Johnny Manziel keeps telling on himself. On the Glory Daze podcast this week, the former Browns quarterback said he and Josh Gordon had a game-day routine nobody on the coaching staff knew about: sneak out of the team hotel at 5 in the morning, walk back to Manziel’s building, fire up FIFA, and smoke for hours before reporting for duty.
“I would set an alarm if we had a game day at, like, noon or whatever it was,” Manziel said. “I would leave the team hotel at 5:00am. Me and JG would walk from the downtown Cleveland hotel we were at to my building. We would turn FIFA on and we would rip the f***ing bong all morning and smoke a blunt.”
The kicker is that neither of them was even playing. “He would go play some snaps or he would be suspended and wouldn’t be playing, and I was the backup and I ain’t never touched the field one time after doing that,” Manziel said. Gordon spent those years in and out of suspensions for weed. Manziel lasted two seasons in Cleveland before the Browns cut him loose.
The clip is doing numbers because it is the most Manziel story ever told. A Heisman winner, a first-round pick, sneaking out before noon kickoffs to hotbox an apartment with the team’s most suspended receiver. He has spent years now telling these stories straight, no softening, as a cautionary tale mixed with nostalgia for the chaos.
See also
- NFL Suspends 49ers Owner Jed York 6 Games, Fines Him $500K After Ohio Prostitution Sting
- Former Steelers Coach Mike Tomlin Spent 12 Years Building A Minecraft City
Photos: Josh Gordon via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0; Johnny Manziel via The Blast