Arch Manning will become the center of the college football universe at noon Saturday, when he leads No. 1 Texas into Columbus to play defending national champion Ohio State, which is ranked No. 3. In some senses, Manning is the most futuristic big-time quarterback prospect to ever come around. He has been an Instagram and TikTok sensation since early in his high school career in Louisiana, where he faced competition that wasn’t up to his level and destroyed it. In a time of college athletes cashing big checks, Manning is one of the few who have huge commercial value independent of the money he receives for playing his sport. He’s a well-compensated pitchman for Uber, Red Bull, and Raising Cane’s, among others.
The existence of a Gen Z Manning has evaluators salivating. He’ll start for Texas for one year, maybe two, then be an early pick in the NFL draft. The nephew of Peyton and Eli and grandson of Archie, he was more or less born to play QB. Manning’s dad, Cooper, wasn’t a quarterback, but as parents go, the former wide receiver and brother of two Super Bowl winners was not a bad resource for his son.
As a celebrity and one of the most hyped college players ever—probably the most hyped, though you could argue about it—Arch Manning occupies a liminal space. He is a quarterback of this moment, a big name who can take advantage of the sport’s changes like few others. But to me, what sticks out the most about Manning is not that he’s following a new playbook for a star QB. It’s that he’s following an established one. So far, he has managed his career less like a modern five-star QB does and more like any other elite QB prospect would’ve acted 20 years ago, before the economic winds shifted and swept up the sport’s old order. So far, his career is more 2005 than 2025.
It’s funny that it would be a Manning who manages his career this way. Twenty-one years ago, the Mannings made the most brazen, self-interested power play in the history of the draft. Eli, coming out of Ole Miss, was the top prospect in the 2004 draft, for which the San Diego Chargers had the top pick. Eli didn’t want to play for the Chargers, and his camp exerted pressure on San Diego to not draft him. Most people think Archie, the family patriarch, acted as the puppet master. Archie has denied orchestrating the move, but at any rate, the Manning ploy worked. The Chargers drafted Eli but quickly swapped him to the New York Giants for Philip Rivers, and the two quarterbacks went on to successful careers on opposite coasts.
The NFL didn’t become more hospitable to young prospects who want to chart their own course. If anything, the professional league went the other way, later winning a rookie wage scale in collective bargaining and limiting the leverage rookies had against teams. But college football has become a lot more like the world the Mannings hoped Eli could build for himself as he was entering the NFL. College players could always pick their schools, of course, but a series of court decisions and political pressure campaigns in the past few decades have gradually handed more rights to players. Every player must be not only recruited but rerecruited, time and again, to stick with his team. A five-star quarterback sits on the bench for a year without playing? He might be gone. He sits for two years? He’s probably gone. Any more than that? There is no chance he’s hanging around. Some people like that this is how it works now, and some people don’t, but it’s the transitory reality of college football in the mid-2020s.
In other words, there has never been a more advantageous moment for someone like Arch Manning to be ascendant. The 21-year-old not only could handpick his first school, as any No. 1 recruit always has, but could probably have extracted a guarantee from well over 100 schools that he would start as a true freshman and fill in whatever number he wanted on his check from the school’s NIL collective. If any of that weren’t to his satisfaction, he could bounce to the next place and get the package he wanted. That isn’t how Manning’s career has gone, though. This is his third year at Texas.
Arch has another thing going for him: He is a Manning. As a member of a generationally wealthy family, he didn’t need to play the name-image-and-likeness game the way most players do. Make no mistake—he did play it. But while most players are paid just to play football, Manning is famous enough to get a raft of legit endorsement deals, not that he needs the money. The world of NIL deals is unbelievably opaque, and this could just be a narrative the Manning family has pushed in media profiles, but Arch appears to have moved slowly to collect NIL dollars after arriving at Texas as a freshman in 2023. (Moving slowly also has its benefits. Manning was the only famous player to announce he wouldn’t appear in the 2024 return of EA Sports’ college football video game. He later got a bigger deal to take part in it.)
These luxuries have allowed Manning to let pure football considerations drive his nascent career. He committed to Texas because he liked Texas and its head coach, Steve Sarkisian. It made sense: Sarkisian is a proven developer of offensive talent, and Texas’ offense relies on passing concepts that resemble the ones Manning will use in the NFL. Texas is wildly rich, as Horns fans will be happy to tell you, but lots of other programs could’ve (and did) put together a gaudy pitch for Manning. Yet when Manning rode the pine as a true freshman, there were only the fringiest of rumors about a transfer. The same was true last year, when he sat behind an often mediocre starter, Quinn Ewers. Now Manning should be fully marinated, and the Longhorns will throw him into the hottest grill imaginable when they face the Buckeyes this weekend.
Manning takes over the starting job under historic circumstances. Texas, it may surprise you, had never been the preseason No. 1 team until now. The game against No. 3 Ohio State is, by ranking, the biggest Week 1 game the sport has ever had. A first-year starting quarterback leading the No. 1 team out of the tunnel for the first game of the season anywhere is rare. The only other times it’s happened this century have been at Alabama, where Nick Saban’s dynasty is the exception that proves the rule.
Next will come the most interesting part: seeing if Manning is actually good. I don’t want to be too dramatic about this, though: He is good. He didn’t set the world on fire in his relief appearances and spot starts last year, but Manning is so physically and mentally built for the position that it would be pure trollery to suggest he won’t be at least a very good college quarterback with a chance at a long NFL career. His field-scanning ability and control of his body are already great traits, and he happens to play in the optimal environment to have a breakout season. Texas always has some of the best wide receivers in college football. The Longhorns’ offensive line should give Manning plenty of time. All that’s left is for him to use his advantage.
