“Johnny did a great job of holding the safeties in the middle of the field with his eyes, and that’s why Mike kept getting so open on the sidelines,” Spavital said. “We hit three or four fades on man-free [coverage].”
On a touchdown pass to Malcome Kennedy, Manziel duped “Ha Ha” Clinton-Dix out of the play to free up the Aggie receiver. Maybe more impressive was how Manziel responded when the Tide threw defensive looks at him that he hadn’t seen from them before, Spavital said. Twice the Tide overloaded one side of the line of scrimmage, and twice Manziel beat it by firing quick passes to the perimeter for 16-yard and 6-yard gains. When offensive coordinator Clarence McKinney saw the crazy third-and-8 play where Manziel scrambled but got grabbed by 290-pound Jeoffrey Pagan, only to break away and evade more rushers before flinging the ball, where his body ended up facing the opposite end zone for a 12-yard completion to spindly freshman Edward Pope, the coach just shook his head. “It’s like he’s Houdini.”
MANZIEL’S MENTOR, GEORGE WHITFIELD’S, stock had risen almost as high as the Aggies’ star’s had in the previous year. The ESPN College GameDay role got him in front of hundreds of thousands of football fans every Saturday morning. In late October, he even got a call from producers of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, looking to book him for a spot in which he would teach host Stephen Colbert how to throw a football. Whitfield was a huge fan of Colbert and Jon Stewart, he said, adding that he hoped he could fit it into his schedule. Things had gotten hectic for him, crisscrossing the country on the traveling road show that was College GameDay, while back in San Diego, he had his own daily project—training Everett Golson, the exiled Notre Dame QB who started the 2013 BCS National Title Game but was dismissed from the school for violating the honor code by cheating on an exam and called Whitfield for help.
It was Halloween. Whitfield, who in less than thirty-six hours would be in Tallahassee with the GameDay gang for the Miami–Florida State game, sat on a scaled-down turf soccer field across from the University of California at San Diego Medical Center. While waiting for Golson to arrive, Whitfield answered a call from his TV producer asking if they could break down why Miami’s QB Stephen Morris was struggling.
“Can you put a circle on the ground below him?” Whitfield asked the producer, hoping for some kind of graphical element to represent how the strong-armed quarterback’s delivery had been hampered by an ankle injury. “I know this sounds weird, but can you make it a blinking light on his leg? Imagine he’s standing on a six-foot circular mat. Does that make any sense? I know this sounds nerdy, but on the good ones can we put a jet stream on it and make it orange or red, and on the bad ones, make it blue—like he doesn’t have anything on it?”
Whitfield knew he was in an awkward spot on TV, often asked to comment on a client he was mentoring. “I wanna be as true-blue as a coach as possible, but out here I don’t wanna look like an apologist,” he said. “I got asked three or four times before I signed anything, ‘Could you be objective with your guys? Can you be critical if need be?’
“I said, ‘Well, I’m not gonna be Skip Bayless, but a bad throw is a bad throw. That is a tangible thing.’ I said it’d be like coaching them with an audience. I wouldn’t say anything to the screen that I wouldn’t say with Johnny [Manziel] or Tajh [Boyd] standing right next to me. I’m not on there to be [Paul] Finebaum. I’m on there for tactical reasons. They never put me on a panel. I have five minutes to discuss and walk them through whatever I can.”
Whitfield was contracted to do thirty-five TV appearances a year with ESPN, he said. His biggest challenge came whenever the subject was Virginia Tech QB Logan Thomas, who had trained with Whitfield for three years. The 6′6″, 250-pound Thomas, who after his sophomore season was touted by NFL Draft analysts as a potential first overall pick, had been an easy target for critics, as his stats had declined while he struggled with his accuracy and decision making.
Whitfield attended Thomas’s Thursday-night game at Georgia Tech. His bosses at ESPN had him comment on his protégé from the sideline. Whitfield noted that Thomas, unlike most big-time college quarterbacks, didn’t play the position much before college.
