232 yards and three touchdowns and rushed for another 143 yards in a 50–20 rout. In the third quarter he cut loose on a 69-yard touchdown run, only to have it called back by penalties that moved his team back 20 yards. On the next play he sprinted 89 yards for a touchdown.
Though he soon piled up record numbers—the likes of which had never been seen at Tivy High—and as a junior led his team to the state 4A semifinals, it was in his senior year that his performance went from merely phenomenal to otherworldly. That season he personally accounted for 5,276 yards of total offense and 75 touchdowns. He averaged 440 yards per game. He was third in the nation in total offense. He was named a Parade All-American and the National High School Coaches Association Senior Athlete of the Year. He put up these numbers even though in six blowout wins he barely played in the second half. He also did it with a team that, compared with many of its opponents, was almost ludicrously undersized, fielding 180-pound linemen against players who routinely outweighed them by 50 or more pounds.
Nowhere was Tivy’s size and talent disadvantage more apparent than in its games against 5A powerhouses Madison High, from San Antonio, and Steele High, from Cibolo, teams that were loaded with Division I–bound players. Against the area’s number-one-ranked Madison, Manziel, running Tivy’s trademark wide-open spread offense, put up even more-astonishing numbers than usual, completing 41 of a state-record 75 attempts for 503 yards and 4 touchdowns in a 39–34 victory. The following week Tivy took on eventual 5A state champion Steele, which featured All-American, All-State, and All-District players and one of the nation’s top running backs, Malcolm Brown (now a starter for the University of Texas). Before a screaming, delirious hometown crowd in Kerrville, Manziel dueled Brown, while Tivy’s undersized team played, as one of the players put it, “out of their shoes.” Brown lived up to the All-American hype, running for 354 yards and 4 touchdowns. Manziel, meanwhile, had one of the best nights in his career, throwing for 423 yards and 6 touchdowns and rushing for 129 yards and another 2 touchdowns in a thrilling 54–45 victory.
But perhaps Manziel’s greatest achievement as a senior came in two heartbreaking losses—Tivy’s only ones that year—to Lake Travis High School, one of the top high school football teams in the nation, which was in the middle of its unprecedented run of five straight 4A state championships. In two epic battles, Manziel and Tivy scored more points than any team had ever scored on Travis during its run, losing 37–33 in a non-district game and 48–42 in the state playoffs. The latter was Manziel’s heroic, bittersweet farewell to Tivy High. “We played against tremendous odds through Johnny’s whole career at Tivy,” says Julius “Juju” Scott, who was the offensive coordinator for Tivy during Manziel’s years there. “People think he played a miraculous game against Alabama, but in Kerrville I saw him do that with a lot less talent around him. Nobody scored that many points on Travis. Beating the Steele Knights? Come on. They’ve got sixteen Division I players. We had one. It shouldn’t be close.”
How did Manziel and his fellow Antlers pull this off? He was a singularly talented quarterback, of course, but the team’s success was also due, more than a little, to love and brotherhood. At weekly devotionals, the entire team, with several coaches, would pack into one room at a local church and shut the door. Though the meetings were optional, everyone attended. “At the beginning of the meeting, they would show a highlight video of the week before,” says Manziel, “and after that, anybody could say anything, and it would never, ever get brought out of that room. Sometimes I would tell a funny story, make people laugh. Sometimes I would come up and have a Bible verse to read—David and Goliath, just whatever it was. Afterward Coach Scott would say a prayer, and then you would hug every person in the room before you left the building, coaches too. There was not a person there that wouldn’t hug any guy on that team. It was awesome. So rare. People wonder why Tivy was so good. We were all brothers. We loved each other.”
As a leader, Manziel could be hard on his teammates, but he had a softer touch when it came to the weaker players. During the team’s final home game, he told Scott that he wanted to make sure that Robert Martinez, a popular senior receiver who had never played, scored a touchdown. Scott approved and put Martinez on the field, and on the next play Manziel deliberately slid down at the 1-yard line to set it up. On the following play he lined up in the shotgun, gave the ball to Martinez, then grabbed him by the jersey and half-carried him into the end zone. Martinez, who was hoisted onto his teammates’ shoulders, was thrilled. After the game, his mother thanked Manziel with tears in her eyes. It is one of Manziel’s best high school memories.
In his three years as a varsity quarterback, Manziel had become a certified Hill Country legend. People drove hundreds of miles to see him. He packed stadiums all over the district. Kerrville would come to an abrupt standstill during every home game. His wild, off-the-cuff plays, often drawn in the dirt or the air by Scott in the moments before the snap, made him a YouTube hero, which drew people from even greater distances. In spite of all this, he managed to lead the normal life of a Kerrville kid. “We were just constantly outdoors,” says Manziel’s close friend Nate Fitch (who would follow him to A&M and later become his personal assistant). “That’s what you do here. Everybody hunts and fishes, and sports occupied the time between.”
Manziel also found time to get into a little trouble. One night he went