Former Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown kicking Cleveland Browns punter Spencer Lanning in the face on a return during the 2014 season opener is one of the most humorous moments in Steelers history. While it didn’t affect him directly, it was a welcome to the NFL type of moment for former Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel.
“My first game ever with Cleveland, Steelers, opening day, on the road. You remember this play probably. Antonio Brown catches a punt return, takes it right up the f***ing middle of the field, our punter is the last one standing. This is my first game ever on a NFL sideline, he splits the middle bro and runs down, sees the punter and is just like, ‘I don’t give a f**k’, he tries to hurdle him and kicks him right in the grill. I’m sitting on the sideline with my headset on and sun flower seeds and I just go, ‘You’ve gotta be f***ing kidding me, this actually happened?'” Manziel said on the Bob Does Sports podcast, vie SteelersNation.com.
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Manziel, who starred at Texas A&M, realized that the level of play was not even close to Saturday’s in the Big 12. Manziel started just one game against the Steelers in his short NFL career, a Week 10 loss in 2015.
Manziel won the Heisman Trophy in 2012 and was expected to be a star in the NFL, but Johnny Football never panned out in the NFL as a lack of maturity and work ethic held him back. He spent just two seasons in Cleveland and never played with an NFL team again. He played in the CFL, AAF and in the Fan Controlled Football League before calling it a career.
A Netflix documentary was released on Manziel last year. The film traces the meteoric rise and precipitous fall of football star Johnny Manziel via interviews with friends, coaches and Manziel himself.
Dan Solomon of Texas Monthly said that the film revealed that Manziel didn’t even bother to watch film in the NFL. He also never studied the playbook at Texas A&M.
“In the film, Manziel talks about how often he studied the playbook at A&M (never) and how many hours of film he watched during his tenure in Cleveland (zero point zero),” Solomon wrote. “He’s hardly the first football player to check out of the game when it ceases to be fun, and toiling in the NFL is famously a whole hell of a lot less fun than playing in college. Not enjoying playing football at the NFL level is an entirely rational response to a very intense—and often downright brutal—workplace environment, but the film makes it clear that old saws like ‘He’s a winner’ or ‘He beat Alabama’ are downright meaningless when it comes to actually being a successful professional quarterback.”