Breaking news: Johnny Manziel has a football job again. Sort of, anyway, as the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League have made an announcement that they are offering Manziel a two-year contract.
There are a few complications, however, and this does not mean Manziel's just going to hop on a field and start playing quarterback in the immediate future.
You see, the Tiger-Cats had a time frame for maintaining the negotiation rights to Manziel -- by offering him a contract on Sunday, they did so within a 10-day window, thereby extending his negotiation list rights for another year.
"As per the negotiation list process, Johnny Manziel and his agent recently notified the Tiger-Cats that they had activated the 10-day window during which the Tiger-Cats must offer him a contract or lose his negotiation list rights," the team said in a statement. "That window closed today and we can confirm that we made an offer to Manziel, and that his rights will remain on our negotiation list while discussions with he and his agent continue. We will have no further comment."
The shorter version: We had to do this if we wanted to keep Manziel on our negotiation list and we don't exactly expect him to accept the offer.
But maybe there's a chance something happens here. After all, Manziel posted on Instagram 12 hours before the offer came in, noting that it's "ComebackSZN" (which is "comeback season" for you non-millenials).
Manziel playing in Canada feels like a long shot, because he still has NFL aspirations. But weirder things have happened -- in fact, roughly one hundred weirder things have happened to Manziel in the past two years. He has been quiet lately, which is probably a good thing.
Back in August, Manziel worked out for the Tiger-Cats, but he had too many red flags for the team to sign him. In fact, the CFL commissioner even ruled him ineligible to sign a contract, although he later did an about-face and said the Tiger-Cats could sign Manziel.
Maybe ComebackSZN starts sooner than we thought.
