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Johnny Manziel's Saturday
For everyone who got tired of Tim Tebowmania after his sophomore year, get ready: the Johnny Manzielorama is going to put that to shame by the time it's done. We're not even through the first offseason with Manziel as the reigning Heisman Trophy winner, and it's already getting dangerously close to overload.
Take Saturday. One day. That single day of the week produced the following events:
- Manziel tweeted with Ole Miss basketball player Marshall Henderson about -- well, about being like Johnny Manziel, basically.
- Manziel shoved a graduate assistant at a scrimmage. During a Twitter conversation with a reader about it, Brent Zwerneman says he wrote about the incident because "rumors were spreading JM had 'hit' a coach or something." (And having followed Zwerneman through the realignment saga and A&M's inaugural year, I think he's generally pretty good on stuff like this, so that probably was happening.)
- Manziel is photographed with 2 Chainz in an Instagram moment that soon goes viral. (HT: DMN)
Again, this is 24 hours' worth of events, dutifully covered by the Texas media in painstaking detail. And of course, that 24 hours of activity brought about its own burst of echo chamber coverage throughout the media. So Grant Teaff, the former coach at Baylor, got asked about the Manziel phenomenon and actually managed to focus on football for a moment. Well ...
It’s got to become a movie someday because how can you go from a second teamer in spring training to Heisman winner the following year. That’s almost impossible.
At this point, the kid's entire life is starting too look like a movie. What would be the difference?
More telling is what Paul Myerberg said in USA Today's item about the weekend kerfuffle, especially when it came to the shoving incident.
Not a huge deal, right?
Right. Except that the quarterback in question is Texas A&M's Johnny Manziel. Oh.
Manziel has gotten a reputation for being something of a bad boy, largely through people talking about how Manziel is something of a bad boy. And so incidents like this -- incidents that would be ignored for practically every other player in the country -- are now blown out of proportion if Manziel is somehow involved. Throw in the pictures with rappers and the tweets to other outspoken athletes out there, and it's a Category 5 media hurricane.
Which is not to say that Manziel doesn't deserve some extra attention, and even some extra scrutiny. That comes with the rather large trophy he held up in December. But it's March. Most of the college football public cannot stand wall-to-wall coverage of every time Manziel does something that would go unnoticed if any other player did it.
And it's a double standard that's not fair to Manziel -- as was shown by the made-up controversy about his taking online classes, something that was probably made necessary at least in part because reporters covering Texas A&M are monitoring his every tweet for signs of what the guy's doing.
It's almost enough to make a fan pine for another First Take segment on Tim Tebow. Almost.
This would see to be something of an issue
Let's listen to Kentucky's new-look offensive staff talking about their wideouts.
"In a perfect world ... we'd like to travel with 10-plus guys. Right now, we've got six total scholarship receivers," said WRs coach Tommy Mainord, who held the same position at Texas Tech the past three seasons.
Ah, well, that's a perfect world he's talking about there. It's a metaphorical thing. That doesn't really exist and doesn't mean that -- oh boy.
This is curious
So, Cyrus Kouandjio, what would you say if asked to compare new starting center Ryan Kelly to old starting center Barrett Jones?
Kouandjio said Kelly, who hails from West Chester, Ohio, was more "strict" than Jones.
I dunno, Jones looks pretty strict to me.
Idaho and New Mexico finally have a home
It's the Sun Belt, which will also take in newly minted FBS members Georgia Southern and Appalachian State. This is great news for Michigan, which will soon lose the distinction of being the only Top 5 team to lose to an FCS school. Sorta.
HEY, BASKETBALL TEAMS, TUBBY SMITH IS AVAILABLE
The former Kentucky coach and recently current Minnesota coach was shown the door after losing to Florida.