The QB The Making of Modern Quarterbacks

by Bruce Feldman

  “I can tell you this: They didn’t call me, and I was on the front line,” Scott said. “His dad made it clear he wanted Jameis and I to handle it. I can promise you, they didn’t call me, and I called them multiple times. And it’s hard for me to believe that one of the nation’s top programs is gonna concede, ‘Well, we’re not going to get this guy.’ ”

  Scott said he and the younger Winston were very organized in their recruiting process. “He’s a planner, and I’m a planner, too. We had people knocking the door down ’round the clock [to try to recruit Winston]. After his sophomore year, we sent out twenty DVDs—Ohio State, Miami. As soon as they got it, they offered.”

  The coach said Winston was very interested in Texas. “I’m telling you, they’d have been in the top two or three for sure,” Scott said of the Longhorns. “He knew they had great programs in baseball and football. The baseball is just as important as the football. He researched it. He’s not a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants guy. He wants to be a podiatrist, and when Miami recruited him, he’d look up and show me all this stuff about their medical program.

  “How’d he end up at Florida State? They had a great program in baseball and football, and because he knew that Jimbo Fisher and Mike Martin have a great relationship, and there wouldn’t be a problem playing both.

  “Bottom line, [Texas] was the only school that he wanted to check out, and they weren’t interested in him.”

  SEPTEMBER 8, 2013.

  The most hyped game of the 2013 season was a Week Three matchup: Alabama visiting Texas A&M. Touted as the Tide’s revenge for the Aggies upsetting them in Tuscaloosa, the real subplot was, what answers had Bama coach Nick Saban been able to conjure up after he and his vaunted defense got de-pantsed by Manziel, surrendering 20 points before the first quarter was over as the freshman QB opened the game completing 21 of his first 22 passes. Surely, with ten months of prep time, Saban should’ve been able to find some ways to corral Manziel, most college football analysts said.

  “I gotta set the tone tomorrow and say, ‘This is another game,’ ” Sumlin told his staff at their Sunday-afternoon meeting, six days before kickoff. “Everyone’s gonna try to make it into ‘The Game of the Year,’ ‘The Game of the Decade,’ and all of that. But the reality is, whether or not we win or we lose, we still have nine games left. Just like Georgia. Georgia loses to Clemson in the first week of the season, and they can still play for the national championship. We beat them [Alabama] last year, and they still got to the national title game. It is a big game, but it’s a big game because it is the next game. The more you win, the bigger the games get.

  “We’re gonna talk about us and not Alabama. It’s about ‘playing hard,’ because they’re gonna get it from everywhere else about how big this game is. Just know that whatever happens, we’re gonna be sitting right here next Sunday, trying to figure out how to beat SMU. This is not our Super Bowl. It is our first SEC game. We’re in conference play, and we’re trying to win the West. It is going to be a circus out there, starting Tuesday. We can’t make this a different week than the other weeks we’ve had, because the kids will pick up on that. It’s just like we’re playing Rice or Sam Houston.”

  Sumlin went around the table, asking each position coach to brief him on how that group’s players performed in the Week Two 65–28 win over Sam Houston State, before getting to Spavital. The twenty-eight-year-old, third-generation coach, who had been a graduate assistant under Sumlin back at Houston, was one of the rising stars in the coaching business. He helped groom Brandon Weeden (Oklahoma State) and Geno Smith (WVU) at his two more recent coaching stops and came to A&M to help handle Johnny Manziel, who was, in his own way, even more of a project. It helped that Spavital came in with the highest recommendation from Kliff Kingsbury, the Aggies’ former OC who left to become the new head coach at Texas Tech. The charismatic Kingsbury was probably one of the few people Manziel truly respected. The fact that Kingsbury was such a believer in Spavital, a colleague from their days at the University of Houston, was a big factor for the Aggies’ combustible star.

  “I thought Johnny played well,” Spavital said. “It was a good game for him to get back into the rhythm of things. He was going up against a scheme that makes you throw the ball more. I was very pleased with how he was spinning it. I thought he made some mature decisions. He wasn’t forcing things downfield as much. He was getting to his jet routes and 618s.”