“He’d only played six high school games at quarterback,” Whitfield said. “That’s not a lot of flight hours. It doesn’t really go much to skill and ability. He wanted to be a tight end in college. The coaches at Tech saw something in him. He’s raw, but he’s playing.
“Here’s what I like most about Logan Thomas: I always make sure I send players a text after a loss, because they’re gonna hear from everybody else after a win. I was shocked when they lost against Duke. I saw it on the scroll. I’m waiting for his stats to come around. And then I saw four interceptions. Then I watched the highlights and saw three balls that should’ve been intercepted. I asked him, ‘How you doing, and what happened out there?’
“He just texted back, ‘I sucked.’ And that was it. You gotta run and quickly try to wean him back up. ‘Listen, some pro quarterbacks are gonna have that type of day tomorrow. And they had that day already. Imagine being in Eli Manning’s shoes [throwing 15 interceptions in the Giants first six games].’ You always want to bring them up to the 30,000-foot view, because they almost always think it’s just them. They can’t see much else, because it’s their fan base—the kids on their campus and their newspapers—and that’s all they’re talking about, so it’s just like having mirrors around them. They don’t have anything else. You try to pull them back up. It is the toughest position in sports.”
Everett Golson, too, required some uplifting. Whitfield picked Golson up at the San Diego airport on September 1. “He looks around and says, ‘This is awesome.’ Then he gets quiet for a bit and says, ‘You’re gonna have me throw with the strings, aren’t you?’ ”Golson had developed the unusual habit of throwing a football with his hand not on the laces. Whitfield said he suspected that other coaches, including the staff at Notre Dame, had tried to get Golson to change but that no one had made a compelling enough case.
Golson arrived wearing a black DRGN SLYR T-shirt (a slogan of Whitfield’s), gray shorts, and navy ND socks with gold Nike cleats. He said in the past he used to shuffle the ball not to get the laces. But now he’s using the laces.
“There’s still an adjustment period with touch [passes], because you do have more grip with the laces, but it is for the better, and, mechanically, George has really helped with my footwork a lot,” Golson said. “For a vast period of my career I depended on my arm—all arm. George taught me to step through and have a base, and that’s where I’ve seen the most improvement.”
Whitfield’s goal was to refine a QB lacking in consistency.
“You’re throwing like he’s wide-ass open,” he prodded Golson as he threw deep outs to a former small-school receiver. “Train like he’s not.”
“You know the butcher and the surgeon deal, right?” Whitfield said later. “They both have tools. They both cut. They both are dealing with blood. They’re both professionals. A butcher just gets in and out, and he’s done, whereas the surgeon starts up, and he’s gotta have a plan, and a Plan B, a Plan C, and a fail-safe, and be particular. That’s what Everett’s getting now.”
The two-month training camp with Whitfield in San Diego was not cheap. Whitfield usually helped quarterbacks find accommodations. For lodging, it was around $60 a day for the two months. For Whitfield’s training, it was about $500 a week. So, combined, that was $7,500–$8,000. Golson’s cousin Ivan helped pay the tab, Whitfield said.
“At this point, I don’t know if it’s politically correct to say it like this, but it’s a business decision for me,” Golson said. “I’m hoping that it’ll pay off in the future.”
HEADING INTO THANKSGIVING, THE Heisman race was in more disarray than it had been in years at such a late stage. LSU, again, got the best of Johnny Manziel, holding him to a season-low 299 yards in a 34–10 romp.
“You have to give a lot of credit to them,” Manziel said of LSU, which prepared i
ts D for him by using its best athlete, star wide receiver Odell Beckham, as the scout-team QB mimicking the A&M star. “They came out and mixed a lot of things up. They kept us guessing, and it really took us a while to figure it out.
“We got punched in the mouth today, and it wasn’t fun.”
During the game, CBS reported that Manziel was bothered by an injured hand. It was actually a banged-up thumb.
“It’s been a factor throughout the past couple of weeks,” he said after being asked how much, if at all, the thumb was a factor. He added that it wasn’t the reason A&M lost.
