The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (31 page)

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 passer. 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.

“Johnny did a great job of holding the safeties in the middle of the field with his eyes, and that’s why Mike kept getting so open on the sidelines,” Spavital said. “We hit three or four fades on man-free [coverage].”

On a touchdown pass to Malcome Kennedy, Manziel duped “Ha Ha” Clinton-Dix out of the play to free up the Aggie receiver. Maybe more impressive was how Manziel responded when the Tide threw defensive looks at him that he hadn’t seen from them before, Spavital said. Twice the Tide overloaded one side of the line of scrimmage, and twice Manziel beat it by firing quick passes to the perimeter for 16-yard and 6-yard gains. When offensive coordinator Clarence McKinney saw the crazy third-and-8 play where Manziel scrambled but got grabbed by 290-pound Jeoffrey Pagan, only to break away and evade more rushers before flinging the ball, where his body ended up facing the opposite end zone for a 12-yard completion to spindly freshman Edward Pope, the coach just shook his head. “It’s like he’s Houdini.”

MANZIEL
’
S MENTOR
,
GEORGE WHITFIELD
’
S
, stock had risen almost as high as the Aggies’ star’s had in the previous year. The ESPN
College
GameDay
role got him in front of hundreds of thousands of football fans every Saturday morning. In late October, he even got a call from producers of Comedy Central’s
The Colbert Report
, looking to book him for a spot in which he would teach host Stephen Colbert how to throw a football. Whitfield was a huge fan of Colbert and Jon Stewart, he said, adding that he hoped he could fit it into his schedule. Things had gotten hectic for him, crisscrossing the country on the traveling road show that was
College GameDay
, while back in San Diego, he had his own daily project—training Everett Golson, the exiled Notre Dame QB who started the 2013 BCS National Title Game but was dismissed from the school for violating the honor code by cheating on an exam and called Whitfield for help.

It was Halloween. Whitfield, who in less than thirty-six hours would be in Tallahassee with the
GameDay
gang for the Miami–Florida State game, sat on a scaled-down turf soccer field across from the University of California at San Diego Medical Center. While waiting for Golson to arrive, Whitfield answered a call from his TV producer asking if they could break down why Miami’s QB Stephen Morris was struggling.

“Can you put a circle on the ground below him?” Whitfield asked the producer, hoping for some kind of graphical element to represent how the strong-armed quarterback’s delivery had been hampered by an ankle injury. “I know this sounds weird, but can you make it a blinking light on his leg? Imagine he’s standing on a six-foot circular mat. Does that make any sense? I know this sounds nerdy, but on the good ones can we put a jet stream on it and make it orange or red, and on the bad ones, make it blue—like he doesn’t have anything on it?”

Whitfield knew he was in an awkward spot on TV, often asked to comment on a client he was mentoring. “I wanna be as true-blue as a coach as possible, but out here I don’t wanna look like an apologist,” he said. “I got asked three or four times before I signed anything, ‘Could you be objective with your guys? Can you be critical if need be?’

“I said, ‘Well, I’m not gonna be Skip Bayless, but a bad throw is a bad throw. That is a tangible thing.’ I said it’d be like coaching
them with an audience. I wouldn’t say anything to the screen that I wouldn’t say with Johnny [Manziel] or Tajh [Boyd] standing right next to me. I’m not on there to be [Paul] Finebaum. I’m on there for tactical reasons. They never put me on a panel. I have five minutes to discuss and walk them through whatever I can.”

Whitfield was contracted to do thirty-five TV appearances a year with ESPN, he said. His biggest challenge came whenever the subject was Virginia Tech QB Logan Thomas, who had trained with Whitfield for three years. The 6′6″, 250-pound Thomas, who after his sophomore season was touted by NFL Draft analysts as a potential first overall pick, had been an easy target for critics, as his stats had declined while he struggled with his accuracy and decision making.

