The Arch Manning Experience vs. the Arch Manning–Industrial Complex

Before Arch Manning ever played a snap of high school football, he was already getting written up by USA Today. In May 2019, a short news story touched upon the middle-schooler’s exploits in a spring scrimmage for the Isidore Newman School, the New Orleans private school that Manning would attend later that fall.

Arch “threw for three touchdowns,” the article read, “while displaying accuracy, arm strength and even mobility (a skill that uncles Eli and Peyton aren’t exactly known for).”

That year was the start of a generational shift for the Mannings. Eli, then 38, finished up the final season of his NFL career, and Arch took over the family business, becoming the starting quarterback as a freshman at Isidore Newman. By the summer of 2020, Arch’s pedigree and early success—Peyton and Eli didn’t even play on varsity as freshmen—had made him the top-rated quarterback in the class of 2023, according to most recruiting rankings.

But a few years later, when Manning was heading into his final season of high school football as the consensus no. 1 recruit in the country, Mike Farrell, a former national recruiting director for Rivals.com, was finally ready to take his doubts public. When he reviewed Manning’s game film, Farrell didn’t see a sure-thing future star college quarterback. 

“When he was very young in his high school career, he had size and more athleticism than Eli or Peyton; I thought he was going to be great,” said Farrell. “Then junior year, the progression just wasn’t what I expected. And he just never got better.”

Weeks before the start of the 2022 season, Farrell made major news by giving Manning a four-star rating and listing him as the eighth-ranked quarterback in the recruiting class. Farrell’s evaluation sent shockwaves across recruiting circles, with this line being passed around in particular: “If his name was Arch Smith, I think he’d probably be a high three-star quarterback.”

Farrell’s stinging analysis set him apart from nearly everyone in the recruiting news industry, and initially marked him as a lone crank. “Oh, I was alone,” he said. “Not one other person said this in 2022. People were saying I was an idiot.”

Three years later, Farrell’s widely circulated and heavily criticized evaluation of Manning seems uncommonly—if not singularly—prescient. Now, the quarterback is struggling through a season that started with him as the preseason Heisman Trophy favorite and leader of the nation’s no. 1–ranked team. Heading into Week 7, Manning’s FanDuel Heisman odds are worse than 31 other players.

Through five games, Manning has completed 60 percent of his passes for 1,151 yards, with 11 touchdowns and five interceptions for the now-unranked Longhorns, who head into their annual grudge match with no. 6 Oklahoma on Saturday. Advanced statistics show that Manning has effectively been a slightly above average FBS quarterback, ranking 47th overall in quarterback rating (out of 156) and 45th in Pro Football Focus’s grading system. Which is not bad, but certainly not what was expected for someone who came into the season as the affable face of major brands like Uber, Red Bull, Warby Parker, and Vuori.

The charmingly chill Manning seemed a sure bet to justify his reported preseason valuation of $6.8 million—the all-time highest valuation for a college football player, or college athlete period, according to On3’s NIL rankings. Now, in recent weeks, he has reportedly lost up to $1 million in value after he and the Longhorns have failed to live up to their lofty expectations. With two losses already, Texas is no longer in the driver’s seat for a playoff berth and will almost certainly have to win all seven of its remaining games—four against top-20 teams—to have a chance at a title. 

Up until this season, the relationship between Manning’s play and his prominence had never been in real tension, in large part because his five-star potential seemed all but certain to blossom under the tutelage of Texas head coach and celebrated quarterback whisperer Steve Sarkisian. Instead, after two years on the bench behind steady veteran—and former five-star recruit—Quinn Ewers, Manning has looked wobbly since short-arming his very first throw of the season against Ohio State. There was the first-half red zone interception against San Jose State. Another red zone interception and 10 straight incompletions against Texas–El Paso. And two fourth-quarter interceptions while trying to rally last week against Florida. “We have to play better as an offense and as a team,” Manning said after the game. “It starts with me being a better leader.”

Of course, Manning still has a chance to succeed and thrive in Austin. After all, he’s only a redshirt sophomore. But he also has the potential to be a Texas-sized bust along the lines of other ballyhooed quarterback recruits such as Shea Morenz and Garrett Gilbert. In that regard, Manning has found himself at the perfect place—a program that has never quite lived up to its own inflated expectations and reputation. That’s especially true if he manages to wrap up his college career with the Longhorns, whose football program is the engine of the wealthiest athletic department in the country, without helping them capture their second national championship in the past 56 years. 

