Love him or not, there’s no question about one thing: Johnny Manziel, AKA “Johnny Football,” is a name etched in football lore. It’s just that some of it is for the wrong reasons.
Johnny Manziel was born to play sports, always having a ball in his hands while growing up. A star high school quarterback, college teams came looking, but one (the one he hoped would offer a tender) did not. Too small to play, the Longhorns concluded, and Manziel had to look elsewhere. And he didn’t have to look far. It’s only about 100 miles from Austin to College Station, and Texas A&M is where Johnny played his college ball.
He started right off the bat there, throwing for nearly four thousand yards his freshman year, named the SEC freshman Player of the Year. He would end his two-year Aggie career by passing for almost eight thousand yards, completing nearly 70% of his passes, and winning the coveted Heisman Trophy.
But Johnny’s fame wasn’t just connected to what he did on the field. It was also very much about how he handled himself–on-the-field and -off. He had style, brash and bold. It was almost as though football was experiencing the second coming of “Broadway Joe” Nameth.
Manziel won a lot in college (10-2 as a freshman, including a big win against ‘Bama), but he also liked to have a good time and soon became known as “a party guy.” There have been a lot of players like that over the years (Paul Hornung comes to mind), but Hornung and others made it in the NFL because they were able to focus on the business at hand. Manziel either could not or choose not.
The bright lights got to Manziel soon after he was drafted by the Cleveland Browns. It didn’t take long for videotapes to surface showing Johnny clubbing, drinking, and doing drugs. It was a shame, too.
John Gruden, among others, predicted that Manziel was going to be an NFL star. But Manziel’s off-the-field escapades–not his on-field performance–became his signature.
After bouncing around the NFL, Canadian Football League, and other pro football ventures, Johnny left the game behind. This one-time star and a much-heralded player could not manage persona demons sufficiently to sustain a pro career.
“Johnny Football,” they once called him. He was the rage, an icon, and even a role model. The name fit him like a glove. But what “could have been” never came to be.