Later that day, two other contenders, Baylor quarterback Bryce Petty (another Whitfield client) and Oregon QB Marcus Mariota, both struggled, too, as their teams each got upset. The one guy from the front of the Heisman race who didn’t have a rough Saturday was Jameis Winston. His team scored 80 on a dreadful Idaho squad and was steamrolling every opponent en route to a BCS National Title bid. With Petty’s struggles, the Seminoles redshirt freshman took over the national lead in QB rating at 194.50. The bigger news surrounding Jameis Winston’s day: Florida State Attorney Willie Meggs told AP that he likely wouldn’t make a decision on whether the FSU QB would be charged until after Thanksgiving in a sexual-assault investigation that had surfaced first via TMZ in the previous ten days but stemmed from a complaint filed with the Tallahassee Police Department back in December 2012.
The matter of the timing with Winston’s case became an awkward subplot to his investigation: Should Heisman electors vote for Winston with the possibility he could get charged days later? Some Heisman voters had said in recent years that “character” is considered in their ballot, even though they don’t really know these guys all that well, if at all. In 2012, Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o was touted by many as the ultimate “character” guy, but a little more than a month after the Heisman ceremony, a ton of questions emerged about his character after the well-chronicled story of his commitment to the deceased love of his life took a bizarre turn when it came to light that his late girlfriend had never actually existed—Te’o had been the victim of an elaborate hoax, a revelation he did not promptly disclose.
Winston, Manziel, and McCarron were among the six finalists invited to New York for the Heisman presentation. Winston got some good news leading up to the trip north: Florida State Attorney Willie Meggs concluded that “no charges will be filed” after an investigation of the case, explaining in a press conference that the “timing [of the case] has not been driven by Heisman demands or a football schedule.”
At each of the Heisman media-availability sessions—one on Friday and two more on Saturday—the Alabama native adeptly handled questions, including a few that touched on the investigation and the magnitude of it.
“I knew I did nothing wrong,” Winston said. “That’s why I knew I could respect the process, and I’d eventually be vindicated. It was more about me being silent for my family, because I didn’t want to put my family in that situation.”
The young QB actually managed the weekend’s media sessions much better than the adults in the FSU PR department did. When faced with any seemingly tough question, Winston was poised, polite, and kept eye contact. He never looked flustered or put-off or agitated. You couldn’t say the same for the Seminole Sports Information Director who stood a few feet behind him. (At the Friday-afternoon session, a Noles SID person pulled Winston away from reporters after a rather innocuous question, and the FSU contingent cut short the scheduled availability before being brought back to the media area about twenty minutes later.)
Winston had a curious dynamic that often got skewed under the magnifying lens of a TV camera. In less formal media windows, he came across as engaging, playful, and more comfortable in his own skin than anyone in the room. However, when those moments became prime-time TV moments, he seemed to lose control, drifting toward playing to the lowest common denominator, acting like a goof, which often rubbed people the wrong way and created its own challenges for the FSU staff.
Winston called the month leading up to the Heisman his “humbling moment.” He said he’d learned he couldn’t go out anymore, and that his coach Jimbo Fisher had told him, “For you to be a man, the kid in you must die.”
Manziel suddenly wasn’t the biggest deal in the room—at least not that weekend. He was still getting A-list offers. Two weeks earlier, A&M turned down a chance for him to be a guest again on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
“They tried to entice him by saying Jennifer Aniston was going to be on the show with him,” said an A&M PR staffer. “I don’t think they know, she’s probably a bit out of his demo.” Manziel looked perfectly comfortable being in the background in New York. He conceded that he felt like “an old sophomore. I feel like I’ve been in college forever.” Observing the media swarm around Winston, Manziel said he was impressed by how the kid had handled the situation.
Four months earlier, Winston had caused a bit of a stir when he was asked a question at FSU’s pre-season media day about “Manziel disease,” and he replied:
“If I ever get Manziel disease, I want all of you to smack me in the head with your microphones.” The comment—even with the context that it was in response to how the question had been framed—didn’t sit well with the Manziel camp, but the A&M star appeared to have no trouble embracing Winston.
