16 startling revelations from the Johnny Manziel Netflix documentary, from a $5 million bender to nearly taking his own life

Manziel suited up for the Antlers at Tivy High School in Kerrville, Texas. In the documentary, Manziel likened the community to the one featured in hit TV show "Friday Night Lights."

"Football is everything in Texas," he says. "If you don't play football, you're either too big of a pussy to play, or you're just not any good."

"The town closes down when it's Friday night and there's a game," he added. "The football team was the lifeline."

By all accounts, including Manziel's, the Tivy football coaches ran a strict program. Practices at 7 a.m. and again after school were par for the course, and opportunities to actually see the field were hard-earned.

So when Manziel made his first start under center during his sophomore year, Kerrville was abuzz over the new quarterback. His mom recalls hearing chatter from the stands and feeling nervous for her son.

But from his very first snap, Manziel shined. He ran the ball from the 25-yard line into the opposing team's end zone for a touchdown, but it was called back on a holding call.

So the very next play, what did he do? Run it into the end zone from the 10-yard line.

Welcome to Johnny Football.

Manziel finished his Tivy career with unbelievable stats. He had thrown for 7,626 yards and 76 touchdowns with only 11 total interceptions, rushed for an additional 4,045 yards and 77 touchdowns, and added 582 receiving yards for another five touchdowns, according to MaxPreps.

Unsurprisingly, Manziel was heavily recruited out of high school. But his favorite team from childhood and his top choice for college — the University of Texas at Austin — hardly gave the 5-foot-11 QB from Kerville a second glance.

"I wanted to play football and the University of Texas," Manziel says in the documentary. "But I'd never really gotten anything other than your basic, normal recruiting letters."

Texas A&M, meanwhile, was big on Mr. Texas Football of 2010. The Aggies offered him a full ride, and after briefly committing to play for the Oregon Ducks, Manziel opted instead to stay in-state.

He took the four-hour drive East from Kerrville to College Station, and the rest was history.

Before his freshman season with the Aggies in 2012 — and before anyone knew who he was or who he'd become — Manziel wound up in a fight in College Station. The police intervened, and when they found a fake ID in Manziel's possession, they brought him to jail.

Manziel says in the documentary that he didn't recall much of what transpired that evening.

"Other than waking. up shirtless on a concrete bench in Bryan County Jail," he admitted. "And they said that wasn't very normal of my character."

"I guess looking back now, maybe it is a little bit normal for my character," Manziel added with a laugh.

But the coaches at Texas A&M had already seen what Manziel could do on the gridiron. And with the pressures of a new head coach and a new-and-improved conference — the mighty SEC — the Aggies needed every advantage they could get.

Kliff Kingsbury, the team's offensive coordinator at the time who has since taken on head coaching roles in the NFL, said it became clear Manziel was "the guy."

"When he got in-line in fall camp, it was like a different human," Kingsbury said. "It was like, 'Alright. Y'all about to see why.'"

His first start — a home game against Florida — didn't go so well, but once Kingsbury resolved to let Manziel "do his thing," he caught fire.

Manziel started gaining steam in the national college football conversation after racking up hundreds of yards of offense in game after game his freshman season. He broke a total offense record long-held by NFL legend Archie Manning, then led the Aggies to a blowout of the Auburn Tigers; suddenly, the kid from Kerrville found himself in consideration for the Heisman Trophy — college football's highest individual honor.

But all the while, Manziel was enjoying a wild lifestyle off the field.

"At A&M, he had a saying 'Win or lose, we booze,'" Nate Fitch, Manziel's close friend at the time who also played football alongside him in high school, recalls in the documentary. "And it was real true."

"People think of athletes as being these super disciplined, on a diet, just being absolutely committed to their craft," he adds.

But that was never Manziel's approach.

"I never saw him look at a playbook, ever," Fitch says. "I've never seen it happen."

"It was as if he was just doing this thing on the side, and the reason wasn't to be badass and win and do all these unbelievable feats," he adds. "It was for what happens after you win."

Ahead of one road game that season, photos of Manziel wearing a Scooby Doo outfit at a party where he'd "obviously had a couple of cocktails," as Kingsbury recalls, surfaced the morning team departed. He was clearly "hungover" at the walkthrough, and Kingsbury warned him: "You better fucking play good."

"He plays one of the best games he's ever played," Kingsbury says. "And for the rest of the season, I always put the ball in his hands."

