Even the most casual US sports fan isn’t likely to have forgotten about Johnny Manziel, football’s Charlie Sheen. The latest instalment of Netflix’s sports documentary series Untold devotes an episode to the bad boy quarterback’s controversy-stained rise in college football, his NFL flameout and his off-field tumble into infamy and disgrace. Titled Untold: Johnny Football, the 72-minute runtime barely covers everything, and resolves even less.
For a start, director Ryan Duffy (the Vice media alum who also co-stewarded Untold’s excellent two-part deep dive into college football cat-fishing victim Manti Te’o) could have fast-forwarded through Manziel’s humble Texas small town beginnings and jumped straight to 12 November 2012: the day Manziel led Texas A&M to a shock upset over the vaunted Alabama on the Crimson Tide’s hallowed home turf. That victory, the film rightly points out, didn’t just make Manziel a household name across the US. It also changed the economics at Texas A&M, a military school in the Lone Star hinterlands that had recently jumped into the SEC – the top-level conference known for churning out future pros.
