that and determine whether we need to reach out and touch those students.” On August 6, three days after fall football camp started, Manziel came before a panel called Student Conduct Services, which punished him with a sanction known as conduct probation. This meant, incredibly, that he could not play football that fall. “Johnny called and said, ‘Mom, you are not going to believe this,’ ” recalls Michelle. “ ‘I got conduct probation. I can’t play. I can’t play at all.’ ”
His only hope was an appeal. By university policy, he had five business days to make it. Two days later, Manziel, his parents, and his coaches met to develop a strategy. Sumlin and Kingsbury wrote letters of support. “We were all in this together,” says Michelle. “It was a total team effort.” The appeal was filed with Reber’s office on August 10. Manziel, meanwhile, continued to practice with the team. He was playing well, even though he knew that it could all come to naught. If the sanction stood, his mother told me, they were planning to transfer him to a junior college.
Then Reber handed down her decision: Manziel’s sanction would be modified. He would have to perform twenty additional hours of community service and complete some extra classwork. But he was no longer on probation. Combined with Sumlin’s discipline, this still amounted to a fairly large punishment for a relatively small offense, but none of that mattered. Reber’s decision, which was dated August 14, meant he could play. One day later Sumlin named Manziel Texas A&M’s starting quarterback.
It was an extraordinary move. Manziel had performed poorly in the spring. He had been outplayed by Jameill Showers in the Maroon and White Spring Football Game. He had then gotten himself arrested and nearly been banned from playing football for the season. But Sumlin had somehow seen through all that. He made it clear, moreover, that there was going to be no rotation of quarterbacks. This was not a “we’ll see how it goes” decision. It was Manziel’s team now. “He’s the starter,” declared Sumlin that fall. “He’s going to play.”
Reviewing the chain of events that led to Manziel’s and Texas A&M’s 2012 football season, there is a point when you stop believing in coincidences. It all seems foreordained: how TCU and UT and Baylor passed on him, how A&M would have too but for the defection of a high school quarterback from Arizona. How he turned down a shot at one of the nation’s greatest football programs for a mediocre 7-6 team that was setting up to be dead meat in the SEC. How Mike Sherman, who probably would not have played him, was fired, and how Kevin Sumlin, a dream coach with a dream offense, got the job. How Manziel’s arrest led not to wrack and ruin but to a partnership with that dream coach. How a ruling by a Texas A&M dean saved his football career at the eleventh hour. How, before all this, a physics professor turned university president had had the gumption to finally push through the university’s move to the SEC, without which there would never have been an Alabama game, without which there would never have been a television announcer shouting, “Four-man Alabama rush . . . Got him! Oh, no! They didn’t!! Oh my GRACIOUS!! HOW ABOUT THAT?!?” as Manziel stumbled and fumbled and somehow managed to escape the rush and hang on to the ball and find Ryan Swope in the end zone and bring the entire country to its feet. Manziel and his family believe that what happened was God’s plan. I have not heard a better explanation.
But the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. No sooner had Manziel demolished the Sooner secondary at the Cotton Bowl Classic on January 4 and commenced his off-season than the problems started. The weekend after the game, pictures surfaced of Manziel holding a bottle of champagne in a Dallas club and a wad of cash in an Oklahoma casino. Both incidents were fully aboveboard—his parents were with him at the club, and it is legal for eighteen-year-olds to gamble in Oklahoma (Manziel himself had Instagrammed the photo). Nonetheless, the Internet exploded with wild speculation that he was already headed for a fall. It was the first indication of Manziel’s signal ability to attract publicity, much of it negative and based on sketchy, unsourced, or rumor-driven accounts. Partly this is due to the fact that after the Heisman, Manziel became famous in a way that no college athlete had ever been before. Think about it: when Tim Tebow won the award, in 2007, social media was in its infancy. When RG3 won it, in 2011, he was a senior and already on his way to the NFL. Manziel, the only freshman ever to win the Heisman, lives in a different world. Through the instant, globe-spanning magic of Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and the blogosphere, his every public move—and I mean every—is chronicled. As he quickly learned, if he went out to dinner with a girl, people in New York and even Tokyo would know where he was and who he was with before he even left the restaurant.
Anywhere he went in College Station, he was immediately enclosed in a sea of students, all wanting photographs and autographs. When he went out to eat with his family, the sudden influx of fans in the restaurant threatened to disrupt the kitchen’s entire meal service. When he and his friend Mike Evans, a wide receiver, went to the rec center to play a pickup basketball game, they drew a crowd of a thousand. Manziel spent two hours signing and photo op –ing.
Almost overnight, the kid had become one of the most visible celebrities in the country. He went to the Super Bowl, Mardi Gras, the NBA All-Star Game. He hung out with LeBron James (who wanted his photo taken with Johnny Football), Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel, the Duck Dynasty