  “He threw the ball out of bounds,” Sumlin said with a tone of satisfaction.

  “He’s gotta keep his emotions down on some of the unnecessary things, ’cause he slows down the tempo of the game when he’s bitching at the referee or talking shit to somebody,” Spavital continued.

  Manziel’s frenetic nature was different from that of any of the quarterbacks Spavital had ever been around. “I asked Johnny, ‘You see what they’re doing?’ He goes, ‘Nah, I’m jus’ playin’ ball, man,’ ” Spavital told a couple of A&M assistants later Sunday night. “It’s like he has to get hit to get focused.”

  Throughout the week, the flat-screen TV in Spavital’s office was tuned to ESPN, and an episode of SportsCenter didn’t seem to go more than ten minutes without some variation of Johnny Football’s name showing up in the left-hand rundown column of the screen. All the different talking points du jour about Manziel—how he’d handle the pressure from Alabama, whether last season’s game was more a case of his catching the Tide and Saban off guard, his late-night habits, his attitude—fueled expectations that Alabama–A&M might become the most-watched afternoon college football game in decades. Much of the national media contingent, which typically filtered into a college town on a Friday for a big game, was already in place seventy-two hours earlier, so they could be ready for Texas A&M’s regular Tuesday press availability. Many of the questions the Aggies players and coaches got were Manziel related.

  • “What about the Johnny Cam?” someone asked about the extra camera fixed on Manziel all afternoon, something CBS was touting as part of its enhanced game coverage.

  • “Basically, I just heard about it maybe an hour ago,” Sumlin said. “To me, it’s interesting. Everything we do, everything I try to do, everything we try to do here at A&M, is about team. It’s about building our team, building our program, and trying not to be an individual. I just don’t understand why there’s got to be one guy singled out and [have] a camera on [him] all the time. That’s not what we’re about, not what we’re trying to promote, and certainly, from my standpoint, with all of the criticism about individualism on the football team, I don’t think this helps enhance the team concept one bit.”

  • “How does a receiver prepare for Johnny Football’s freewheeling scrambles?” someone asked.

  • “Just from constant practice,” said wideout Malcome Kennedy. “We came up with a drill we do that accompanies Johnny when he’s running. We practice that every week, right before the games.… I don’t remember the first time we did it. It was definitely the spring when he first got here. It was weird, because we weren’t used to a quarterback who could move in one direction, make a throw across his body, and be accurate. We’ve incorporated that into our drills, and now we’re in sync with everything he does.”

  The most newsworthy quote at the press conference came when Sumlin was asked why star QB Johnny Manziel wasn’t meeting with the media. “Quite frankly, his family and his lawyers have advised him not to talk,” Sumlin explained, “and I’ll respect his wishes.”

  Three floors above, Manziel, wearing a gray T-shirt with WITNESS in big pink letters, black shorts with maroon socks, and orange and black Nikes, sat at Spavital’s desk watching Alabama video.

  “I like stuff over the middle this week,” he told Spavital.

  “When you tempo, they’ll play zone, because they’re unsure,” Spavital said.

  “I want this right here every time,” Manziel said as he paused the video where A&M’s 6′5″, 225-pound, go-to receiver Mike Evans was matched up one-on-one with Alabama c
ornerback John Fulton, attempting to jam the hulking wideout at the line.

  “Mike gets really angry with fuckers in his face,” receivers coach David Beaty said.

  The Tide won’t like Mike Evans when he’s angry.

  “If we can get this a hundred times, I’ll take it all hundred,” said Manziel.

  On the video showing the Tide’s defense, Manziel matter-of-factly pointed out the Alabama linebacker; he’d look off to the three-receiver side of the formation, “We do this, and it’ll be like stealing.”

  Spavital told Manziel he expected Alabama to play man-up coverage against the Aggies.

  “I hope so,” said Manziel. “It’s a bad deal. I will fuck them up. I’m excited now, fuck.”

  Sumlin popped in to see Spavital grinning. Manziel, seated at the desk, asked why the coach wasn’t letting him speak to the media that week.

  “I didn’t [decide that],” Sumlin said. “That’s what your people want. That was Brad’s decision. That’s what Brad wants.”

