Last weekend a video surfaced of the Browns then-starting quarterback Johnny Manziel holding champagne while at a party. Normally that’d be no big deal—who cares that he’s having fun during the bye week—except that Manziel went to rehab earlier this year, presumably because of a drinking problem.
Johnny Manziel’s response to the video? “Videos can be old.” But while it is true that videos can be old, this one wasn’t. In the video you can hear a song that was only released in March (Manziel entered rehab in January and left in April), and the caption of the video referenced lyrics in a Future and Drake song from two months ago. Shortly afterwards the Browns demoted Manziel to the third string.
That all sounds bad enough—a guy who seemingly has a drinking problem out partying, who was also questioned by police after a roadside argument with his girlfriend, who Browns leadership clearly doesn’t trust—but it’s even worse.
On the Fox pregame show this morning, Jay Glazer reported that not only did Manziel lie to the Browns about the video, he also asked other people to lie to the Browns too:
He lied to the Cleveland Browns. And what I mean by that is he told the Browns that video was old. And then, making it worse, he called the people involved with that and said, “Hey, cover this up for me, make sure they think it’s old as well.” That is why Johnny Manziel has been demoted all the way to number three.
Asking others to tell an easily disprovable lie to a team that was hesitant to make him the starting quarterback in the first place? That was ... not smart.
[FOX]
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