be if the football team was humiliated in its new league.
Texas A&M chancellor John Sharp, on whose watch the university left the Big 12 for the SEC, photographed in his office on May 31, 2013.
Into all this galloping transformation and high-wire marketing came Manziel and new head coach Kevin Sumlin, who was himself a significant symbol of change. In December 2011, after a dismal football season, Sherman had been fired; Sumlin, who took over that same month, was the first African American head football coach in A&M history. And critically for Manziel, he was the designer of a wide-open offense the likes of which the university had never fielded. That fall, Manziel took his first snap as Sumlin’s quarterback, and nine weeks later, nearly 10 million Americans watched A&M beat Alabama on national television. That week everyone in the country, it seemed, was talking about Texas A&M. And for Aggies looking to establish a new identity, that was exactly what the school needed. “What Johnny and the team did was make folks look at us,” Sharp says. “We’re the number one research university in Texas and the Southwest, but nobody was telling the story.”
The importance of Kevin Sumlin in the legend of Johnny Football cannot be overstated. Before becoming the head coach at the University of Houston, Sumlin had excelled as offensive coordinator at A&M, under R. C. Slocum in 2002, and shared the title at Oklahoma, under Bob Stoops in 2006 and 2007. Slocum had given him the job after the team’s third lackluster game that season. “I put Kevin in charge of the offense, and it was like you flipped a switch,” says Slocum, now a special adviser to A&M’s president. “It went immediately from dark to light. They were the same players, but it just looked completely different.” Sumlin’s University of Houston team ran a high-speed, no-huddle spread offense built around a play-making quarterback, an approach the coach took with him to A&M and which seemed tailor-made for Manziel’s skills. “I saw some of the new plays and I just thought, ‘I have done this for four years,’ ” says Manziel. “ ‘I know the terminology, I know the stuff. It’s a little different, but I know it.’ And it was just like a blessing.”
But Manziel, now a redshirt freshman and full member of the team, may have been overly excited. During spring football in 2012, he seemed to be trying too hard, going for a big play every time he had his hands on the ball. For the first time in his life, Manziel, normally a deadly accurate passer, had trouble hitting his targets. “It was like I had the yips or the shanks,” he recalls, referring to problems that afflict golfers. His parents were horrified. “He was just terrible,” says Paul. “He was awful. We didn’t know what was wrong, but I could have made better passes than some of the ones I saw him throw.” A&M’s offensive coordinator, Kliff Kingsbury, now the head coach at Texas Tech, was worried about him too.
“I knew in the spring that he was not focused,” says Kingsbury, who happens to be from New Braunfels and knew all about the Manziel legend. “I remember talking to him, and he was like, ‘Coach, I am not being myself.’ He wasn’t playing very well. And then after spring practice ended, I was on vacation in Cabo when someone emailed me a picture of the famous mug shot with his shirt off, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, here we go.’ ”
But although no one could have possibly guessed it at the time, that mug shot marked the beginning of Manziel’s five-month run to the Heisman. In early July, immediately after he was released from jail, Sumlin sat him down for a long meeting. The message was clear: if Manziel did anything like that again, he was done. “They came down hard on him,” says Michelle. Sumlin gave him a checklist, things he would need to do through the end of the summer and into the season to get back in the good graces of the football team. These included sessions with a counselor and community service, plus extra running and other physical exercises. Partying and drinking beer were, by agreement, strictly off limits.
“Many of those things have not been made public,” says Sumlin. “But that’s a lot of what went into his transformation. The things he had to go through—those are life-changing experiences. Sometimes you need to be at your lowest point for things to hit you in the face.”
Football coach Kevin Sumlin at an August press conference addressing reports of Manziel's alleged NCAA violation.
The team reconvened on August 3. “He was a different player,” says Kingsbury. “He was on a mission.” Still, that only meant that he was probably—as the media clearly believed—the second-best quarterback on the squad, if not a notch lower than that. And yet that was not even his biggest problem.
As the events of this summer have made abundantly clear, Manziel has a special ability for courting disaster. Over and over again, he finds himself having to scramble out of a jam. This summer’s training camp drama marked the second year in a row that he has gone through fall practice not knowing if he would even be eligible to play. People within the program could be forgiven for thinking, “Haven’t we seen this movie before?”
In 2012 the trouble originated with “the incident.” Though a lawyer hired by his family had managed to defer his court appearance on charges stemming from the June arrest, as training camp began, A&M weighed in with its own disciplinary review. The university does not conduct such reviews for every off-campus student offense, but in the words of Anne Reber, A&M’s dean of student life, “When things hit the newspaper, TV, or radio and it comes to our attention, now you are looking at the university’s reputation per se, and so we look at