I haven't seen this mentioned in detail yet, so I thought I would give it a shot.
What I saw yesterday were two football games within the same 60 minutes, as I'm sure many others did as well, so I thought I'd take to the stats to see exactly how Manziel performed on the stat sheet in each of these two hypothetical games.
First Quarter:
5 rushes for 74 yards
10-11 passing for 86 yards
Quarters 2-4:
13 rushes for 18 yards
14-20 passing for 167 yards
I'm a believer that stats don't tell the whole story, but here, I think they come pretty close. What I saw in the first quarter was that we simply did not execute our contains on Manziel across the board well enough. Not to take anything away from Manziel's stellar performance, but he's a running quarterback, not a quarterback who runs, to me, and 13 rushes for 18 yards over three quarters is extremely unsuccessful in my mind.
He threw some phenomenal passes as well, which surprised me more than his running performance, but to improve a player's yards per completion by 3.3 yards, while still maintaining a 70% completion percentage and only scoring 9 points (12 if you count the FG Manziel had nothing to do with missing) really shows me that we had the ability to stop and contain him, but it just took us too long to get in a rhythm.
Always tough to dig yourselves out of a hole 20 points deep, but it's really too bad we couldn't, because our defense showed me more in those last 3 quarters than they have in any game all year. Just my 2 cents.