The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks (8 page)

“She had gone to Texas and so many places and tried to get people to look at him, and they wouldn’t,” Rossley recalled of a spring visit. “The only thing I couldn’t give them at that point was that he had to be face-to-face with Coach Sherman. Sherman had to offer him that scholarship. It took a while till we finally offered him, and in the meantime he committed to Oregon. But I kept recruiting him and got him to come over to a few games. The third home game he came to that we played in September, he had an A&M shirt on. I knew we had him.”

MANZIEL ARRIVED IN COLLEGE
Station and was fourth-team on the depth chart, behind starter Ryan Tannehill, a future first-rounder. Within the first month of the season, Manziel’s uncanny knack for evading tacklers and wriggling out of trouble at practice convinced Rossley that his fourth-stringer was actually A&M’s best Plan B.

“I told Johnny, ‘If something serious happens to Ryan, we’re gonna break that redshirt, and you’re gonna have to play and finish the year for us,’ ” Rossley said. “And he was agreeable to that. He impressed me every day in practice. He was a great practice player, a great competitor, and was accurate and had a strong arm. The players
all loved him and loved to be around him. Same as Favre, who was the life of the locker room.”

Fresno State coach Tim DeRuyter, the former A&M defensive coordinator, said he got an idea of just how special Manziel was at mid-season that year. Manziel was the Aggies’ scout-team quarterback facing DeRuyter’s first-string defense as A&M prepped for Baylor and its speedy dual-threat QB Robert Griffin III. DeRuyter, after watching Manziel run for about 800 yards against his defense during the week, ripped into his players. He was convinced they had to be jakin’ it. But on game day, the Aggies beat Baylor by 4 touchdowns and held RGIII to 15 rushing yards on 12 carries.

“After the game,” DeRuyter said, “a couple of defensive guys came up to me and said, ‘I’m tellin’ ya, Coach, Manziel’s a lot harder to tackle than RGIII was.’ ”

That win over number twenty Baylor was one of the last Sherman and the Aggies would have in 2011. A&M lost four of its final five regular-season games, including against archrival Texas at home on a last-second field goal. Sherman, Rossley, and the A&M staff were fired. Kevin Sumlin was hired from the University of Houston, bringing his hurry-up spread offense run by his thirty-three-year-old offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury, himself a onetime backup to Tom Brady with the Patriots.

Kingsbury grew up in New Braunfels, Texas, about an hour from Manziel’s hometown. Kingsbury had heard about the local legend Johnny Football. He loved the kid’s film. Kingsbury got a peek at his freakish athleticism playing basketball with some teammates, where the six-footer with the abnormally big hands was throwing down 360° dunks. The young coach told his friends that Manziel reminded him of a taller, more athletic version of Doug Flutie.

Manziel, though, struggled adapting to the new offense. Manziel toyed with the idea of quitting football and playing for the Aggies’ baseball team.

George Whitfield had never heard of Johnny Manziel in the spring of 2011 when the Texan’s mother called up the Southern California–based quarterback coach. As connected as Whitfield had become in
the football world, he’d never been one to keep tabs on the recruiting sites.

“Honestly, if there’s some high school kid breaking records an hour north of here, I probably wouldn’t know it,” Whitfield admitted.

Manziel’s mother had heard about the work the self-described “Quarterback Builder” had done with Ben Roethlisberger and Cam Newton. Most observers saw Manziel, ranked as the thirty-ninth-best QB prospect in the country in his recruiting class by ESPN, as a long shot to win the A&M starting job.

Whitfield surfed around the Internet and found some high school footage of Manziel. The Aggie came out a week after A&M completed spring football. The week of training cost the Manziels $1,500, plus airfare and hotel.

In San Diego, Whitfield was already set to work with a high-profile quarterback prospect, Virginia Tech’s Logan Thomas, a 6′6″, 250-pound sophomore some NFL draft analysts had already touted as a future number one overall pick. Whitfield structured his week so that Manziel and Thomas would work out separately. Manziel, though, knew of Thomas’s rep from having seen the Hokies play Michigan in the Sugar Bowl and convinced Whitfield to let him train side by side with the QB who was a half foot taller. Whitfield compared the dynamic to seeing a Kodiak bear being sized up by a leopard. Whitfield kept harping at Manziel about many of the same things he preached to Cam Newton about working in his cockpit rather than being too quick to rip the cord and escape. Whitfield shortened Manziel’s throwing motion, relying on a shorter stride and keeping the ball closer to his ear.

