Johnny Manziel doesn’t have the arm of Andrew Luck or the size of Cam Newton or the athletic ability of Robert Griffin III. As an NFL prospect, Manziel is far from perfect, and that’s even before we get into the question of whether teams are scared off by some of his off-field activities.
But some NFL team is going to fall in love with Manziel.
Manziel put up absurd numbers in a loss to No. 1 Alabama on Saturday. He completed 28 of 39 passes for 464 yards, with five touchdowns and two interceptions, and added 14 rushing attempts for 98 yards. As Peter King writes at TheMMQB.com today, one NFL scout who was at the game said that there may be some-old school coaches who aren’t ready to buy into the way Manziel plays the quarterback position, but they’re going to have to accept that this is how the quarterback position is played today.
“It’s like Ric Flair once said: ‘You may not like this, but you better learn to love it,’” the scout told King.
As Ric Flair also said, to be the man, you gotta beat the man. And Manziel is gonna be the man for some NFL team next year. There are surely a lot of NFL coaches and general managers who don’t like Manziel, but all it takes is one team that has learned to love him. And when Manziel carves up Nick Saban’s defense, it becomes easy to love him.