  Brad was Brad Beckworth, an attorney and longtime family friend the Manziels had hired in August to help shepherd Johnny through the NCAA mess and through his 2013 season. Beckworth had become Manziel’s consigliere.

  “I don’t like Brad,” Manziel sighed in a tone that sounded only half-serious. “He never lets me do anything.”

  “You just want yes-men,” laughed Sumlin.

  “Hey, there’s nothing wrong with yes-men. Didn’t you see the movie?” Manziel said, referencing the 2008 Jim Carrey comedy Yes Man.

  “Yeah, and I saw how that movie ended, too,” the forty-nine-year-old coach said, noting how Carrey’s character’s life went into a downward spiral after agreeing to say yes to everything.

  The dialogue between star player and coach illuminated some of the reasons Sumlin emerged as one of the hottest commodities in the coaching world, with annual interest from NFL teams. No coach in the college game related to players from a wide spectrum of backgrounds and personalities better than Sumlin did. He was also equally adept at schmoozing with a seventy-year-old billionaire oilman or a seventeen-year-old inner-city football talent. The coach subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, poked at his star player, knowing which buttons to push and when. He had also allowed Manziel the flexibility to be himself, on and off the field. And, while the byproduct of that might irk some people, Sumlin didn’t care. And deep down, Manziel appreciated all of that, he said.

  “People, even inside the program, really don’t know just how special my relationship is with Summy,” Manziel told me later.

  The biggest misconception about Manziel, Sumlin felt, was how the quarterback fit in with his teammates. Manziel, despite his constant SportsCenter presence and jet-set off-season, got along very well with his teammates. During Bama week, he would take his entire offensive line out for steak and lobster. He treated Conner McQueen, the redheaded, scout-team, walk-on QB, like his little brother, and he constantly joked with Mike Evans, his roommate on road trips, and the other receivers at practice. Manziel also communicated with fellow QB standouts Tajh Boyd from Clemson and Michigan’s Devin Gardner after every game, since the trio had become tight after their week as counselors that summer in Oregon at the Elite 11 camp. (Gardner would go on to say in a few days that Manziel sent him a text to keep his head up after Michigan’s bad showing against an awful Akron team the same day as the Alabama–Texas A&M game.)

  Sumlin had been around a lot of future NFL stars but said he’s never seen a QB with the spirit Johnny Manziel had. As if Manziel was convinced he was the baddest man on the field every time he pulled his helmet onto his head. Drew Brees, who was at Purdue when Sumlin was an assistant, had something. But Manziel’s spirit was different for a QB. The one other player Sumlin had been around who had that kind of spirit: Adrian Peterson. Sumlin vividly recalled Peterson’s first game for Oklahoma against archrival Texas. Peterson backed up all his bravado by breaking off a 44-yard run the first time he touched the ball. He went on to hammer the Longhorns for 225 yards, more than any freshman ever had in the ninety-nine years of the rivalry. The running joke around the A&M football office was, “Just get to Tuesday,” as in, that’s when the real work for the players would begin. Sundays, A&M players were off, and Monday was a light day, with an hour practice that was heavy on special teams and corrections from Saturday’s game.

  “I just asked him in our meeting, is he gonna watch film this week, or is he going to just go out there and wing it like last week?” Sumlin said to Spavital and David Beaty as Manziel rolled his eyes and smirked.

  MANZIEL: Ask Spav what I said to him.

  SPAVITAL: I said after the first series, “You see how they’re playin you? He goes, ‘Nah, I’m just playing ball.’

  MANZIEL: I don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. I’m just throwing to the open guy.

  SUMLIN: Monday, get to …

  MANZIEL: Get to Tuesday.

  SUMLIN: That’s what we have to do every week. Get to Tuesday. Saturdays are all right. Game time is the easiest part of the week.

  MANZIEL: (breaking into a wide grin) After the game …

  SUMLIN: Just get to Tuesday.… You think I’m kidding?

  BEATY: I know. I know.

  SUMLIN: That’s where we are. By the way, that’s a nice sock-shoe combination.

  MANZIEL: I came in with no shoes on. I just walked in barefoot.

  SUMLIN: I’m somehow not surprised.

