Whatever Happened to Johnny Football?

It would have been a laughable question a month ago, but is Johnny Manziel actually underrated?

By Chris Landers

Nick De La Torre/AP

Johnny Manziel was a revelation last season, to the point where — for all the constant hype and all the hardware — it’s still hard to understate just how great he was. His 2012 campaign was quite possibly the single greatest offensive display college football has ever seen: over 5,000 total yards and 47 total touchdowns while completing 68% of his passes against the best defensive conference in the country.

Cut those numbers in half and it would’ve been an impressive and exciting debut for a redshirt freshman on a team transitioning to the SEC. And the cultural storm that is Johnny Football only grew over the summer, as the weight of expectation started to crush the 19-year-old who enjoyed relative anonymity just nine months prior. But despite the laughably hyperbolic media frenzy, a funny thing has happened as the 2013 season wears on: Johnny Manziel — yes, that Johnny Manziel — is the most underrated player in the country.

After the Aggies fell to Alabama in the new Game of the Century, Texas A&M — and its iconoclast quarterback — fell out of the national consciousness a bit. So you’d be forgiven for not noticing that Manziel, in a lot of ways, has been even better than his Heisman-winning freshman season. To reiterate: the guy set the world on fire the way no one ever has, and came back even better.

The numbers bear this out. He’s on pace for more passing yards and a better completion percentage than 2012, and although his rushing numbers are slightly down, that’s a bit misleading. Take his first two games against Rice (played only a few series) and Sam Houston State (only seven carries in a game that quickly became a laugher), and here are his rushing averages: 93 yards and one touchdown per game on over seven yards per rush.

That’s slightly down from the video game numbers he put up last season (and really, that might be doing a disservice to video games), but given the uptick in passing yards and the increased burden he’s had to carry, you can make the argument that Manziel is on pace for an even better season.

And that’s the thing that no one seems to want to acknowledge about Manziel: He’s a one-man wrecking crew on a team that probably doesn’t deserve him. The Aggies are loaded at wideout, which certainly helps after the graduation of Ryan Swope and Uzome Nwachukwu, but Texas A&M lacks elite talent around their superstar. Their defense has been shaky at best and dreadful at worst, giving up 49 points to the Crimson Tide and over 30 in consecutive games against Arkansas and Ole Miss. Kevin Sumlin deserves a ton of credit for the recruiting classes he’s bringing to College Station, but the team surrounding Manziel would be middling at best in the brutal SEC West.

The nation is largely sick of hearing about Johnny Football, and there’s not a small amount of truth in that. He’s been entitled, he’s been childish, and he’s seemingly gone out of his way to welcome the criticism that inevitably finds him. But that shouldn’t diminish just how transcendent Jonathan Manziel is on a football field. Because when all is said and done, he just might be the best player in the history of college football, and we’ll have been too disillusioned to notice.