Alright, so today I decided to actually look into something I’ve wondered about now and then: the specifics of Johnny Manziel’s rookie contract. Remember all that buzz when he came into the league? I figured I’d spend a bit of time trying to nail down the actual figures and terms that were reported back then.
First thing I did was just sit down at my computer. Opened up a search engine, pretty standard stuff. I typed in a few variations, things like “johnny manziel rookie contract amount” and “manziel browns contract details 2014”. You know how it goes, just trying to find the right keywords.
Got a whole load of results back, naturally. Lots of sports news articles from that time, some retrospective pieces, forum discussions. Had to kind of wade through the noise. A lot of articles were more about his performance or off-field stuff, which wasn’t what I was after right now. I needed the contract specifics.
I started clicking on links that looked like they were from reputable sports news sources around 2014, when the contract would have been signed. Tried to find the initial reports.
Here’s what I pieced together:
It took a bit of cross-referencing, checking multiple articles to see if the numbers lined up. Here’s the gist of what I found:
- Team: Cleveland Browns. That much I remembered clearly.
- Year Drafted: 2014. He was a first-round pick, number 22 overall.
- Contract Length: Standard for a first-rounder, it was a four-year deal.
- Total Value: The figure reported most often was around $8.2 million to $8.25 million for the four years. Give or take a few thousand, different reports had slightly different numbers, but all in that ballpark.
- Guaranteed Money: This is usually the most important part. The reports consistently mentioned the guaranteed amount being somewhere around $4.3 million. That usually includes the signing bonus.
- Signing Bonus: Yes, there was a signing bonus, seemed like it was just over $4 million, which makes sense as that formed the bulk of the guaranteed money.
So, that was the process. Just some basic searching, filtering through results, and noting down the key numbers that kept popping up in reliable reports from that period. It wasn’t super complicated, mostly just took a little patience to find consistent information.
It’s interesting to put actual numbers to that whole situation. All the hype, the expectations… and then you see the contract details laid out. Puts things in a certain perspective. Anyway, mission accomplished for today’s little research task. Got the details logged down.