  MANZIEL: It happens. At least I’m here.

  Manziel didn’t watch much film in his first season as the starting quarterback, he told me. “We mostly just watched it in the meeting room. Oklahoma [at the end of the season] was the game I probably watched the most.

  “I like to see people’s tendencies more than anything else.” Gauging how aggressive rival players were was big for him. He could use that. He could manipulate them. Now he could influence defenders to move them out of position with his eyes, something he couldn’t do or even think to do in 2012. “I was just trying to get through the games last year.”

  For all Manziel’s frenetic ways, Spavital said the sophomore quarterback had an uncanny sense of finding holes in defenses. It was as if Manziel was some sort of geometry savant who could calculate spatial equations on a football field in milliseconds. A Good Will Hunting in shoulder pads. As spectacular as he was in his freshman season in Tuscaloosa, Manziel had spotted plenty of things he could’ve—and had—improved on. His arm was stronger. His mechanics tighter. His awareness sharper.

  Each hour he spent in Spavital’s office during the week, Manziel’s name probably was mentioned a dozen times on the TV tuned to SportsCenter. The only time he seemed to notice was when there was a mention of Charles Barkley ripping him. Spavital checked Twitter and read that the NBA great, an Auburn product, said he was about to do the unthinkable and root for Alabama, because “Johnny is annoying me so much,” and he compared Manziel to Miley Cyrus.

  Manziel rose up out of his seat, playfully winced, and headed toward the door. “OK, I’m a bad person.

  “And, on that note …”

  • • •

  “THE HARDEST THING FOR me is having a genuine love for SportsCenter and ESPN for so long as a kid,” Manziel told me. “It was a huge part of my life. For such a long period of time over this off-season, it was hard to not watch it. But I just couldn’t watch it, because I was getting bashed every day. It was hard to block out, but I got used to it.

  “I’ve had to grow up a lot with the whole NCAA deal with all of the scrutiny. It made me realize it wasn’t the best idea, posting about all the places I was going to and all the stuff I was doing. I’ve learned a lot from my mistakes. I’m off Twitter for now, and I just want to focus on the season. I’m not tweeting, and I don’t have time for that. The biggest thing for me is, I want people to know that all the stuff that was talked about with the off-season didn’t get in the way of all the work that I had put in with Coach Whitfield ’cause I worked hard to become a better p
asser. We talked all the time. It was nice to go out and show how much I got better. I really did work hard. Were there times I could’ve been out here slaving this summer? Yes, but I didn’t feel like that was what I needed to do. I felt like I deserved to have a little bit of fun, and it was really blown out of proportion.”

  SEPTEMBER 14, 2013.

  For those hoping Manziel would be exposed against the Tide, they’d be disappointed. The Aggies got the ball, and within the game’s first ten minutes, A&M was up 14–0. Manziel completed four of five passes for 102 yards with 36 rushing yards on four carries. The Aggies’ plan to target Mike Evans looked prescient. By the midway mark of the first quarter, Evans had a 100-yard receiving day and had scorched John Fulton so badly, the Tide cornerback had lost his starting job. However, the A&M defense was a mess and got overwhelmed. The Aggies lost, 49–42. At the midfield post-game handshake between the two head coaches, Saban told Sumlin, “You took ten years off my life.”

  The sixty-one-year-old Saban probably felt as if Sumlin’s quarterback had taken twenty years. All that bluster about how Bama, with ten months of prep time, would contain Manziel, seemed laughable. The Aggies ripped Alabama for 31 first downs and 628 yards, the most the Crimson Tide had surrendered in more than one hundred years. Manziel showed up for the post-game press conference wearing a white Texas A&M baseball hat and a red T-shirt that said NO NEW FRIENDS. An Aggie sports information staffer handed him an A&M polo to change into. “I worked this off-season to be a better passer and be better in the pocket and get better in those areas instead of freelancing as much,” he said. “I think you can look at it today and our previous games and say that goal happened.”

  The 6′0″, 203-pound quarterback finished with 562 yards of offense, 464 through the air and 98 on the ground. The stat sheet showed that Manziel had a record-breaking game. The tape that Spavital would study the next morning underscored just how sharp the QB was against the Tide.