This weekend I watched the Netflix documentary about Johnny “Football” Manziel, the Heisman-winning quarterback from Texas A&M a few years back. It’s definitely a tragic story, but one worth hearing about. As an Arkansas Razorbacks fan, I watched as it unfolded over the course of two SEC seasons.
The endpoint of the story is: Johnny Football didn’t make it in the NFL, did alot of drugs, and due to some mental disorders can’t do much in terms of work now (although he is with it enough to make this documentary). There is some redemption we hear about though: Manziel’s father had cut him off until he hit rock bottom, but opened the door to his son when he realized the pointlessness of his prodigal ways.
If he had made this change earlier, things may have been different in Johnny Manziel’s life. As he acknowledges in the documentary, Johnny was “a frat boy” at Texas A&M- and he didn’t put his best foot forward in the NFL draft. Given his physical limitations, the only chance Manziel had to make it in the NFL was to be at the top of his game. He would have had to have the discipline to practice like he did in High School at Kerrville- on the very edge of West Texas, a very “Friday Night Lights” sort of environment.
Unfortunately at Texas A&M Head Coach Kevin Sumlin and OC Kliff Kingsbury did NOTHING to discipline Manziel. This did not surprise me- I have always thought Kingsbury was a jerk. In my book, they and the administration at the university (in loco parentis) are the main ones who failed and exploited Manziel, as bad as his own behavior was.
The documentary includes a slightly preachy narrative about the NCAA and its failure to pay players or even cut them in on Name, Image, and Likeness money. Keep in mind, this story takes place 8 years before the Supreme Court decision in NCAA v. Alston (2021) changed that deal. Since then, Texas A&M set up an NIL collective to pay players, resulting in the top-ranked recruitment class in the country (even higher than Saban’s Alabama!).
But would Manziel’s story have been any different if the NIL money had been there? I reject that notion. He wasn’t going to change his “frat boy” character until he was forced to. Easier money may have been gasoline to the fire for his party lifestyle and lack of discipline on campus- which as far as I can tell hasn’t changed at our big public universities (not just Texas A&M).
I think the somewhat forced “NIL money” narrative goes along with the very lazy, very common “it’s all about the money” trope we read about in sports and culture in general. As I have said before, “it’s all about the money” does NOT explain much of anything; money may come into play somehow, but human beings and motivations are much more complex than simple materialist determinism tied to money. As we see in the tragic but somewhat hopeful case of JOHNNY FOOTBALL.
(On this point about the fallacy of Marx-influenced economic determinism, see Ed Feser’s excellent recent post “In Defense of Culture War”).
Thanks for the review, CJ -- I watched Johnny Football play for the Browns briefly, but had no idea about his past or how he failed... It's shocking that 18-year-olds at prestigious universities should be so out of control...