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Close your eyes and imagine for a moment: a young man who as a high school quarterback passed for 3,609 yards for 45 touchdowns and just 5 interceptions with a 65.7% completion percentage. This same young man also ran for an additional 1,674 yards for another 30 touchdowns.
Now let us imagine a redshirt freshman at the 15th-ranked Texas A&M Aggies who led his team into Tuscaloosa, Alabama and defeated the number 1 team in the country, the Alabama Crimson Tide.
At the end of a banner first year in college, this young man became the first freshman to ever win the Heisman Trophy.
His second year in college was just as successful statistically, even though Texas A&M fell to a 9-4 record. However, he ended his second season with an epic 52-48 come-from-behind victory against Duke in the Chic-fil-a Bowl.
After compiling 7,820 yards of passing with 63 touchdowns as well as 2,169 rushing yards and 30 rushing touchdowns in two seasons at Texas A&M, this young man chose to forgo his junior and senior years of college and go into the National Football League.
In the 2014 NFL draft, this young man slipped all the way to the 22nd pick in the draft, when the Philadelphia Eagles traded the pick to the Cleveland Browns – a pick used to select one Johnathan Paul “Johnny” Manziel.
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There are many who view the things Manziel does as a way of reaching out for help. Similar to fellow Browns player Josh Gordon, his NFL career thus far has been plagued by bad choices off the field. When people look at him with such disdain there are those of us who want to try and understand why Manziel gets so much hate.
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First, let us look at Manziel the person. He comes from a wealthy family who made their riches off oil, and seeing him drive around campus in a black Mercedes Benz was not unusual. Perhaps a telling sign, Manziel’s family has had a somewhat checkered past, so is it no wonder on the eve of the last game of the 2015 season, he was seen in multiple places up and down the Las Vegas Strip (more on this in a bit).
Thrust into the spotlight with wealth and fame, Manziel all of a sudden went from being a well-off kid with oil money to rubbing shoulders with the likes of Drake, Jay-Z, and LeBron James with courtside seats at college and NBA basketball games. Just because Johnny Manziel comes from a family that are not in need does not mean he does not fall into the trappings of celebrity life, and his struggles with the partying lifestyle have been well-documented, most of which has centered around alcohol.
What about Johnny Manziel, the football player? Selected as the second quarterback drafted in the 2014 draft, he did not possess what the pundits use as prototypical numbers, on top of the fact that the offensive system at Texas A&M was not one favored by NFL scouts and teams, so many people were already against him.
Numbers never lie, however, and with over 9,900 total yards and 93 total touchdowns in just two full seasons at College Station, there was hope that he would be able to compete in the NFL.
He may be short (6 feet even), but there are successful quarterbacks in the NFL who are shorter, like Russell Wilson and Drew Brees, both Super Bowl winners. So there are those who do not believe in the physical stats of a player but they believe in what they can see, and how players transform their teammates. This is a quality that Johnny Manziel has been able to show in college.
So far, however, he has been unable to show that type of quality in the NFL.
Let’s also look at Manziel as a Brown. When a franchise uses a first-round pick on a quarterback, you tie the quarterback and that franchise together almost like a marriage. In many cases, the franchise looks at that pick as their quarterback of the future and do whatever is necessary to make him productive and successful.
For example, look at the Jacksonville Jaguars who in the 2014 draft selected Blake Bortles from Central Florida. After selecting him, they have since surrounded him with Allen Robinson, Allen Hurns, Marquise Lee, T.J. Yeldon and Julius Thomas.
Likewise, in Teddy Bridgewater’s case, the quarterback was selected as the last pick of the first round of the 2014 draft, and got to enjoy a full season in 2015 with Adrian Peterson, along with Stefon Diggs and Kyle Rudolph.
Both examples show quarterbacks who have made tremendous strides, with Bortles and the Jaguars contending for a playoff spot this season and Bridgewater leading the Minnesota Vikings to a division title. It is telling that Minnesota and Jacksonville were able to surround their young quarterbacks with playmakers while Cleveland did not.
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Cleveland’s ground game is inconsistent, and after tight end Gary Barnidge, they had no one else of note in the passing game. The Browns also mismanaged the quarterback position, and it seemed like every week former head coach Mike Pettine found every excuse not to start Manziel, even as Josh McCown was struggling.
Finally there have been questions about what transpired before the season finale against Pittsburgh – a game that Manziel had been ruled out of after he failed to be cleared under the NFL concussion protocol. With his coaches and teammates over 2,000 miles away preparing for a game, he was seen the night before, gambling in Las Vegas.
Did then-general manager Ray Farmer know that Manziel was going to Vegas? Did Pettine know? All we know for certain is that the ax fell immediately in Cleveland, as both Farmer and Pettine were terminated after losing to the Steelers.
There are those who like Manziel, and there is a lot of thought that he is young and immature. Then there are those who just do not like him for a myriad of reasons. That being said, the fact remains that Manziel was not set up for success in Cleveland.
Draft picks who did not pan out, a coaching staff that had no idea what to do with him, and a management staff that was clueless on how to build a franchise have all come together to create an unstable situation in general.
Do not feel bad for Johnny Manziel and all of the intense scrutiny that he seems to always be under, feel bad instead for the Cleveland Browns fanbase that has already lived through one team leave and go on to a Super Bowl championships, while since 1999 the Browns have only had one wild-card playoff berth and many years of futility and high draft picks.
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For Manziel, hope still is out there, though it will require a change of scenery. A fresh start in Dallas, perhaps? Maybe Jerry Jones, who has never made it a secret that he wanted to draft Manziel, might be the one person on a personal level who could relate to him. Of course, this is all fanciful speculation, but there is a chance that in Dallas, NFL fans could see the return of “Johnny Football”.