Johnny Manziel texted former Cleveland Browns QB coach Dowell Loggains on Draft Day 2014, urging him to draft Manziel so he could "wreck this league."
Instead, Manziel's nightmare rookie season almost wrecked the team. So says an ESPN.com report, which quotes nearly 20 Browns sources, indicating that the divisive rookie has problems that run deep after a mere nine months with the team.
In six quarters as a starter, Manziel failed to impress, and his presence in the locker room helped fracture a team that had some nice moments at time but fell from the playoff race late and now stands with total uncertainty on where it stands at quarterback heading into 2015.
Loggains was fired. Offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan left with two years left on his contract. New offensive coordinator John DiFllippo has said the team must figure out if the Browns' future quarterback is on the roster currently, and Browns owner Jimmy Haslam echoed those uninspiring comments, too.
Manziel was fined for being AWOL on the final Saturday of the season after suffering a hamstring injury that ended his season. The Browns brass openly wondered during the season, per the report, whether Manziel ever would be a viable franchise quarterback. Manziel's teammates clearly had troubles with the rookie's social calendar and lack of commitment to getting better and being prepared.
One player, according to the ESPN story, said Manziel as a rookie was a "100 percent joke."
Anyone shocked by this? Other teams around the league hardly are. Those that did their work on him during the pre-draft run-up hd their share of questions.
Even though Manziel twice late in the season vowed to fix his problems with tardiness and tone down his partying, the evidence suggested that it carried right through to the offseason — and not long into it.
He was seen partying in Miami Beach, Houston and in Aspen, Colorado, and all in a short time span.
"Johnny's his own worst enemy," one source said in the report.
Manziel sparked the team in the fourth quarter against the Buffalo Bills and led a touchdown drive — he ran it in — in the eventual loss. But his follow-up work against the Cincinnati Bengals and Carolina Panthers was not good, and he left the latter game with a hamstring injury. The Browns were upset he did not appear at the facility diligently to rehab his injury, and he was fined for missing a team meeting.
Are the Browns holding him accountable? The report suggests not nearly enough. Although his teammates had good things to say about Manziel publicly, privately the report shows another matter. And people on other teams are seeing the things that scared them off from drafting Manziel.
"What Johnny has to understand is [if] he has another year like he just had, he's not going to be famous anymore," one NFL team exec said. "LeBron James is going to lose his number."
This is not what the Browns needed. All the positive momentum gained in Mike Pettine's first year as head coach in what would be a 7-9 season now feels undercut by the underprepared and unreliable Manziel. With one year under his belt, it's way too soon to say that he's a bust or that he'll eventually be one.
But the early returns are not positive, and the immediate future all of a sudden looks very questionable.