So what are we to learn from the gulf between the Arch Manning Experience and the Arch Manning–Industrial Complex? How did (almost) everyone get it so wrong? And what happens when college football media’s need for another superstar supplants the very obvious limitations of the anointed one? 

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When it comes to the Manning-Industrial Complex, Farrell faults the sometimes misaligned incentives of recruiting websites, which boast about their rigorous analysis and insider information but also need to grab readers’ attention. “It’s agenda-driven, and it’s based on the name,” said Farrell, who worked at Rivals.com for nearly 25 years before starting his own college football recruiting rankings and evaluation site in 2022. 

“The job of these rankings is to evaluate talent but also to appease the masses and drive subscriptions. All of those fans paying money are not going to want to hear what I had to say” about Manning. “The only reason I was able to give a true opinion on Arch is that I wasn’t working for anyone. It was because I had my own platform and I could do whatever I wanted.”

Gabe Brooks, a 247Sports national scouting analyst, was part of the website’s team of analysts that evaluated and then ranked Manning as the no. 1 overall recruit in the class of 2023. In September 2022, Brooks traveled to Louisiana to watch Manning play against a small-school power that boasted two major college prospects on defense.

He “came away impressed with Manning’s ability to sense pressure and try to make something out of nothing despite the rest of his roster being overmatched,” Brooks wrote recently via email. “So while his team lost the game—which was sold out and absolute mayhem—I came away feeling pretty strongly about Manning because I got to see the performance beyond the on-paper context of whatever the box score said. He was really big, and clearly athletic, and he did not ever let up, on a night that just about anybody could have been excused for doing so.”

Brooks remembered the ranking process for Manning and other prospects being roughly the same as any other year, but “I think the vitriol from some folks surrounding Manning as a prospect and how he stacked up against the other top-tier QBs maybe made that end-of-cycle process for us a bit more arduous.”

Chris Simms might understand what Manning is going through better than anyone. Simms is the son of two-time Super Bowl champion quarterback Phil Simms, and he was the crown jewel of Texas’s no. 1–ranked recruiting class in 1999. He was the top prospect in a year that produced future NFL first-round picks like J.P. Losman, Kyle Boller, and … Eli Manning. 

Simms arrived in Austin as the long-awaited savior of a program that had underachieved for more than a decade; the Longhorns hadn’t finished a season ranked in the top 10 for 16 years.

“One of the reasons you go to that school is because you want that expectation,” Simms said. “It’s a special school to play at, but when things aren’t good, it’s one of the toughest schools to play at.”

Upon Simms’s arrival at Texas, he endured a position battle with the undersize and unheralded Major Applewhite that divided Longhorns fans for three seasons, after which he earned a reputation for struggling in Texas’s biggest games. He left Austin with a career record of 26-6, no all-conference honors, and no championships. Simms ended up a third-round pick in the 2003 NFL draft, the sixth quarterback taken. In the end, Simms put together a respectable college career, but failed to meet everyone’s sky-high expectations. His was a typical story for Texas.

“When I would walk through campus, I’d have people yell all kinds of foul shit to me,” Simms said. He “definitely felt the eyes and the weight of the school on me when I’d be walking around the campus for school or even at Sixth Street.”

 

Two years after Simms was drafted, former five-star recruit Vince Young became one of the Longhorns’ few blue-chip QB signees to deliver on his promise. In 2005, Young finished as Heisman Trophy runner-up and winner of the Davey O’Brien Award, and led the Horns to their first national title in 35 years. 

But since Colt McCoy left the program as its all-time winningest quarterback in 2009, Texas has legendarily whiffed on highly touted QB recruits. From Gilbert to Manning’s predecessor Ewers, no recent Longhorns quarterback has earned first-team all-conference honors. That’s happened as four former in-state recruits (Robert Griffin III in 2011, Johnny Manziel in 2012, Baker Mayfield in 2017, and Kyler Murray in 2018) have gone on to win the Heisman, and two more (Andrew Luck in 2012 and Cam Ward in 2025) eventually became no. 1 NFL draft picks. 

There are lots of reasons that Texas hasn’t landed someone of that caliber since McCoy: The state annually produces dozens of college quarterbacks, and the Longhorns can’t sign them all; more programs than ever are heavily recruiting in Texas as conference boundaries cross into the state, from the SEC to the Big 12 to the American; and sometimes prospects simply don’t pan out, like Tyrone Swoopes, who after college converted to tight end, or Hudson Card, who was benched in only his second start and later transferred to Purdue. That obviously doesn’t offer much solace, though, when a local recruit like Jalen Hurts leaves the state to thrive at Alabama and then Oklahoma.