“I had to go through some controversy. I had to go through some things,” Manziel said. “To see him at such a young age be able to put his head down and focus on his teammates and where they are and where they’re headed, I do give him a lot of credit for that. With all the scrutiny and everything that he’s under, I feel like he’s done a tremendous job of focusing on his team and his family and what matters most.”
Winston ended up running away with the Heisman voting, winning by the seventh-biggest margin in the award’s seventy-nine-year history. He received 668 first-place votes, even though he didn’t appear at all on 115 Heisman ballots. Manziel got fifth place—behind Winston, McCarron, Northern Illinois QB Jordan Lynch, and Boston College running back Andre Williams.
“I can’t explain and say enough how truly intelligent he is, how instinctive he is,” Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher replied upon being asked what quality impressed him most about Winston. “The game makes sense to him. He always wants to know why he’s having success. If he throws a touchdown, he has to understand it, so he can repeat it.”
Winston wasted little time trying to get a better understanding of how winning the Heisman could change his life. He’d been picking Manziel’s brain for a few days already.
“We had a really good talk Thursday night at dinner,” Manziel said. “I wasn’t prepared for it. I don’t know if you really can be.
“It’s going to be a whirlwind for a little bit, but he’ll get used to it. I didn’t ever want to be a different person. There are things you have to adapt to and get used to, because this is how life is going to be. No matter how bad you want things to be back to the way they were before and live a normal life, those days went out the window a long time ago for me. I’ve accepted that fact, and I’m fine with it, and life’s good.”
Manziel’s best advice: “Continue to be yourself—just be you, and try not to let this thing change you.”
MANZIEL’S COLLEGE FINALE CAME on New Year’s Eve against one of the sweetest stories of 2013—a 10–3 Duke team that, after years of being a punch line, made it to the ACC Title Game. The Aggies limped into the Chick-fil-A Bowl with consecutive losses at LSU and Missouri.
“It was a taxing year physically and mentally,” Kevin Sumlin said on the eve of the game. Weeks before the bowl game, Sumlin shook up his offense by promoting Spavital, making him the Aggies’ new play-caller, taking over for Clarence McKinney. The move was expected to ramp up the tempo for A&M even more, with Spavital coaching from the sidelines and more in sync with Manziel. It helped that Manziel had time to heal after sustaining nagging injuries throughout the second half of the season.
“
Johnny got his stinger back,” proclaimed A&M defensive coordinator Mark Snyder a few days before the bowl. “I think he lost it after the Auburn game.” That 45–41 defeat in late October ended whatever national-title hopes the Aggies had had. Manziel threw for 454 yards and 4 TDs but had to leave the fourth quarter for a few plays after a shoulder injury. In the aftermath, Manziel still produced big numbers, throwing 13 touchdowns over the next three games before facing LSU and Missouri, but Snyder noticed a different side of the play-making QB at practice: “I kept saying to him, ‘Man, that’s not you. You don’t ever lose your confidence. C’mon, talk shit to me.’ ”
Manziel admitted that the Auburn loss was “really deflating. That just stung for a long time, especially offensively. We just kind of lost our confidence after that and never really could get it back.”
Boarding one of the team buses for what would be his last full practice as a college player, Manziel was back to being himself. A grinning Manziel walked past Sumlin seated in the first row. The quarterback was followed by a bleary-eyed teammate with a gray hoodie draped over his face. Apparently, the young teammate, a freshman, had had a rough time keeping up with Manziel the night before.
“This is your fault,” Sumlin said through a smile to his star, nodding toward the young player.
MANZIEL: What?
SUMLIN: You know.
MANZIEL: Nah, that’s not me this time.
SUMLIN: C’mon, really?
MANZIEL: What? I’ll take all of [another underclassman’s] hungover days but not this one.
SUMLIN: Ah, only three more days.
Manziel, who earlier in the month had turned twenty-one, had a verbal rapport with his coaches that often sounded as if someone in Hollywood must’ve scripted it. When Sumlin reminded him to be on his best behavior, because he had to “impress thirty-two owners and head coaches.”
The QB The Making of Modern Quarterbacks Page 24