to Walmart to buy a phone charger. While he was there a security guard smelled alcohol on his breath and called the police, and Manziel was taken to jail. His father, furious at him, refused to pay his fine and even suggested that the judge increase his community service hours from ten to twenty. Paul also sold the new car he had given Johnny on the condition that he stay away from alcohol. In its place he gave his son an old, rattletrap pickup truck to drive to school.
“Johnny Manziel is a red-blooded American young man,” says Scott, with whom Manziel still has a close relationship. “He is not superhuman, he is not a saint, he does not have a halo. He is subject to the temptations everyone else is. But he is a great person. He has a genuine love for his teammates and coaches. I have never spoken to him on the phone when he didn’t end the conversation saying, ‘I love you, Coach.’ He has never not said it.”
Manziel may not have been superhuman, but his statistics very nearly were, and they ought to have guaranteed him a spot on at least one of the two teams he had dreamed about playing for: UT and, later, TCU. But neither school, as it turned out, offered him a scholarship. TCU showed no interest at all; UT considered him for an athletic scholarship, but not as quarterback. Baylor, another school Manziel could envision himself at, did end up offering him a scholarship but also did not want him as a quarterback.
It wasn’t for lack of familiarity. No schools in the country had gotten a better look at Manziel. “After sophomore year I would load him up in the car, and we would go to these camps,” says Michelle. “We went to Baylor junior days, and we went to UT every year. At UT they had already made their selections—here is McCoy’s brother warming up over here, and they had the others over there. We were with the others. Johnny also loved TCU, and we did somersaults for them. We went to their camps; Paul would go talk to Coach [Gary] Patterson. But they never moved.”
“I would go to every camp, and I tried so hard,” Manziel recalls. “We would just bounce around the state, but we never got an offer.” A&M, meanwhile, seemed, in the early going, just as uninterested as TCU and UT. The rap on Manziel was predictable. At six-foot-one, he was too small. He was a running quarterback in a world that favored pocket passers. Nobody seemed to have noticed that, with Tivy’s flyweight offensive line going against the likes of Steele, Lake Travis, and Madison, he’d had no choice but to flee the pocket. “If he stays in the pocket, he gets killed,” Scott said at the time.
It has been widely written that Manziel was a lightly recruited player. That is not true. Though UT and TCU never offered him anything, and A&M demurred, by the summer of 2010 he had received bids from Iowa State, Colorado State, Louisiana Tech, Tulsa, Wyoming, the University of Texas at San Antonio, Rice, Baylor, Stanford, and Oregon. The latter two represented the sort of football programs he was looking for, and they were the cream of the Pac-12. In June he committed to Oregon, one of the best teams in the nation with one of the best coaches. He was ecstatic. It wasn’t a Texas school, as he and his parents had wanted so badly, but it was a great offer. He was going to the Northwest.
Then something happened—a seemingly small shift in the currents of destiny that would change Johnny Manziel’s life as well as the future of Texas A&M. In early September 2010, a highly regarded quarterback from Arizona named Brett Hundley, who had been considering both UCLA and A&M, announced his commitment to UCLA. This was very late in the recruiting game, and it meant, among other things, that A&M suddenly needed another quarterback for its roster. Though Aggie head coach Mike Sherman had shown only lukewarm interest in Manziel before, all that now changed. Spurred by offensive coach Tom Rossley, who had seen Manziel play and believed that he might be the next big thing, Sherman soon made an offer. Manziel, whose heart had always been in Texas, accepted and then made what he says was a “very difficult” phone call to Oregon to “de-commit.”
His debut at A&M fell far short of glorious. In the fall of 2011, the Aggies had an excellent starting quarterback named Ryan Tannehill, who would be a first-round NFL draft pick in the spring. They had a talented backup in Jameill Showers. They were running a pro-style offense that had virtually nothing in common with Tivy’s wide-open, brilliantly improvisational spread. As Manziel puts it, “I was just the kid in the back of the room. They would tell me to go turn the lights on.”
So Manziel was relegated to a role as quarterback on A&M’s “scout team,” where his job was to mimic opponents’ offenses during team scrimmages. A scout quarterback is generally supposed to pass the ball where the defensive coordinator tells him to. On occasion this involves throwing an interception or purposefully botching a play, but Manziel, with his almost feral, fast-twitch reflexes, sometimes failed to do that. “The coach used to get so mad,” Manziel says, laughing. “They would yell, ‘F—ing throw it to the same guy again.’ Whatever. I am not made to throw picks intentionally. I am not going to do that.”
Manziel, as the coaches were discovering, is a polite young man most of the time, but on the field, he is almost outrageously cocky. He always believes he is the best player out there and that no one can beat him. In practice before the Baylor game, he was tasked with mimicking the fleet, elusive Robert Griffin III, an assignment he turned out to