Ex-Browns QB Johnny Manziel gets real in chat with Shannon Sharpe on 'Club Shay Shay'

Former Cleveland Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel pulls something off in a chat with former NFL tight end Shannon Sharpe on his “Club Shay Shay” podcast, which dropped Wednesday.

He sounds contrite.

Manziel didn’t come close to sounding contrite in the Netflix documentary “Untold: Johnny Manziel.” Perhaps a less formal setting with casual conversation with someone who understands the life of a professional athlete was needed because it certainly sounds like contrition in talking to Sharpe.

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Manziel apologizes to more than a few people in the more than two-hour interview.

Johnny Manziel needles sports broadcaster Skip Bayless

He even addressed, much to Sharpe’s delight, Skip Bayless, the tight end's former debate partner on ESPN and later Fox Sports 1, saying that Manziel would be bigger in Cleveland than LeBron James.

“Skip, I love you, bro,” Manziel said with a grin. “I hope you know it was always love and I honestly feel like I let him down.

“I remember watching ‘First Take’ religiously and being able to see him come on there and ride for me when everything was going on. I remember seeing the passion in his voice and the way he was animated when he would talk about me, so when I sign and go to Cleveland and this Johnny Manziel will be bigger than LeBron…"

Manziel recognized it for what it was at the time, he said.

“OK, you got your click bait, you got your headlines for that week type of thing,” he said, “and it was never ever going to be a reality.”

Ya think?

Johnny Manziel knows he disappointed LeBron James, Joe Thomas

Manziel understands, however, that by throwing in with James and Maverick Carter, who represented him in business dealings, he had the opportunity to succeed beyond his wildest dreams giving him “the best fighting chance and the best team around him.”

He realizes that for that reason and the fact that James and Carter aren’t used to making losing bets and his track record of behavior in Cleveland – their home territory even if it wasn’t their hometown – was “blatant disrespect.”

In short, he screwed up and knows it because James would reach out to him to guide him.

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“This is how bad off I was whenever I was in Cleveland. LeBron would text me every week to come over to the house to watch a game, play poker with the boys [and] try to be there,” he said. “I was so depressed for the first time in my life even my biggest role model and inspiration in my life couldn't get me out of bed to come and hang out with him.

"I didn’t really grasp and latch on to him the way that I should have. He tried to take me under his wing, right? I’m just kind of nudging it away because of where my mental is and being just fully depressed in where I was in my life.”

Manziel takes ownership of that situation. And it’s not the only morsel.

“It was the same shame that I carry with me to this day about letting down [Browns left tackle] Joe Thomas as a guy who's in the end of his hall of fame career and is looking for somebody to come in and lead this team. And then you get me.”

The interview is well worth some time.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Johnny Manziel says he disappointed Browns, Joe Thomas, LeBron James