‘Only up from here’: reason for hope amid Johnny Manziel’s dire CFL debut

There was Johnny Manziel in Montreal on Friday night, the shadow of a sensation, dashing across a field high above the downtown lights. And you could see glimpses of Johnny Football in the first start of his CFL redemption; the spins, and ducks and dives that once dazzled America. That swaggering, skinny kid from central Texas had not gone away completely.

But there also was too much of the Cleveland Browns’ Johnny Manziel, a quarterback lost, flinging balls carelessly into the arms of his opponents. In the end, his second pro career started much the way his first one ended, with four interceptions against his old team, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, leaving a whole lot of questions about whether Manziel will ever get what it takes to be a quarterback.

He is just 25, which seems amazing considering all that has happened: the rise at Texas A&M, the games with 500 total yards, the parade of headlines, the wiggling fingers, the spectacular flame-out in Cleveland, the drugs and the all-out crash in 2016. He has said the right things about fixing his life, including a revelation that he is bi-polar.

He has time to make football work again.

Being intercepted four times in his first CFL start is not the way to do that.

In fairness to Manziel he was put in a near-impossible situation. He had come to the Montreal Alouettes less than two weeks before after sitting on the bench in Hamilton. He only had a handful of practices with his new team before being thrown in to start Friday’s game. The whole thing smacked of a publicity stunt for a struggling team that has won just once this year, desperate to draw fans.

As is often the case with interceptions, they weren’t all Manziel’s fault. His second came after he made two dazzling moves to evade a pass rush, lobbing a pass to an open tailback Tyrell Sutton. It should have been a spectacular play, but Sutton was clearly not used to playing with a Johnny Football and he seemed surprised by the throw, the ball bounced off his hands and into the arms of Hamilton’s Jumal Rolle.

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Johnny Manziel threw four first-half interceptions in his CFL debut.

What happened next, however, is the thing that should give everyone hope about Manziel: the reason we shouldn’t quit on Johnny Football. Rather than fret about a broken play and an interception on a dropped pass, Manziel sprinted from across the field, bursting through two teammates to take down Rolle with a flying tackle. If nothing else, it appeared as if Manziel cares.

“This is a humbling experience,” Manziel told reporters after the game. “I’ve had this experience in the past before and there’s two ways you either go about this moving forward. One you can let this get you down and sulk … and harm you moving forward. The other way is to just take this on the chin like a man and never allow this taste to creep back in your mouth again and never let this happen again.”

Johnny Manziel

Manziel’s signature ability to buy time and extend plays was on display in Friday’s comeback start. Photograph: Canadian Press/REX/Shutterstock

Which is what Montreal can build upon. While there isn’t much positive to take from four interceptions in the first half and a half-time benching in a 50-11 loss, Manziel showed enough flashes of the old Johnny Football to make this experiment worth following. He did complete 11-of-20 passes for 104 yards. He did show he can make the old cuts that agonized tacklers in college.

The Alouettes are 1-6. It doesn’t hurt to give Manziel a try. The CFL, with a bigger field and three downs, is a good fit for his skills. Scrambling quarterbacks do well in Canada. A few years ago, Montreal’s former general manager Jim Popp, who held the rights to another college sensation – Tim Tebow – told me Tebow’s skills were ideal for the CFL because one less down makes a versatile quarterback more dangerous. He cautioned, though, that in the CFL, just like the NFL, a quarterback “has to make all the throws”.

Tebow never could throw accurate mid-range passes, no matter how much he tried to learn. Manziel is a much better passer, just as long as he doesn’t throw the ball to players on the other team. Interceptions can be fixed and from the little he played on Friday it’s clear Manziel still has the speed and elusiveness that made him Johnny Football. Montreal’s head coach, Mike Sherman, recruited Manziel to Texas A&M, coaching him during his redshirt season. Sherman also had a measure of success coaching another untethered, unpredictable quarterback with a propensity for making spectacular plays: Brett Favre.

Any chance for Manziel to be Favre is probably gone. The NFL is unlikely to take another shot given the way things went in his two disastrous Cleveland years. His first game in the CFL didn’t offer a ton of hope he can make it in Canada. But for a few lost moments on Friday night he was Johnny Football again. Perhaps with time and coaching he can be a star once more, even if it is a long way from Texas and a time when he was the biggest thing in college football.

“Only up from here,” he said Friday night.

There’s nowhere else to go.