5 Things I Learned from Week 15 of the NFL Season

Johnny Manziel Will Have Growing Pains

Whether Johnny Manziel will be great at the NFL level or not, Week 15 showed us all that he's going to have some growing pains.

According to our Net Expected Points (NEP) metric, Johnny Football's starting debut against for Cleveland was the worst start we've seen from a quarterback in 2014.

If you recall, Andy Dalton, just a few weeks ago, had a Thursday night performance to forget. On that night, Dalton's Passing NEP was an awful -21.31. That was even worse than Josh Freeman's game against the Giants last year.

On Sunday, Manziel totaled a -21.63 Passing NEP score, and that dropped to -23.42 when you factor in rushing. It's difficult to even put that low of a total into perspective, but if you were to throw a relatively average (roughly below average because passing is more efficient than rushing), you would've expected him to create over a three-touchdown swing in points in Cleveland's favor on Sunday.

You couldn't have asked for a worse debut.