Johnny Manziel may not be the Cleveland Browns’ starting quarterback Monday night after a new video of him partying in Texas during the team’s bye week surfaced on TMZ on Monday.
“I want to sit down and discuss it before I do a knee jerk and go off on a tangent,” Coach Mike Pettine told reporters Tuesday afternoon. ” … It’s a little easier to handle when it’s a one-time occurrence, but when it’s a repeated pattern of behavior, it’s a concern.”
Pettine said he would speak more fully to the video and to who will start Monday night’s game on Wednesday, but he called the latest Manziel party video “disappointing. Very,” according to Cleveland.com’s Mary Kay Cabot. Pettine indicated that the team had investigated the video and was “still in the process of gathering information.” He added that he had spoken to the team’s owner and general manager and would “get all parties involved this afternoon.”
The coach declined to say whether the team would require Manziel, who spent 10 weeks during the offseason in rehab, to seek help again. The latest problem for Manziel comes less than a month after the NFL investigated an incident involving Manziel and his girlfriend. Manziel was stopped for driving erratically and his girlfriend had bruises on her arm. She said that they were incurred when Manziel tried to stop her from jumping from the vehicle and declined to press changes. Manziel was not charged, but admitted that he had had a couple of drinks that afternoon.
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Since then, Pettine had named Manziel the starter for the rest of the season, but the return to health of Josh McCown, coupled with the new party pictures, changes that dynamic. On Monday night, during a Cleveland charity event, Manziel said little about the video, only that it might be old. The song playing in the video, Cabot points out, was released in mid-March.
“You know there’s all kinds of people that come out,” Manziel said. “Videos can be old. Videos can be all kinds of different things. So like I said, I’m not in a state to be able to speak on it because my focus has been on this today and what really matters is this game on Monday. So that’s where my focus has been. I did get a chance to relax. So I haven’t seen anything like that, and I’m not going to be able to speculate on it right now.”
Asked if the video was old, Manziel said: “I haven’t seen it, so I can’t speak on it.”
McCown told reporters he’d be ready to play, if needed.
“My hope for him is that whatever choices he’s making, they’re healthy choices,” he said of Manziel.
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