What Manziel’s trade to Montreal says about his NFL future

5:02 am | July 26, 2018 | Go to Source | Author:

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The view from 30,000 feet is rough: Johnny Manziel couldn’t beat out a CFL quarterback. He couldn’t, in fact, get on the field for a single snap in five games for a 2-3 team. Now he is starting over, traded to one of the worst teams in the league with a third of the season already expired.

It’s easy to view this week as a setback for Manziel and his comeback attempt. Late last year, Hamilton Tiger-Cats coach June Jones predicted Manziel would be one of the best players in CFL history. Sunday, the franchise decided it was better off without him. So what happened in between to merit a trade to the last-place Montreal Alouettes?

To hear the Tiger-Cats tell it, the decision was sealed by the record-setting play of starter Jeremiah Masoli and an undeniably massive bounty offered by the Alouettes. In an interview, Tiger-Cats general manager Eric Tillman said he also considered the “human element” of giving Manziel a chance to get on the field. And by all accounts, there was no off-field issue involved.

Are you buying that explanation? Do you really think a team would trade a player it considered a potential future hall of famer for any reason? Or is there reason to fear that Manziel fell far short of the team’s expectations?

In reality, this all makes more sense than it might appear. Manziel hasn’t stumbled. If anything, he has followed the path predicted by those who pay close to attention to the CFL — a league that requires a bigger adjustment for U.S.-born players than many Americans realize. Players in similar positions have described a process of years, not weeks or months, before they were comfortable with the CFL style.

This trade probably puts Manziel in a better spot to begin showing the skills he hopes one day can carry him back to the NFL. He is expected to get his first regular-season action Thursday night against the Edmonton Eskimos (7:30 p.m. ET, ESPN+) and could start as soon as next week.

“This is a decision we struggled with,” Tillman said. “If something had happened to Jeremiah, I’m very confident that Johnny would have come in and played at a high level. He has been great, on and off the field for us. We had no issues at all with him. I’ve had people calling me and asking me that, and the answer is no, no, no.

“For us, this was just a huge deal for us to get, and it will get Johnny on the field soon. The best deals are always win-win for everyone.”

Masoli might not be a familiar name for casual American fans; he played at Oregon and Ole Miss and went to training camp with the San Francisco 49ers in 2011. But he didn’t just outplay Manziel in practice and the preseason. Masoli’s performance, since he assumed the Tiger-Cats’ starting job last season, is nearly unprecedented in league history.

He tied a CFL record by throwing for at least 300 yards in nine consecutive games, dating back to last season. Masoli is also averaging 8.5 yards per rush, the second-highest figure for any CFL player this season with more than one carry. There was every indication that Jones wanted to get Manziel on the field, but there was no way to reasonably do it amid Masoli’s historic run.

“Of all the years I’ve been a part of this league,” Tillman said, “one of the common denominators is that when guys get up here, they are surprised — very — at the quality of athlete of our league. Jeremiah is 5-foot-11 and he probably wasn’t born to play in the NFL. But his skill set is one that is really structured for the spread system, and for our league.”

It’s fair to ask why the Tiger-Cats didn’t hold on to Manziel for insurance against a Masoli injury, unless of course they weren’t as impressed with him as they said they were. I don’t sense that was the case.

As Tillman outlined, there would never be a better time to extract a big return on Manziel. The Tiger-Cats received two first-round draft choices, plus two starting players, in exchange for a quarterback who hadn’t taken a meaningful snap in three years (and two other players).

“Let’s say we had gone toward the status quo,” Tillman said. “There was really no way we were going to go forward in 2019 with both guys. You might try to tell yourself that, but realistically you couldn’t. If you’re sitting there at the end of the year, and Johnny has one year left on his contract, and people know that, with a high degree of success, he would be going back to the NFL, the return we would get would be appreciably less. We just felt this would be the time we could get a premium return.”

So the question of why the Tiger-Cats made this trade can be separated from a referendum on Manziel’s progress. All we really know is that Manziel wasn’t good enough in practice to unseat the best-performing quarterback in the league, at a time when he already was trying to play catch-up.

The good news is that Manziel faces no such obstacle in Montreal. The Alouettes’ revolving door at quarterback — former Oregon starter Vernon Adams Jr. will become their fourth different starter Thursday night — means Manziel will get every opportunity to play immediately. But it’s also important to listen to Manziel’s own words, repeated several times since he arrived in Canada.

“I’ve tempered my expectations to not reach too high,” he said this week. “I want to come in and I want to play solid football. That’s what I want to do. I realize there are going to be some growing pains to get there, because it is a process. I have been away from the game a little bit. I’m excited to get some reps, and I know I’m going to be putting in the time that I need to off the field to expedite that process.”

Per CFL rules, Manziel is locked into his contract through the end of the 2019 season. That mandatory timetable eases the urgency to impress NFL scouts right away. In the big picture, it’s not unreasonable to think that Manziel could get enough starts this year to set himself up for a bigger season in 2019. It won’t happen where he intended, but it can still happen. So it goes.

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