Whitfield attended Thomas’s Thursday-night game at Georgia Tech. His bosses at ESPN had him comment on his protégé from the sideline. Whitfield noted that Thomas, unlike most big-time college quarterbacks, didn’t play the position much before college.

“He’d only played six high school games at quarterback,” Whitfield said. “That’s not a lot of flight hours. It doesn’t really go much to skill and ability. He wanted to be a tight end in college. The coaches at Tech saw something in him. He’s raw, but he’s playing.

“Here’s what I like most about Logan Thomas: I always make sure I send players a text after a loss, because they’re gonna hear from everybody else after a win. I was shocked when they lost against Duke. I saw it on the scroll. I’m waiting for his stats to come around. And then I saw four interceptions. Then I watched the highlights and saw three balls that should’ve been intercepted. I asked him, ‘How you doing, and what happened out there?’

“He just texted back, ‘I sucked.’ And that was it. You gotta run and quickly try to wean him back up. ‘Listen, some pro quarterbacks are gonna have that type of day tomorrow. And they had that day already. Imagine being in Eli Manning’s shoes [throwing 15 interceptions in the Giants first six games].’ You always want to bring them up to the 30,000-foot view, because they almost always think it’s just them. They can’t see much else, because it’s their fan base—the kids on their campus and their newspapers—and that’s all they’re talking about, so it’s just like having mirrors around them. They don’t have
anything else. You try to pull them back up. It is the toughest position in sports.”

Everett Golson, too, required some uplifting. Whitfield picked Golson up at the San Diego airport on September 1. “He looks around and says, ‘This is awesome.’ Then he gets quiet for a bit and says, ‘You’re gonna have me throw with the strings, aren’t you?’ ”Golson had developed the unusual habit of throwing a football with his hand
not
on the laces. Whitfield said he suspected that other coaches, including the staff at Notre Dame, had tried to get Golson to change but that no one had made a compelling enough case.

Golson arrived wearing a black DRGN SLYR T-shirt (a slogan of Whitfield’s), gray shorts, and navy ND socks with gold Nike cleats. He said in the past he used to shuffle the ball
not
to get the laces. But now he’s using the laces.

“There’s still an adjustment period with touch [passes], because you do have more grip with the laces, but it is for the better, and, mechanically, George has really helped with my footwork a lot,” Golson said. “For a vast period of my career I depended on my arm—all arm. George taught me to step through and have a base, and that’s where I’ve seen the most improvement.”

Whitfield’s goal was to refine a QB lacking in consistency.

“You’re throwing like he’s wide-ass open,” he prodded Golson as he threw deep outs to a former small-school receiver. “Train like he’s not.”

“You know the butcher and the surgeon deal, right?” Whitfield said later. “They both have tools. They both cut. They both are dealing with blood. They’re both professionals. A butcher just gets in and out, and he’s done, whereas the surgeon starts up, and he’s gotta have a plan, and a Plan B, a Plan C, and a fail-safe, and be particular. That’s what Everett’s getting now.”

The two-month training camp with Whitfield in San Diego was not cheap. Whitfield usually helped quarterbacks find accommodations. For lodging, it was around $60 a day for the two months. For Whitfield’s training, it was about $500 a week. So, combined, that was $7,500–$8,000. Golson’s cousin Ivan helped pay the tab, Whitfield said.

“At this point, I don’t know if it’s politically correct to say it like this, but it’s a business decision for me,” Golson said. “I’m hoping that it’ll pay off in the future.”

HEADING INTO THANKSGIVING
,
THE
Heisman race was in more disarray than it had been in years at such a late stage. LSU, again, got the best of Johnny Manziel, holding him to a season-low 299 yards in a 34–10 romp.

“You have to give a lot of credit to them,” Manziel said of LSU, which prepared its D for him by using its best athlete, star wide receiver Odell Beckham, as the scout-team QB mimicking the A&M star. “They came out and mixed a lot of things up. They kept us guessing, and it really took us a while to figure it out.