Manziel and the Aggies marched into Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to face the No. 1 Crimson Tide with hopes to "do the undoable" and "beat the unbeatable," as the quarterback says in the documentary. But no one really thought No. 15 Texas A&M could pull it off — not even the Aggies themselves.

"We have zero expectations to win this game," Manziel says, "And when you have that 'What the fuck does it really matter?' attitude, you play better."

And play better they did. Manziel threw for 253 yards and two touchdowns and rushed for another 92 yards to lead Texas A&M past Nick Saban and mighty Alabama on their home field. The 29-24 win — and Manziel's heroics down the final stretch of the game — catapulted Manziel to near-instant celebrity.

He wasn't sure how to handle it.

"I didn't know how serious it was until I walked outta the locker room," he recalls. "I would always go find my parents. I couldn't find them."

Manziel's mother recalls finding her son through "a mob" of people and seeing a "fear in his eye that I've never seen before."

From that point on, according to Fitch, Manziel struggled to move around in public on his own. Manziel himself describes it as "pure chaos, 24/7, if you stepped out of the house." Kingsbury recalls the quarterback being forced to enroll in online classes "which, for Johnny Football, that's not a good idea."

He led the Aggies to an impressive 11-2 record on the year and a resounding victory in the Cotton Bowl Classic, breaking record after record in the process. And then, of course, Manziel became the first-ever freshman to win the Heisman Trophy — college football's most prestigious individual award — mere days after his 20th birthday.

His younger sister notes in the documentary that Manziel became "a little bit larger than football at that point."

The football program, the larger Aggie community, and even the university itself began to capitalize on the meteoric rise, too. The team store sold his No. 2 jersey — without his last name on the back, of course — and so many sold that Adidas couldn't manufacture them fast enough.

His coach, Kevin Sumlin, earned a massive contract extension at the season's end. Kihngsbury earned a head coaching position at Texas Tech. And Manziel himself was estimated to have brought in a whopping $37 million in media exposure for the school and potentially hundreds of millions in donations.

"There was nobody that was looking sideways once we started winning and having the run we had," Kingsbury says. "I mean, everybody knew that they were gonna profit off this run."

Everybody except Johnny Football — at least not legally.

While Manziel and Fitch were in Miami for the 2012 national championship game, a stranger approached them with a proposition: money in exchange Johnny Football's signature.

Manziel blew him off at first. But then, he clarified: $3,000 for one signature. That caught Manziel's attention.

"I was just tired as hell of not having any money," Manziel recalls. "And I sure as hell saw 45 million No. 2 Adidas jerseys sold. It didn't make any sense and I had a bone to pick."

"I have a deep hatred against the NCAA," he adds.

So he goes for it — despite the risks of breaking the NCAA's rules in such blatant fashion. Someone rents out a room at the famous Fontainebleau hotel, leaves him merchandise to sign, and then gives him the code to a safe containing $30,000.

"Once that happened for the first time, it was like 'Game on,'" Manziel says.

He and Fitch would fly to Miami monthly, and eventually, Manziel said he had 100 grand in cash stuffed under his bed. And the two spent it living a life of fame and luxury — partying at LIV Nightclub, spending tens of thousands on courtside seats and Super Bowl tickets, and hanging out with celebrities like LeBron James and Drake.

But they were 20 years old, and they had no guidance.

"All I wanted to do was get famous," Manziel told Insider.

Just before Manziel's sophomore season at Texas A&M, outlets started reporting that the superstar quarterback had been accused of making money in exchange for signatures. Of course, that was true, but Manziel and Fitch — his manager of sorts at the time — had a plan.

"The part you have to conceal is money being paid," Fitch explains.

Manziel says in the documentary that he would give his grandfather the cash he earned from signing sessions, and grandpa would return the same amount to him in a check that he could deposit in a bank account without raising suspicion.

"My grandpa's a fucking G," Manziel says.

Then Fitch says he "invented a narrative that his family was vastly wealthy." And the national media bought it: Johnny Football, descendant of oil barons.

Manziel evaded serious consequences for his offense, earning a half-game suspension from the NCAA to start the 2013 season. He recalls going into the punishment "with the biggest smirk on my face ever."

"They penalized him half a game for failure to prevent the commercialization of his name," Fitch recalls with a laugh. "And we went right back to signing autographs."

