Manziel is one of many athletes who have been put on a pedestal. Courtesy of Bleacher Report.com

If you follow sports closely, you will recognize the name Johnny Manziel when it’s either spurted out on Sports Center every ten minutes or just in a normal day with friends or co-workers.

This past year’s Heisman winner has been part of a lot of controversy this summer with his partying lifestyle and alleged “drug-use”.

And more recently his autograph signing scandal that occurred during Texas A&M’s 41-13 Cotton Bowl victory over the Oklahoma Sooners this past January.

It was leaked that Manziel had signed up to thousands of autographs for some sort of price and that this may not have been the only incident.

It is a well-known fact that college athletes are not allowed to profit from any sort of signatures or products that have their name on it or have been endorsed by said athlete.

There will always be the controversy of whether or not the NCAA profits too much on athletes like Manziel, Jadaveon Clowney of the South Carolina Gamecocks and many others.

And if those athletes should see some of that money. But that’s not what we’re looking at right now.

Manziel, being a young 20 year old who goes to school at a big southern school and the face of the football team, should be allowed to do what he wants as long as he does what he’s supposed to on the field and academically.

With all of the pressure most college kids feel from just classes and some activities, one can only imagine how hard it is to do that and then have everybody in the country just waiting for you to mess up. So let Manziel be a bro and do his thing.

If I were in the position of being a college athlete at a school like A&M, I would want everyone to think higher of me and I would want to get away with little things like missing homework assignments, being able to drink underage and not have a true care in the world except for next weeks game.

Manziel and other college athletes spend so much of their childhood and early adulthood to become the best athlete they can be and when they get to college they should have every right to be on a higher pedestal than those who have not put in all that work to become a college athlete.

I feel bad for Manziel, the media is on his case 24/7 and if he slips or is seen to be “partying” too much, then the school has to clean it up somehow and make sure he doesn’t stay in the spotlight as much.

But for Manziel, that seems too hard for him to do because he just wants to be a college kid and have fun, but being the face of a big school is pretty hard to do that. If he acts negatively then the school gets negative reviews and it doesn’t look good on them.

For bigger schools, you spend millions of dollars on these athletes to come to your school and make your sport programs better and eventually get that money back and better your school as a whole. So schools should want players like Johnny “football” to just focus on their sport and not put that much effort on academics.

It sounds bad, but like I said, that’s why they are there, to win games for your school. And if paying someone to make sure that player passes in order for them to put more effort in the weight room then so be it.

However, at Hartford, even though we are a division one school, we are not seen as a “power-house” in the NCAA.

Unless we get some super star athlete like we have in the past like Vin Baker or Jeff Bagwell, then the students and athletes are very much on the same pedestal.

There are incidents where athletes are able to miss class because of their games and that is totally acceptable, but there is no reason that an athlete at Hartford should be able to get away with being reckless and their reason for that is because they are a Hartford athlete.

Because we are such a small school, we need to have more a connectedness between students and athletes and not separate each other from one another.

All students need to go to games, and athletes need to respect the students and acknowledge that they are part of this school.

So let the big time athletes be themselves and fool around because they deserve it with the winning they do and the money they bring their school. As for Hartford athletes, just keep going out on your field, win those games and show what we can do.