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Johnny Manziel To Play In Spring League

February 14th, 2018 at 9:29am CST by Dallas Robinson

Former Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel has agreed to play in the 2018 Spring League, the league announced today. Games will get underway in Austin in mid-April.Johnny Manziel

Manziel was thought to be interested in working out a deal to play in the Canadian Football League during the 2018 campaign, and was in fact offered a contract by the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in January. However, Manziel and his team reportedly weren’t pleased with the terms of the pact, and set a January 31 deadline to ink a new deal. That date has since passed, but the Tiger-Cats were still willing to pursue an agreement with the former first-round pick.

Earlier this week, Manziel appeared on Good Morning America and detailed his struggles with addiction and bipolar disorder. “I was self medicating with alcohol because that’s what I thought was making me happy to help me get out of that depression to a point where I felt like I had some sense of happiness,” Manziel said. “But at the end of the day, when you wake up the next day after a night like that or after going on a trip like that, and you wake up the next day and that’s all gone.”

Manziel is still only 25 years old, but he hasn’t played in the NFL since the 2015 campaign. In eight career starts for the Browns, the former Heisman trophy winner completed 57% of his passes for 1,675 yards, seven touchdowns, and seven interceptions.

The Spring League is a developmental effort comprised of four teams which involves four games in April. The league began in 2017, and notable ex-NFLers such as Greg Hardy, Kellen Winslow, and Ahmad Bradshaw were among the participants.

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