Johnny Manziel Wins Heisman With Performance of Year

Tonight Johnny Manziel won the Heisman trophy.

Period.

If you vote for anyone else, you're blind, deaf, and stupid.

Or a Bama fan.

Manziel's performance on the road tonight was the best big game performance by any player all season. The fact that a redshirt freshman sliced and diced a Nick Saban defense for 345 total yards passing and rushing is downright incomprehensible.

It's amazing.

It's the perfect capstone to the game of the year.

I didn't think it was possible there'd be a better game than Bama-LSU all season. Then it happened seven days later.

I'm still in awe.

The fact that Manziel, a redshirt freshman, just led his team to a road win over the number one team in the country in their first season in the SEC is the feverish dream of the most red Aggie on earth.

That. Just. Happened.

And now that it's happened, Manziel has to be the Heisman favorite.

He's now passed for over 2780 yards and rushed for 1014 more.

That's 3794 total yards with two games remaining.

Putting those numbers into context, Tebow put up 3970 total offensive yards when he won the Heisman trophy as a sophomore. It was a season's performance I thought I'd never see the equal of and Manziel has already rushed for more yards than Tebow did in that year. He's going to throw for more yards as well. And Manziel's win on the road at Alabama dwarfs any win that Tebow had as a sophomore, when his Gators went 9-3 in the regular season.  

Manziel has also thrown for many more yards than Cam Newton did in his Heisman season and he'll likely pass him in total yards as well. In 2010 Cam Newton put up 4327 total offensive yards. I believed we'd never see another season its equal for the rest of our lives.

Now Manziel is likely to eclipse Cam Newton's total yards as well.

This means that Manziel is likely to put up more total yards than either Tim Tebow or Cam Newton did in their Heisman trophy seasons. Which means Manziel is on pace to have the greatest single season of any quarterback in SEC history.

Think about this for a moment.

It's a truly amazing story.

Before this game I wrote that if Manziel found a way to go on the road at Bryant-Denny Stadium and win, something only Cam Newton and Auburn and last year's LSU team have managed to do in the past four seasons, he'd deserve the Heisman trophy.

Now there's no doubt.

He deserves the Heisman trophy. Not just for what he did at Bryant-Denny, but for what he's done all season and just accomplished at Alabama. It was a performance for the ages, a win that will reverberate through the Aggie ages until eventually there are 300,000 A&M fans who claim to have been in Tuscaloosa on this day.

But that's for future contemplation.

The more immediate question is this, will Manziel break out the Scooby Doo costume in College Station tonight? And if he does, where will his night rank in the annals of SEC quarterback celebration nights? (Please send pictures for the rest of us, the mere mortals). Further question, how many months of your life -- assuming you live to be 80 or more -- would you give up to be Johnny Manziel this week in College Station? I mean, if you live to be 90, this week alone has to be worth six months, right? I can't imagine that eighty-nine and six months to ninety is an extraordinary time.

Anybody else wish CBS had a camera on this blonde during the game?

Other questions, what is Kliff Kingsbury doing tonight? Is he even going home? I'm picturing him already at the Kappa Kappa Gamma house with an on deck circle outside the room he's taken over for the night. He's probably wearing his headset and nothing else, still calling plays that only he can hear. "Red skirt, audible, you kiss white top, Scooby 46..."  

In the meantime, the holy trinity of A&M athletics in this 2012 season, Kevin Sumlin, Manziel, and the SEC, has taken the college football universe by storm. Remember all those who said that A&M couldn't compete in the SEC? Not since Columbus proved the earth wasn't flat has a theory been more soundly defeated in the space of a fall. This isn't the kind of win that fades, this is the kind of win that continues to grow each year, a line of SEC demarcation, a time line forever dividing what was and what will be. 

This was the day that Scooby Football become a bona fide national star and A&M served notice it's going to become a legit national power.  

Somewhere back in Texas, Longhorn fans are nervous as hell. They'll pretend that they aren't, try to downgrade this win and claim it's no big deal, but secretly they know that everything changed tonight. That their puny narrative about A&M not being a good fit for the SEC gave up the ghost tonight. The Longhorns can hear that train a comin' and they're standing in a dark tunnel with nowhere to go. How big was this win for A&M? A desperate Texas might even fire Mack Brown because of it.

Tonight the Aggies served notice that they're here to stay in the SEC.

And they made Bama fans cry.

Which means the rest of us SEC fans love you too.

Gig'em.

Written by
Clay Travis is the founder of the fastest growing national multimedia platform, OutKick, that produces and distributes engaging content across sports and pop culture to millions of fans across the country. OutKick was created by Travis in 2011 and sold to the Fox Corporation in 2021. One of the most electrifying and outspoken personalities in the industry, Travis hosts OutKick The Show where he provides his unfiltered opinion on the most compelling headlines throughout sports, culture, and politics. He also makes regular appearances on FOX News Media as a contributor providing analysis on a variety of subjects ranging from sports news to the cultural landscape. Throughout the college football season, Travis is on Big Noon Kickoff for Fox Sports breaking down the game and the latest storylines. Additionally, Travis serves as a co-host of The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, a three-hour conservative radio talk program syndicated across Premiere Networks radio stations nationwide. Previously, he launched OutKick The Coverage on Fox Sports Radio that included interviews and listener interactions and was on Fox Sports Bet for four years. Additionally, Travis started an iHeartRadio Original Podcast called Wins & Losses that featured in-depth conversations with the biggest names in sports. Travis is a graduate of George Washington University as well as Vanderbilt Law School. Based in Nashville, he is the author of Dixieland Delight, On Rocky Top, and Republicans Buy Sneakers Too.