Johnny Manziel’s NFL career has long stood as one of the most sobering cautionary tales for any player. His talent was undeniable, and his rise was meteoric. But his fall became a case study in how quickly fame, addiction, and poor decisions can dismantle a promising future.
Advertisement
From cocaine use, reckless nights out, rule violations, public controversies, suspensions, and even suicidal ideation in 2016, the former Heisman winner has experienced every pitfall young stars are warned about in college.
Now, years removed from the chaos, a sober Johnny Manziel has chosen to peel back one more layer of that past.
On the latest episode of The Glory Daze podcast, Manziel revisited a moment from 2015. He still feels that the moment is “hilarious to even think about,” but one that also marked the start of an even stricter phase of the NFL’s drug monitoring program.
It all began after a night out for Manziel’s birthday in Cleveland.
“I’ll never forget [my drug test]. Shoutout to Dwayne Bowe… 2015 in Cleveland, on my birthday, we went out, and he mixed up some lean… a couple cups of lean… Of course, I didn’t think they would test me the day after my birthday,” Manziel recalled.
But they did. Manziel indeed got tested. And as he put it bluntly: “I come in like December 7th, yada yada, fail my second test for promethazine.”
Failing that test meant entering what Manziel described as the NFL’s version of probation. “When you fail a drug test in the NFL, they put you in the program pretty much where they just test you more… but they give you one more opportunity for the most part,” he explained.
But it was after that second test, when things got “really, really strict.” That’s when a phrase entered Manziel’s life that he said both he and his old crew still get “traumatized” thinking about: ‘change in location.’
As the name suggests, once the league keeps a tab on your traveling, one has to update the NFL with every ‘change in location.’ Wherever you went — flights, hotels, family visits, training weekends — you had to call the number, log the location, and be available when testers pulled up. “It’s like probation… They’re going to pull up on you,” Manziel explained.
He then intriguingly revealed something few fans ever knew: a loophole that players have exploited for years.
“There was a really off-the-map place in South America you could change your location to where the NFL couldn’t get to with their drug testers,” he said. According to Manziel, a “very good” NFL player started the trend, and eventually, “probably 20% of the guys in the league in the offseason would do their offseason training down there.”
But of course, someone eventually ruined the spot by showing up at a U.S. sporting event while supposedly being off the grid. “After that, it got a lot more strict,” Johnny said.
Hearing all this now, a decade later, is equal parts outrageous and eye-opening. Yet there’s also a silver lining in the fact that the man retelling these stories isn’t running anymore. Manziel is sober, reflective about his struggles, and shares these stories without an ounce of pride.
And as for that mysterious South American safe zone? Well, let’s just hope that the NFL has pinned it on a map by now. If they haven’t yet, we urge them to have a little ‘chat’ with the bad guy turned good guy, Johnny Manziel.
