repeat right now. So what’s amazing to me is the perception that he ignored me. The worst thing that could have happened was for him to reply, based on what I told him.”

  Johnny Football, thanks to the hand-wringing of some polarizing TV talking heads, had become an antihero. He’d also become the first college athlete to make the cover of TIME in almost forty-seven years. Manziel’s picture showed him striking the famed Heisman pose next to the cover line: It’s Time to Start Paying College Athletes. But by the end of Week One, there was another quarterback who had the sports world buzzing.

  SEPTEMBER 2, 2013.

  For the opening week of the season, college football takes over the Monday-night stage, instead of the NFL on Labor Day night. That meant all eyes were on number-eleven-ranked Florida State’s game at Pittsburgh. They tuned in and saw the much-hyped debut of Seminole redshirt freshman “Famous” Jameis Winston, the most impressive QB prospect to come through the Elite 11 since Trent Dilfer took over. Dilfer said Winston could be “a rock star” in the NFL and the first pick of the draft someday. The Noles’ former offensive coordinator James Coley, who had left FSU to coach at Miami, told me the 6′4″, 230-pound Winston was the “best natural leader I’ve ever seen.” Others inside the FSU program echoed that sentiment.

  As hard as it would be to live up to all that buildup in his first college football game, in prime time on national television, on the road, against a team that returned nine starters from what had been the number seventeen defense in the country in 2012, Winston managed to exceed the hype. Winston was nearly flawless, opening the game completing his first 11 passes en route to a dazzling 25 of 27 passes with 5 touchdowns in a 41–13 romp. He set an FSU record for completion percentage in a game (92.6 percent).

  At some point, while Winston was carving up the Pitt defense and sending Twitter into a frenzy, the story of the FSU QB’s recruitment started to circulate. Well, specifically, that the former five-star recruit actually wanted to go to Texas, but the Longhorns n
ever were interested in him. “I’m an OU fan, but I always wanted to go to Texas. If I’d gotten offered from Texas, I’d be going to Texas right now,” Winston was quoted as saying. The quote was months old, but the late-game tweet fed into a meme about the Longhorns’ decline.

  Given the recent history of star QBs who either grew up dreaming of being Longhorn quarterbacks or were Texas natives bypassed by Mack Brown’s staff—Andrew Luck, Robert Griffin III, Johnny Manziel—the story gained a lot of traction. And probably nauseated a lot of Longhorn fans. The next morning, a UT staffer said the school did reach out to Winston’s coach but was told the QB wasn’t seriously interested in Texas.

  Matt Scott, Winston’s head coach in high school, said that wasn’t the case at all. Scott said he called the UT football staff “four or five” times and one time even spoke to a woman at UT after he tried the main line to the Longhorns football office.

  “I said, ‘I know you get this call every single day. But lemme tell you, I’ve got a guy some think is the number one quarterback in the nation. Let me help you. You’re gonna want to get this message to the right folks. He’s interested in your school,’ ” Scott recalled telling her.

  “She said, ‘OK, I’ve got it.’ ”

  But neither Winston nor Scott ever heard from Texas. Scott said it was possible that Winston’s recruitment got muddled in the transition of Texas going from Greg Davis as UT’s outgoing offensive coordinator to Bryan Harsin, who was hired from Boise State in January 2011.

  Told that someone at UT said the staff did reach out to Winston’s coach but didn’t believe the dual-threat quarterback was “seriously interested” in Texas, Scott said he’d never heard from them.