By the time his sophomore season rolled around, Manziel had become invaluable to many individuals and institutions. In many ways, he was bigger than his team, his school, and his sport — and he internalized that as any 20-year-old kid would be apt to.

"Whether people like to say it or not, I was bigger than College Station," Manziel says.

But according to his father, Paul, "what Johnny needed was to be held accountable."

His coaches couldn't rein him in, with Kingsbury noting that he "felt you always had to be careful on trying to tell Johnny how to live his life."

Paul notes that the school couldn't afford to "take him out and waste a season," even if that was what would have been best for Manziel himself. So long as he played well, he was untouchable.

"All of the expectation, the partying, the NCAA stuff, all the A&M, all the pressure — I think it changed him," Paul adds.

Despite partying, rule-breaking, and other forms of debauchery, Manziel played well enough in his second and final season with the Aggies to become a top NFL prospect. His team finished 8-4 on the season, but back then, it didn't matter to Manziel; he was busy looking ahead to life in the pros.

As soon as Manziel opted to leave college station and go pro, his agent, Erik Burkhardt, launched an intensive campaign to clean up the former Aggie's image and help him get picked in the first round of the draft.

Manziel went to San Diego for pre-draft training, limited his social media posts to photos and videos of himself working out, gained weight, and stopped drinking. Burkhardt hoped that such a display of dedication to his craft would help teams consider Manziel as their franchise's future.

"I was drug testing him every other week," Burkhardt says in the documentary. "I know that's gonna come up and I want to be able to go 'Here's 25 drug tests — I've been testing him because when I signed him, I didn't know what the hell I was dealing with, but I wanted you to have peace of mind.'"

And, for a while, Manziel actually adhered to the plan. But just a week before the NFL Combine in Indianapolis, he slipped up by partying in California.

"I didn't remember much of the night," Manziel recalls. "I woke up in a hotel room and didn't know how I got there."

He also didn't know if he was going to pass the drug test he had to take once he got to Indianapolis.

Though his agent strongly recommended against him attending the NFL Combine, Manziel was adamant about participating in the pre-draft event. But Burkhardt knew that if his client failed the drug test there, he'd lose all hope of going in the first round, and may not get drafted at all.

Burkhardt went so far as to instruct Manziel's parents to check into the hospital with fake chest pain so that their son would have a believable excuse to leave the combine and avoid a drug test. But Manziel had other ideas.

"I'm gonna chug a gallon of fucking water. I'll piss this shit out," Burkhardt recalls Manziel telling him. "Trust me. I've been passing these tests at A&M for a while."

Burkhardt later learned that Manziel only passed those tests in College Station by having the Aggies' fourth-string quarterback pee on his behalf. But by then, Manziel's plan was already in motion.

"I get like three gallons of water, a bunch of Pedialyte, and four drug tests," Burkhardt says. "There's, like, six hotels at the combine, so every team's staying at these same hotels. We get on the elevator and oop! Two general managers and a college scouting director get on the elevator. I'm holding the drug tests, trying to hide them. We go to my room."

"We're holding his piss up in the bathroom of my hotel room and it's a little ambiguous. Johnny's just crushing liquids. We take our second one. It's a little lighter. So he's like 'ha ha ha, we got this shit.' I was like, 'Keep drinking,'" he added. "By the way, he of course crushed his interviews. In fact, rave reviews out of the combine on how great he did."

Manziel recalled the incident as "a very, very scary thing — one that I think snapped me out of it [partying, drugs] for a little bit."

But, as had become a theme in Manziel's life, getting through it "unscathed" just encouraged him to "let loose a little bit more."

As the 2014 NFL Draft approached, buzz had built that Manziel would wind up getting selected in the first round. In fact, some even suspected he could become the No. 1 overall pick.

Billboards has popped up around Houston urging the Texans to use their coveted first pick to bring Manziel back to the Lone Star State. And as fate would have it, Manziel found himself at a charity event alongside the team owner and his wife.

"Johnny ends up donating his own money to the cause," Burkhardt recalls. "It goes phenomenal."

"The next day, I get a call," he continues. "He was golfing today at River Oaks Country Club, and it got back to the owner's family that Johnny, by hole five, had taken his shirt off, 'looked intoxicated,' and broke multiple clubs over his knee and threw 'em in the pond."

"There goes Houston."