Manziel left California more confident in his passing skills, but that hardly made him the front-runner to emerge as the Aggies’ new starter. A July arrest for drunken street fighting and the fake ID he produced, which triggered a shirtless mug shot being tweeted all over the Internet, nearly cost Manziel his career at A&M. Kingsbury found out while lying on a beach in Cabo with a girlfriend, when he noticed a half dozen missed calls from his mercurial young QB. Sumlin lobbied for him with school brass and got him another chance.
Despite Manziel’s struggles in the spring, Sumlin and Kingsbury still were convinced he was their best option as they made their debut in the roughest league in college football—the SEC West.

Manziel’s father, Paul, told Kingsbury his son would win the Heisman. Kingsbury wanted to roll his eyes. Most parents predicted greatness for their kids, but this sounded different. Cocksure. Like, “No, you don’t get
it.
” Like when Chief Brody muttered in
Jaws
, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” It was an interesting family, for sure. Paul Manziel was a scratch golfer, had a black belt in martial arts, and sold cars for a living. Johnny’s grandfather would later proclaim himself to the
New York Times
the 1983 world champ of cockfighting.

Turns out, Paul Manziel was prescient when it came to his boy’s football future. The younger Manziel’s daring, gunslinger style evoked memories of his favorite QB, Brett Favre. Manziel’s first start put a scare into the number twenty-four Florida Gators. At one point, thanks primarily to Manziel, the Aggies had almost as many first downs (15) as UF had run plays (18). Texas A&M didn’t beat the Gators, falling 20–17, but by the end of the day everybody around college football was buzzing about the frenetic QB who had made a dormant, stuffy old program must-see TV. Heck, even Sumlin and Kingsbury’s chins were on the floor. After all, in practice, plays get whistled dead when tacklers touch the quarterback. Who knew actually tackling Manziel would be such a headache or what magical things he could do after pirouetting away from some three-hundred-pound monsters?

“This is a different animal,” Kingsbury said, referencing Manziel. Kingsbury, a former record-setting quarterback at Texas Tech, played in Mike Leach’s “Air Raid” spread system. Like other Leach disciples, Kingsbury used a variation of the Air Raid, but there had never been such a running threat at QB in the scheme. With each week came new wrinkles to A&M’s souped-up Air Raid. By the time Manziel played his next SEC game, at the end of September, he threw, for a school record, 453 yards, and ran for 104 yards to break the SEC record for total offense in a 58–10 win over Arkansas. Two months later, Manziel had emerged as a Heisman contender. His team, which hadn’t
finished in the Top 10 in almost twenty years, went into Tuscaloosa ranked number fifteen to face the top-ranked Alabama Crimson Tide.

Two hours before kickoff, Manziel, who as an A&M freshman (per Sumlin’s policy) had been off-limits to the media all season, tweeted to his 25,000 Twitter followers a line from the action movie
300
: “Give to them nothing, but take from them EVERYTHING.”

As had been the norm for A&M, Manziel and company jumped on the Tide early. Manziel scooted his way around defenders and zipped passes to give the Aggies the early lead. A&M outgained Alabama, 172 yards to 34 yards in the opening quarter. The Aggies put up 20 points on Coach Nick Saban’s D before the opening quarter was over, and Johnny Football wasn’t just trending, he was becoming the sports world’s hottest new thing. All season no player had a run go for longer than 22 yards against the Tide. Manziel, though, gashed the Tide for runs of 29 and 32 yards. More impressive: Manziel started the game 21 of 22 as a passer.

The play that made all the highlight shows and became the signature Johnny Football moment occurred in the first half, when A&M faced third-and-goal from the Alabama 10-yard line. The Tide collapsed the pocket with a four-man rush. Manziel tried to squeeze through what he thought was a crease in the right side of the line. But Alabama’s defensive end shoved Manziel’s right tackle, Jake Matthews, back into him. The QB caromed off Matthews, into A&M’s right guard, which caused the ball to pop free from Manziel’s hands for a heartbeat. Manziel re-gathered the ball while twisting his body back to his right, so he had his back to the other twenty-one players on the field. He hunched down and snagged the ball while wheeling to his left, escaped the scrum, and fired a pass with both shoulders parallel to the goal line to a wide-open Ryan Swope in the back of the end zone.

“You can’t teach that, can you?” howled CBS analyst Gary Danielson, a former longtime NFL QB, on the telecast. “And you can’t defend that, either.”

The play Manziel actually relished the most came later in the game, after Bama battled back, scoring 17 consecutive points to get within a field goal going into the fourth quarter. Manziel had driven
the Aggies to the Tide 24-yard line. A&M came out in a five-receiver set with an empty backfield. Alabama put eight defenders up at the line to crowd the Aggies. Manziel glanced left and noticed his inside receiver, Malcome Kennedy, had beaten the Tide’s top cover man, Dee Milliner (a guy who later became the ninth pick in the 2013 NFL Draft), off the line by getting the DB to think he was going inside. Even though Milliner and Kennedy seemed to be running in a cluster toward the left corner of the end zone, Manziel lofted a pass that came down just over the receiver’s left shoulder. A diving Milliner couldn’t reach it with his outstretched arm. Touchdown. Alabama’s best DB had tight coverage, and Johnny Manziel still beat him. “Still think I can’t throw from the pocket?” Manziel laughed to himself.

