The Johnny Manziel era has officially begun in the podcast industry.
On the 10th anniversary of Manziel’s infamous NFL rookie year, the once-great college football star quarterback is trying to revisit the glory days. His new podcast, “Glory Daze,” launches Thursday, alongside Almost Friday Media. Manziel is now on a mission to land interesting guests for his episodes.
And there is one figure in particular that Manziel admits would be his “dream guest:” hip-hop artist Aubrey Drake Graham, aka Drake.
“I’ve been friends with Drake for a long time, so it would be really cool to sit down and have him on and talk about some of our relationships and some of his life a little bit, so I think that would probably be a dream guest,” Manziel told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview.
Drake has been a leading figure in the genre for well over a decade. But this past summer, his reputation changed in the eyes of some fans.
Drake performs at a concert in St. Louis. (Prince Williams/Wireimage/Getty Images)
Drake has been at the center of the biggest rap feud of 2024, and arguably, the biggest in recent years, with a back-and-forth series of diss tracks between him and rival Kendrick Lamar. The feud resulted in a total of nine diss tracks between the two rap stars this past summer.
Drake was on the receiving end of one of the diss tracks that soared as high as any other in the genre’s history, when Kendrick released “Not Like Us” on May 4. It has already accumulated over one billion total listens across multiple platforms.
By Aug. 25, “Not Like Us” had over 700 million streams on Spotify. It was the fastest rap song to reach the milestone, taking only 112 days. In its first 24 hours on YouTube, the music video peaked at 1.5 million views per hour.
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Lamar and his hit song, due to its content, enjoyed all that exposure at Drake’s expense.
But if Drake does end up agreeing to go on Manziel’s new podcast, he says he wouldn’t even bother mentioning the feud with Lamar, not even to get Drake’s side of the story.
“I would stay away from it all together, it’s such a small point,” Manziel said. “It’s something people have made a big point out of, but in the grand scheme of things it’s such a small blip on his life and his career and what he’s done. So I probably wouldn’t.”
Still, Manziel admits that he’s followed the situation very closely this year.
Johnny Manziel of the Texas A&M Aggies takes the stage after he was picked by the Cleveland Browns during the first round of the 2014 NFL Draft at Radio City Music Hall, May 8, 2014, in New York City. (Elsa/Getty Images)
“It was kind of a viral thing that went for a couple of months there, for a while, so you know, I definitely was following it a little bit,” Manziel said.
The popularity that Lamar has earned from the feud, as many have declared him the winner of the rap battle, will culminate in the performance of a lifetime in early 2025. On Feb. 9, Lamar will perform the first Super Bowl halftime show of his career at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans.
Fans will be clamoring for him to perform “Not Like Us” during the show, a show that will be watched by well over 100 million people.
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“I think it’s cool, obviously it’s a great [thing] for him, and it will be a great performance and the Super Bowl always has an amazing halftime show,” Manziel said of Lamar’s inevitable performance.
Manziel has a close tie to Drake, dating all the way back to the peak of the former quarterback’s stardom in the early-to-mid 2010s.
Drake was one of Manziel’s biggest supporters when he was coming out of college at Texas A&M and entering the NFL Draft. Drake’s endorsement went so far that he released a single titled “Draft Day” dedicated to Manziel, a 2014 first-round pick by the Cleveland Browns. The song even headlined a soundtrack to a major motion picture of the same name, and played during the credits after a fictional story of a star quarterback who ended up falling in the draft, like Manziel did.
But Drake’s endorsement of the former pro and 2012 Heisman Trophy winner did not do any good for the rapper’s credibility.
Drake greets Johnny Manziel during the NCAA Men’s Final Four Semifinal between the Kentucky Wildcats and the Wisconsin Badgers at AT&T Stadium, April 5, 2014, in Arlington, Texas. (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
Manziel’s NFL career ended after just two disappointing seasons before a series of personal issues affected his life for many years to come. These issues included substance addiction and depression. Some theorized that Manziel had fallen victim to “The Drake Curse,” which is a virally-recorded pattern of Drake’s interactions with star athletes and pro sports teams preceding unfortunate failures.
Other theorized victims of the Drake curse include Serena Williams at the 2015 U.S. Open, the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors, and MMA fighter Conor McGregor after a humiliating loss to Khabib Nurmagomedov in October 2018.
However, Manziel said he hasn’t looked at it that way. The former quarterback takes accountability for his own actions resulting in how his career panned out, and believes it all came down to him. In fact, Manziel has even gone out of his way to apologize to Drake for crashing out of the NFL so badly while representing the hip-hop star.
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“I don’t think I treated Drake the way that I should have, with [him] representing the clothes that I was wearing and his OVO brand and his label and everything. At that point in time, I was so selfish that I was dragging everybody that was tied to me through the mud,” Manziel previously said on Shannon Sharpe’s podcast in February.
“I owe those people an apology and, hopefully, one day down the line, I’ll be able to have the opportunity as a man to be able to look him in the eye and be able to do that.”
Former NFL stars Antonio Brown and Le’Veon Bell leave the stage after Brown spoke in support of Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally Saturday in Latrobe, Pa. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Now, Manziel is hoping for future interactions with Drake on an episode of “Glory Daze.”
The podcast is Manziel’s latest venture into the media industry after being the subject of a critically praised Netflix documentary focused on his football downfall and struggles with addiction.
Manziel is entering a competitive space of sports podcasts run by popular former athletes. But his approach to standing out is to highlight the dark side of sports and common mental health issues for athletes, just as much as the fun and wins.
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“For a lot of people, it’s not necessarily easy when you’re done playing football and the struggles that comes along with it,” Manziel said.
In addition to Drake, another guest that Manziel says he would possibly be interested in having on the show is former NFL star Antonio Brown. Brown, like Manziel, has made an attempt to leverage a high-profile and controversial image to carve out a reputation on social media.
In various podcast appearances of his own, Brown has acknowledged that he might be dealing with CTE and has expressed his passion for sharing stories of athletes’ past traumas from their sport.
“He’s definitely a guy that’s had an interesting football career and, now in his life off the field, is still advocating for that, so I could definitely see [myself] sitting down with AB and talking a little bit about that,” Manziel said.
Brown has also taken a heavy hand in politics this election cycle, as he’s had an active hand in campaigning for former President Trump in the key swing state of Pennsylvania.
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But like Drake’s feud with Lamar, Manziel said he has no interest in exploring political topics on the show at any point.
“Politics is probably something I will never get involved in,” Manziel said.
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