Browns owner Jimmy Haslam didn’t give the order to draft Johnny Manziel. Unless he did.
Despite an insistence from G.M. Ray Farmer that Haslam “at no point demanded, requested, tried to influence the process in any way,” quarterbacks coach Dowell Loggains said Thursday that, after Manziel sent Loggains a “come and get me” text, Haslam issued the directive.
“As soon as that happened, Mr. Haslam said, ‘Pull the trigger. We’re trading up to go get this guy,'” Loggains told Bo Mattingly of ESPN Arkansas, via Mary Kay Cabot of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Loggains explained that the text from Manziel said, “‘I wish you guys would come get me. Hurry up and draft me because I want to be there. I want to wreck this league together.'”
It’s not a surprise. At all. Haslam wants to run the show without leaving obvious fingerprints, since he knows he’s not really qualified to run the show. So he’ll run the show without carrying the title of G.M. and if/when it all falls apart he can hire a new G.M. and continue to run the show.
In other words, Haslam is doing what Jerry Jones should have been doing since 1989.