“No moment is too big for him,” Sumlin said of Manziel after the game. “He gives our players a sense that anything can happen. It’s a contagious feeling.”

One month later, Manziel would win the Heisman, becoming the first freshman ever to do so; his Twitter followers increased tenfold, and he helped generate a whopping $37 million in exposure for Texas A&M. He set an SEC record with over 5,100 total yards, captivating fans and media—both old media and new media—and also appeared to be the anti–Tim Tebow.

Manziel was completely unfiltered with his after-hours persona, from the shirtless mug shot to the Halloween pictures of him dressed as Scooby-Doo dancing with leggy blondes in lingerie and hanging with LeBron James or rap star Drake to sniping back at trolls on Twitter. His free-flowing artistry resonated with the hip-hop generation, while his Texas Hill Country roots connected with the good ol’ boys, giving Manziel a unique platform as an overnight sensation—the rare guy who could present at both the CMA and the BET Awards.

Manziel’s off-season, though, would bring new challenges: coping with his escalating rock-star status and trying to hone his pocket-passing skills while not short-circuiting his improvisational wizardry. Kingsbury was gone, too. The young coach’s stock had soared so fast, Texas Tech had scooped the thirty-three-year-old up to become its new head coach. Sumlin, knowing Manziel’s occasionally obstinate personality, was mindful of bringing in a quarterbacks coach his
young star would respect. Sumlin hired twenty-seven-year-old Jake Spavital, a Kingsbury protégé who had coached West Virginia star Geno Smith and Brandon Weeden, a recent first-round QB—although “Johnny Football 2.0” would be a radically different experience for the young coach.

THE NFL WORLD WAS
fascinated to see how Manziel would develop. His emergence came at a time when the League had begun to rethink rigid views that had been in place for generations.

“There are gonna be two seminal moments in changing the landscape of every quarterback having to look like Ben Roethlisberger or Troy Aikman,” said longtime
Sports Illustrated
pro-football writer Peter King on the eve of the NFL Combine. “One happened in 2006, when New Orleans was recovering from Katrina. The Saints had to get a quarterback, because they didn’t have one. [Head coach] Sean Payton and [general manager] Mickey Loomis see that there is only one free-agent quarterback who is even remotely good, and he has a major shoulder issue, and Nick Saban wants him in Miami. It’s Drew Brees, but Saban was being a little bit waffle-y on him, because his doctors didn’t really like him. Sean Payton does not want a 5′11¾″ quarterback. He wants Peyton Manning or Tom Brady. He wants a big guy, but there were no big guys available. So Sean, who is really a smart guy, said, ‘Look, we have to cast our lot with this guy, even though he has this shoulder issue—and we don’t know when he’ll be ready—because we need somebody.’

“Sean had enough faith in his ability to develop quarterbacks that he said, ‘Shit, I’ll take a 5′11¾″ quarterback, and I’m gonna make something of him.’ Drew Brees works, but until 2012, he’s really an anomaly. How many other great quarterbacks at 5′11″ or 6′0″ or barely taller than 6′ had any success?”

The second seminal moment for the League’s quarterbacking enlightenment, King said, occurred when the Seattle Seahawks blew out Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos to win the 2014 Super Bowl. Seattle’s budding star was twenty-five-year-old, second-year QB Russell Wilson, a 5′11″, 205-pound, onetime two-star recruit.

“John Schneider had scouted Russell Wilson earlier at Wisconsin, and he’d told [head coach] Pete Carroll after the Big Ten Championship game in Indianapolis, ‘I’m telling you, you’re gonna love this guy. You gotta believe me. Don’t reach a conclusion because he’s 5′11″ [technically 5′10⅝″].’ ” Schneider, the boyish-looking Seahawks GM in his early forties, raved to Carroll about Wilson’s leadership skills, competitiveness, and ability to extend plays. It also didn’t hurt that Wilson put together a sterling 109-to-30 touchdown-to-interception ratio in college. The moment that really won Schneider over occurred on a two-point play late in the game, when Wilson was flushed from the pocket, scrambled left, got to the left hash mark, then wheeled around back to the middle of the field and threw a strike on the move to the Badgers tight end Jake Pedersen in the middle of a pack of Michigan State defenders for the score. Schneider also really loved that Wilson was voted team captain at Wisconsin despite having arrived at UW as a transfer from North Carolina State only a few weeks earlier. That told Schneider a lot, too, even if NFL rationale said not to invest in quarterbacks shorter than 6′0″ tall.