I sometimes wonder, now that all the dust has settled with regard to Manziel, how we should look back at all of that had it been us instead?
In the beginning, as Manziel had early success at aggy, Texas fans grumbled about how Mack Brown only "offered him as a safety." This became an often repeated line and internet joke. This was compounded by (1) our suffering at the QB position ever since (including Mack Brown not returning Jameis Winston's phone calls) and (2) Manziel winning the Heisman (followed the next year by Winston winning it).
But, by my recollection at least, the UT fan group sentiment began to change with each new incident of Manziel acting badly. By the time of Manziel's spectacular flame out in the NFL, we had regained the upper hand with aggy over Maziel and were once again able to point and laugh at them. And his behavior has been only worse since then (to the point of becoming scary). At this point, I dont even know (or care) if aggy is still happy with him or embarrassed by him.
I am somewhat interested, however, in how we look back at that ourselves? How should we? What would our collective position be now if we had offered him as a QB (we were his fav school), he had success here as a QB and won us another Heisman? And yet still became the same jerk that he is today.
If JFF had fulfilled his childhood dreams and become a Longhorn (and assuming Mack would have let him play QB), he would have saved us from much of the on-field suffering we experienced in those days, since much of which was caused by our lack of a QB. If so, he might have/probably would have single-handedly saved Brown's job (for a while longer at least) and possibly even got him another extension (our old AD did love extending his coaches).
The other view is that we dodged a bullet and that, despite our desperation for a quality QB for so many seasons, we are still happy he was never a Longhorn. He simply was not worth the drama.
I tend to think that had Manziel done the same here (win games for us, win the Heisman) that we would be more forgiving of his subsequent troubles. We do that with VY now. While Vince has never been a Manziel-level jerk, he has had multiple embarrassing, self-inflicted problems since he left early for the NFL. Despite all of that, every man, woman and child still forgives him and loves him to this day -- all for what he did for us while he was here.
Do we have a consensus on this?
Or not?
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Last edited: Apr 13, 2018