Down the stretch of the 2024 season, Texas’ offense was sputtering.
Yes, the Longhorns were grinding out wins on their way to the SEC championship game and College Football Playoff, but it didn’t quite look right. The red-zone efficiency was poor, starting quarterback Quinn Ewers was beat up with injuries and coach Steve Sarkisian was increasingly facing questions about whether he might make a quarterback switch to the young backup whose legend had already been years in the making.
But Arch Manning was a sensitive topic in Austin.
“I’m not even going to answer that,” Sarkisian snapped back after being asked what it would take to swap out Ewers for the most heralded recruit in years. “I don’t know what the question is. Next question.”
That press conference moment occurred during this very same October week two years ago. It’s funny how often history repeats itself in sports.
In the middle of his second season as a starter, Manning is still a sensitive topic at Texas but for a much different reason. No longer is he the savior-in-waiting that fans and media members are itching to watch, to the point of agitation for his coach.
This time, with Texas’ offense underperforming again, it’s Manning who has become the subject of replacement speculation. But it’s notable that unlike the situation with Ewers in 2024, you did not get the same indignant reaction when Sarkisian was asked this week about his plan going forward at quarterback.
“I think there’s no doubt about it, Arch can play better for us,” Sarkisian said. “He’s our starter, but I need to see a better version of Arch Manning like I need to see a better version of a lot of guys on our offensive football team right now. But we need to see a better version of him this week.”
At 4-2, heading into a home game against No. 7 Ole Miss that will either revive the Longhorns season or cast them into College Football Playoff purgatory, it’s hard to know who’s on a shorter leash during this last, desperate attempt to make an alleged $50 million roster look like a good investment.
Right now, it’s the quarterback. But eventually, if nothing changes, it’s going to be the coach.
Will either of them be at Texas next year?
The Texas Longhorns lost three games last season and missed out on the College Football Playoff. They have two losses through Week 7 this season. (Alex Slitz/Getty Images)
Across college football, the watercooler conversation around Manning’s future is no longer centered on the NFL Draft but whether he will utilize his final season of college eligibility somewhere else.
That doesn’t mean Manning’s disappointing performance this season has wrecked his stock to the point of no return. If you were to bet which league Manning’s paychecks will be coming from next year, NFL is still in the lead over the SEC or Big Ten.
Despite the inconsistent performances, killer mistakes and an obvious struggle to process what he sees on the field, Manning still has plenty of fans in the scouting and front office world who are apparently seeing something the rest of us don’t see on the field every Saturday.
Then again, up until the change in tone from Sarkisian on Monday, that was exactly the message out of Texas: You don’t see how good Arch is in practice, so what’s the problem? It’s just a matter of getting him to do it when the game starts. No big deal, right?
When a coaching staff starts leaking that kind of stuff to local beat writers, which it did last week to Orangebloods.com, you can practically set your clock to the point when it’ll become a “him-or-me” conversation.
It took Sarkisian less than a week to get there. But realistically, what’s the other option besides figuring out how to claw into the CFP or going down with the ship?
The idea of Texas benching Manning in favor of KJ Lacey Jr. seems like an empty threat — the kind of thing that gets whispered to ESPN (which reported Monday that Lacey would get an “uptick” in first-team snaps at practice) to create urgency but has very little real world meaning.
As long as Texas has a theoretical chance at the CFP — and even a third loss wouldn’t necessarily eliminate them — it would be completely against type for Sarkisian to play a quarterback who has never faced an SEC-quality pass rush in a meaningful game.
Just like in 2024 when Sarkisian dug in on Ewers, injury and all, it’s up to Manning and Sarkisian to make it work.
“I fully expect myself to play better,” Manning told reporters Monday. “I haven’t put good film on tape the past five weeks, and I’m going to be better. I’m going to be better for my teammates, be better for myself, be better for for my coaches.”
This is Manning’s fourth year in college, and Saturday will be his 22nd start. He’s no rookie anymore. Just a few weeks ago, when the Longhorns were still winning and ranked No. 1 but clearly not playing well, the message out of Texas was that he wouldn’t be getting this much scrutiny if his last name weren’t Manning.
Now that things have gone sideways against Oklahoma and Florida in back-to-back weeks, we need to consider the opposite: If his last name weren’t Manning, we’d all shrug our shoulders, conclude that Arch at age 22 is pretty much who he’s going to be as a quarterback and mentally move on from the idea that he can still make a breakthrough to a higher ceiling.
If that’s the case, it’s a tough break for Sarkisian but one that must carry consequences for him and his staff.
In the current era of college football, where a program like Texas can splash into the transfer portal with more money than anyone, there is no reason to invest four years in a quarterback who isn’t good enough to get you where you’re trying to go.
Texas’ coaching staff sees Manning every day and analyzed every moment of film. If he has more talent than he’s shown but they can’t coax it out of him when it counts, that’s on them. If he just isn’t good enough and they’ve banked on him this whole time, waiting for something that isn’t there, that’s also on them.
You can’t blame fans for being seduced by the Manning mystique. You can blame coaches for failing to acknowledge reality until it’s too late.
So far, though, you’ve heard a lot more talk about Manning’s job being in jeopardy than Sarkisian’s.
Understandably, even Texas will not be eager to part with a coach who has won 39 games against just 10 losses the past 3 1/2 seasons. Texas is a top-tier job with vast resources, but the end of the Mack Brown era through Charlie Strong and Tom Herman showed everyone how low the floor can be.
As competitive and deep as it is in the SEC right now, and with a 24-team playoff all but certainly coming next year, there’s a school of thought to not let perfect become the enemy of good in these big, expensive coaching decisions. Texas has seen the abyss and does not want to risk going back.
Still, after waiting two years for Manning to assume the starting role, there’s now a very realistic chance that Texas will miss the 12-team playoff in both of his seasons as a starter, largely because a very talented (and highly paid) offense can’t figure out how to function.
If that’s what comes to pass, it would be a catastrophic failure both Manning and Sarkisian would have to wear, and it’s hard to see how either of them can do it comfortably at Texas.
For better or worse, Manning is the defining player of the Sarkisian era. That’s what he signed up for during a recruitment that seemed like a reality show, and that’s what he accepted while fans were waiting and waiting and waiting to see the transformational quarterback they thought they’d been promised.
From Ron Powlus to Christian Hackenberg, predictions of quarterback greatness don’t always work out as planned in college football. It’s always ugly when that realization sets in.
In Austin, the fight to control the narrative over who’s to blame began this week with the most subtle threat. But these things can’t really be contained by the force of propaganda. Manning will either be better, as he promised and Sarkisian demanded, or the undertow is going to take everyone down.
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