Johnny Manziel: Father attempted to negotiate Texas A&M return for $3 million in 2014

Former Texas A&M quarterback and 2012 Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel made a surprising revelation on Wednesday on the Club Shay Shay podcast with Shannon Sharpe: His father once tried to broker a $3 million deal on his behalf while Manziel was still in college.

In the pre-NIL era, Manziel claims such an occurrence was relatively commonplace.

“I’m leaving to go to the draft. I’ll paint a picture for you,” Johnny Manziel said. “It’s the spring of 2014, December 2013, right in there about December/January, I’m getting ready to make this decision on if I’m going to the NFL Draft or if I’m going to stay. And I found this out five years later from my dad.

“But 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 says this is as true today as he did when he told me.”

Manziel, of course, would not end up staying in college. He departed early for the 2014 NFL Draft, where he was a first-round pick and the No. 22 overall selection.

But the entire interaction between his father and Sumlin seemed to sit poorly with the family.

“He comes to Sumlin, he asks him for X amount, Sumlin pfff,” Johnny Manziel said. “He had this ego about him that what we built, ‘we,’ was all him. And then you start that next year, OK, I leave, decide to go to the NFL. This deal doesn’t work. Kevin Sumlin kind of blows us off, we can do this without you type of vibe.

“So the fall comes around, 2014, A&M football season. Kenny Hill is named our starting quarterback. We win our first five games of the year, we’re 5-0, we’re Top 10 in the country. I ain’t getting no love in the program.”

Sharpe quickly rewound the conversation to bring it back around to the $3 million offer. Because while it’s certainly not unheard of, you don’t often get athletes on the record talking about deals being negotiated in the pre-NIL era.

Manziel seemed nonplussed by the conversation.

“Went on for 30, 40 years before,” Johnny Manziel said. “It was the same way that was happening when you were getting recruited back in the day.

“Just keep it in cash, throw it somewhere. We’ll get it later. We don’t need it right now. But for my security if something happens for two years down the road. And my dad did this without me knowing. And I ain’t mad at him about it for nothing. It’s the way the business worked back then. 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.”

While Manziel’s revelation is hardly surprising, it’s interesting in light of how NIL has brought these types of dealings to the surface, above board.