Manziel and his representatives had "no idea" where he would wind up as they arrived on the draft floor in New York City, Burkhardt says in the documentary. But once the Jacksonville Jaguars selected fellow quarterback Blake Bortles with the third pick of the evening, Manziel was convinced that he'd be heading back to Texas to join "America's Team" — the Dallas Cowboys.

Instead, he waited with growing anxiety as team after team passed on him. His dad notes that "a lot of teams did their homework" and wanted to avoid the risk that would come with drafting a person as volatile as Johnny Football.

But the Browns were willing to take a chance on the electric quarterback. They moved up four spots in the draft and selected Manziel with the 22nd overall pick.

And from that point on, the city of Cleveland staked all of the hopes of its wayward football team on Manziel.

Manziel says in the documentary that it didn't take him very long to realize he wouldn't be happy in Cleveland. Without the familiarity, structure, and camaraderie built into college football, the Browns' supposed savior struggled.

"I had every single thing that I could've ever wanted; You have money, you have fame, you're a first-round draft pick battling for a starting quarterback position," Manziel says. "But when I got everything that I wanted, I think I was the most empty that I've ever felt inside."

He fell short on and off the field. He told Insider viewers of the documentary will "see a little bit more of the personal hectic side of what was really going on in my life."

"When I got to Cleveland, I wasn't in this head space to be able to just go play football," Manziel told Insider. "I was struggling to get out of bed in the morning. I was struggling to fight thoughts and feelings that I had never really had before in my life."

"I'm supposed to be the savior," he adds in the documentary. "I'm just looking for a good day."

Soon enough, the crushing weight of expectations and a serious depressive episode made him desperate to "get out of being Johnny Football," as he says in the documentary. He showed up late to team meetings, refused to watch tape, and fell out of the starting quarterback spot.

Manziel continued partying on nights when he should've been preparing for games and, unlike in college, it was showing on the field.

His family and Burkhardt encouraged him to go to rehab, and when he returned to the team, it appeared as though the hiatus may have been exactly what Manziel needed to step into the role of savior at long last.

But the changes didn't stick, and after several run-ins with the law, Cleveland finally parted ways with the former star less than two years after trading up to draft him.

As photos of Manziel during his late-night escapades increasingly found their way to tabloid covers and gossip websites, it became clear he had turned to alcohol and drugs as an escape. He mentions using cocaine and OxyContin regularly in the months following his departure from the Browns, adding that he lost 40 pounds in a nine-month span.

Burkhardt cut ties with him shortly thereafter, and in the documentary, his family recalls feeling helpless as they watched Manziel's life spiral further out of control. Eventually, after he repeatedly refused to return to rehab, Manziel lost his family, too.

"The people closest to me were in the mindset of 'We have to let him go,'" Manziel says in the documentary. "And when that happened, it was full-blown 'I'm gonna rub this whole thing in your fucking face.'"

"You think you've seen something now?" he adds. "You haven't seen shit yet."

Manziel says he ramped up his drug use to "a constant, daily thing" for the first time in his life. He spent nearly $5 million on a prolonged bender and ignored his Bipolar Disorder after taking offense to his initial diagnosis.

"I wanted it to get as bad as humanly possible to where it made sense, and it made it seem like an excuse and an out for me," Manziel says in the documentary.

While reflecting on this period of his life in the documentary, Manziel recognizes that he was engaging in "direct self-sabotage" in an effort "to burn this thing down." He nearly succeeded in doing so several months after purchasing a firearm.

"The plan was to take my life," Manziel says in the documentary.

He attempted suicide, but when he pulled the trigger, his gun misfired. He says "still, to this day, I don't know what happened."

"The last thing I want is anybody to feel any type of sympathy or any of that," Manziel told Insider, adding later that "the blame falls squarely on my shoulders, and it's one that I accept."

Manziel left Los Angeles without knowing where he should go or to whom he should turn. He wound up on his parents' doorstep.

He's been on the road to recovery ever since he returned home, and Manziel says in the documentary that he's now "on the pursuit of happiness in a way more simplistic form than I was years ago."

He tells Insider doing so involves living "a more normal life"; spending time with family, golfing, and enjoying his new normal in Arizona.

But he's not naive.

"I know that I'm still gonna walk down the street or go to a restaurant or go to a football game and people are still gonna recognize me," Manziel told Insider. "But at the end of the day, I wanna live a more normal, simplistic lifestyle now. I'm finding things that truly do make me happy without having to be in a spotlight every day."