Arch Manning was supposed to be the one to finally end that exasperating stretch. The marriage between Texas football and Manning family pedigree was supposed to deliver on every accolade and championship that has eluded the Longhorns for the past two decades. Instead, Manning has become an online punch line and cautionary tale, already branded a “flop” by some national media outlets.

“Arch Manning has started seven college football games in his life, and we already think he stinks. And—more importantly—we are already sick of him,” Will Leitch wrote for The Athletic this week. USA Today placed Manning atop a list of “the 10 biggest quarterback disappointments in college football.” After the Horns’ loss to Florida, ESPN’s Paul Finebaum said, “The only positive thing I saw yesterday was the one play Arch Manning was out of the game.”

Horns fans are also growing restless, especially heading into Saturday’s game against Oklahoma. Already, Manning and the offense have been booed by the home crowd in the first half against Texas–El Paso. And some even mused about benching Manning for backup Matthew Caldwell, who completed a 26-yard pass when Manning was forced out of the game against Florida after his helmet came off. “If Arch continues to miss wide open receivers, then by all means, give Caldwell a shot,” one fan wrote Saturday in a thread on HornSports.com. 

So far Sarkisian has vigorously defended Manning in public, even praising his gritty effort against Florida behind a porous offensive line. 

“I found out he’s a tough dude. He fought his ass off,” Sarkisian said of Manning, who was sacked six times in the loss. “This guy’s got a lot of courage, he’s got a lot of toughness. I think he gained a lot of respect from his teammates, which is a great thing.”

Max Browne, a football analyst and former college quarterback who played for Sarkisian for two seasons at USC, said that kind of support is critical for a young quarterback who’s looking for something positive amid unrelenting negative media coverage. In 25 years as a coach, Sarkisian has worked with future NFL first-rounders like Carson Palmer, Matt Leinart, Jake Locker, Tua Tagovailoa, and Mac Jones.

“I do think Sark, more than any other coach, is equipped to navigate that,” Browne said. “Sark has seen a lot of different quarterbacks and dealt with those expectations.”

Browne had his own experience with failing to live up to a five-star billing coming out of high school. He barely played in his first three seasons at USC before finally beating out Sam Darnold for the starting job in 2016. But Browne was benched three games into the season, and later transferred to Pittsburgh, where he started five of the first six games in 2017 before a season-ending shoulder injury.

Given that history, Browne wondered whether Manning was struggling with his confidence during what’s likely his first extended stretch of poor play in his life.

“I’d be willing to bet,” Browne said, “Arch is laying in bed at night and wondering what’s going on.”

Browne pointed to Manning’s surprisingly shoddy mechanics as a possible culprit. “His mechanics are not good, which is bizarre given his last name,” Browne said, a reference to the family’s famously excellent practice habits, which have lured hundreds of young players to South Louisiana every year for the Manning Passing Academy. 

Simms agreed, saying he’s seen Manning’s throwing mechanics and pocket presence regress since last season. “He’s got to go back to the lab and put some work in this offseason and fix some of these things. … I’m not expecting [that] all of a sudden he’s going to be a Heisman contender again.”

On the other hand, an increasingly plausible answer is that Manning is simply a product of an insatiable media machine that has routinely overrated quarterbacks. Well before Arch Manning, there was Ron Powlus, Dan Kendra, Mitch Mustain, Ryan Perrilloux, and Tate Martell, to name just a few. 

In Farrell’s rankings for Manning’s 2023 class alone, only four of the 25 four- and five-star quarterbacks are still with the schools they originally signed with. And only one—Dante Moore, now starting at Oregon after first going to UCLA—has shown the potential to be a Heisman candidate and future high NFL draft pick.

“Awful group,” Farrell said. “QBs get evaluated improperly all the time—it happens.”

However, Farrell remains bullish on his initial evaluation of Manning. “I can’t think of anyone else in my years [since 1997] who was overhyped so much because of name. Not even close,” he said.

The counterargument is that for two generations now, the Manning name has been about as sure of a thing in football as there is. It’s almost too big to fail.

Predicting the future for teenage stars like Manning is a notoriously difficult business, from Freddy Adu to Bronny James to even Manning’s former teammate Ewers, who went from 247’s fifth-highest-ranked recruit since 2000 to a seventh-round draft pick in April. But there’s clearly something about Texas, which now has a list of five-star busts that reaches all the way back to its days as a national power in the 1970s, that suggests the pressure and burden of donning that burnt orange can overwhelm almost anyone.

As it turns out, maybe the only thing bigger than the Mannings is the withering glare of the Eyes of Texas.