Former Texas A&M Aggies quarterback Johnny Manziel certainly has told some wild stories over the years concerning his time in College Station, Texas, from his autograph scandal that got him suspended for a whole half to his using the urine of a backup quarterback to pass all of his drug tests in college.
The 2012 Heisman Trophy winner left the Aggies after his redshirt sophomore season and says when he was deciding on his future, his father, Paul, stepped in and talked to then-head coach Kevin Sumlin, attempting to secure a big bag for his son to return to school.
‘It’s the spring of 2014, December 2013,’ Manziel said during an interview with Shannon Sharpe, for his podcast Club Shay Shay. ‘I’m getting ready to make this decision on if I’m going to the NFL draft or if I’m going to stay. My dad went and had a meeting with Kevin Sumlin. And pretty much went to him man to man and was like, ‘We’ll take $3 million and we’ll stay for the next two years.’
‘And my dad did this without me knowing. And I ain’t mad at him about it for nothing.’
Manziel eventually left school and was drafted in the first round of the 2014 NFL draft by the Cleveland Browns.
Manziel also said that schools, even a decade ago, had a ‘bag man’, someone known for handing out cash to players and sometimes to recruits to secure a commitment.
‘It’s the way the business worked back then,’ Manziel said. ‘There was a bag man. There was a bag man at LSU. There was a bag man at ‘Bama. There was a bag man at every school around the country if you were competing for a national title. It is what it was, and it was always that way until we’re into the NIL portion of everything now, the way it should be.’
