Johnny Manziel violated an NCAA bylaw and he was suspended for it, for one half of one game.
According to ESPN, Johnny "Football" Manziel will sit out the first half of Texas A&M's season opener against Rice as punishment. The NCAA and the school agreed upon this suspension for the A&M quarterback's violation of bylaw 12.5.2.1, which states a player cannot promote the sale of his name or likeness and cannot receive payment for it.
At the beginning of the month, ESPN broke the story that the NCAA had opened an investigation into whether or not Manziel accepted payment for autographs. This suspension appears to be the end of the matter, but the NCAA left the door slightly ajar. The announcement of the suspension came one day after the NCAA reportedly grilled Manziel for six hours on the school's campus.
"If additional information comes to light, the NCAA will review and consider if further action is appropriate," the NCAA and A&M said in a joint statement. "NCAA rules are clear that student-athletes may not accept money for items they sign, and based on information provided by Manziel, that did not happen in this case."
The other part of the punishment is Manziel must speak to his teammates about what he had learned from the ordeal and A&M must educate its student athletes about signing numerous items for different people.
Since the start of the investigation, ESPN and its investigative reporting show "Outside the Lines" (OTL) cited numerous unnamed witnesses who said they saw Manziel sign items. While no one said they witnessed him accept payment, the sheer volume of memorabilia signings was highly irregular. By OTL's estimate, the young quarterback signed 4,400 items in three different states in less than a month.
College athletes are allowed to sign autographs, but as the NCAA ruled on Manziel, they are not allowed to promote or profit from them.
"I am proud of the way both Coach [Kevin] Sumlin and Johnny handled this situation with integrity and honesty," A&M chancellor John Sharp said in the statement. "We all take the Aggie Code of Honor very seriously, and there is no evidence that either the university or Johnny violated that code."
Last week, Sharp told a local news station he knew Manziel was innocent because he had "seen things other folks can't see."
The NCAA certainly did not declare him innocent, but the punishment is still pretty light. A "maximum sentence," with this kind of violation for example, could have been plenty more games. The NCAA did after all suspend Terelle Pryor for a similar violation that he made while at Ohio State for five games in the NFL.
Instead, he will sit for the first 30 minutes of a football game against a team he may not have played all the way through anyway.