The rise of Arch: Manning's moment is finally here, and the setting couldn't be more fitting

AUSTIN, Texas — Within the halls here at the University of Texas football facility, one particular player moves about like all of the others.

He jokes, horse-plays, fist bumps, listens attentively, celebrates on the practice field, even dances — all the things you’d imagine a 21-year-old college kid might do.

He eats TexMex often, wakesurfs on Lake Travis, dines at Chipotle upwards of three times a week and occasionally hits the golf links.

Arch Manning is just one of the guys, whether you want to believe it or not.

“I don’t think he walks around with a hoodie with his name on the back so everyone knows who he is,” Texas coach Steve Sarkisian said. “He’d much rather be unassuming.”

For much of his career, even during his junior high days as a young superstar in New Orleans, Arch has, whether on his own or through a family directive, dodged the spotlight at every turn.

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He’s evaded the cameras, avoided social media and escaped any other real attention — politely, of course. After all, he’s the grandson of the patriarch of not only one of football’s First Families but the truest Southern Gentleman you’ll come upon: Archie Manning.

No, sir. Yes, sir. Please. And thank you.

It is the Manning Way.

And so, too, at least for Arch, is side-stepping any and all attention. For instance, Arch and his family rejected college scholarship offers made to him until he was deep into his high school career. Coaches extending an offer would often receive a patented line from Arch, his father Cooper, or high school coach, Nelson Stewart.

There is no offer to give because there’s no offer to receive.

While Arch was a freshman in high school, the Mannings denied HBO’s attempts to film a documentary on him. Arch and all close family members were mostly made unavailable for interviews until his sophomore season of high school. And, to this very day, Arch has posted five tweets and follows no other person on X.

In fact, Arch’s true quarterbacking career got started in what his coach planned to be an unassuming way. A few plays into his team’s spring game in May of 2019, Stewart covertly inserted his eighth-grade quarterback hoping no one would notice.

On his very first snap, Arch completed a perfectly placed 25-yard touchdown pass, video of which garnered more than 2 million views on ESPN’s social media platforms.

“It was crazy,” Stewart said then. “That’s foreshadowing.”

Now, more than five years later, Arch’s college quarterback career truly begins this weekend in one of football’s greatest settings, on the road, against the defending national champion Ohio State Buckeyes, in a top-five tilt televised nationally.

Good luck avoiding the spotlight.

“I tell him all the time, ‘You’re not really a quarterback until they boo you,” Sarkisian said. “When 105,000 boo you, then you know you’ve arrived.”

Ohio Stadium, the third-largest football venue in the country, holds 102,780. Close enough.

In this one — the premier event of opening weekend — the storylines abound. Two of the richest brands in college football, each from one of the industry’s most valuable conferences, collide at high noon in a rematch of last year’s Cotton Bowl semifinal — a matchup decided by a late-game goal-line gaffe.

Big Noon Kickoff, Fox’s pregame show featuring former Buckeyes coach Urban Meyer, will originate from Columbus. The game’s been sold out for months. And lower-bowl, midfield tickets are selling on the secondary market for more than $1,000 each.

It’s almost enough to make one forget that this Manning kid only has two starts under his belt.

Almost.

The legend begins

Situated behind wrought iron gates in an affluent neighborhood of New Orleans, Isidore Newman, a small private school removed from the city’s bustling hustle, is where Arch Manning began to make his mark.

In 2019, he threw for more touchdowns than any quarterback in the football-crazed metro area of New Orleans. He was 15 years old. Arch put up such gaudy numbers that grown men asked for his autograph before games. Before one game in fact, two people posed as newspaper photographers in an attempt to share a sideline with Arch. Both were eventually escorted off the field.

In many ways, Arch has always been in the spotlight. After all, he played his high school ball at a school that retired the jersey of his father, two uncles, and whose football complex and highest athletic individual honor bore his last name.

He was never just some normal kid, even if he tried to be. Opposing high school coaches who played against him marveled at his awareness, pure release and mobility, one of them famously telling Archie after a game, “This dude’s going to be better than any of your sons.”

So, yeah, the expectations, the hype, the buzz, it’s been there for a while.

It oozed into his college life, perhaps exacerbated by his two years sitting behind starter Quinn Ewers. Things have had plenty of time to build.

Some of the stuff is quite ridiculous (maybe?). Despite attempting just 95 passes in his college career, Arch is the betting favorite to win the Heisman Trophy, out-distancing more veteran college passers like LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier, Clemson’s Cade Klubnik and South Carolina’s LaNorris Sellers.

It’s all led to a crescendo moment this weekend.

Is he ready?

“I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this,” said Texas defensive back Michael Taaffe, Arch’s best friend on the team, “but he told me, ‘I can’t wait till I throw a pick and everybody goes from I’m the best player in the world to the worst player.’”

Arch, always the jokester.

Arch may not tweet often — five times in three years! — but he does follow what’s posted about him on social media, both Twitter and Instagram. He sees your compliments and your criticisms. He’s always searching for a way to use the comments to motivate himself.

“Talk is cheap,” Arch said this summer about the hype. “I’ve got to prove it.”

This feels like a page-turning week for Arch’s career arc. His high school moments are well behind him and his two-year backup role in Austin is over. The “tough love,” as his dad describes it, that Texas coaches showed him in the early days here hardened him up (they yelled a lot) and the fact that, for the first time in his life, he served as a No. 2 toughened him up (he vented about that to an array of people).

But he’s the man now, the guy, the leader, and it couldn’t happen at a better time, his dad says.

“You’re talking to a much more confident, seasoned and mentally tough guy who knows what’s being asked of him,” said Cooper Manning, the older brother of Peyton and Eli who, before injuries ended his career, was a star receiver at Ole Miss.

“Texas does a good job of being tough on those young guys. They put them in spots where they can’t succeed. They yell at you and test you and make you fail in front of your peers, so when the real bullets are flying, you’ve been through some version of it. There’s a little bit of boot camp in that. Not everybody loves it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not good for you.”

Showdown at The Shoe

Two-hundred and twenty-six days ago, the Texas Longhorns stood 1 yard away from tying Ohio State in the College Football Playoff semifinal.

And then a nightmare unfolded.

Trailing 21-14 with less than four minutes left in the game, Sarkisian’s team, on first-and-goal at the 1, went backward: a run for no gain; an inexplicable toss play for a 7-yard loss; an incomplete pass; and then, on fourth-and-goal from the 8, Ewers cocked his arm in an aim toward the end zone when, suddenly, Ohio State’s Jack Sawyer swatted the ball free, cradled it into his arms and began a 83-yard scoop-and-score to seal the victory.

In Austin, they have not forgotten.

“They accomplished what we were trying to accomplish. They made it there and finished the job,” Texas running back Tre Wisner says. “We get a chance to see them again. It’s a blessing.”

But these teams resemble little from those that battled last January in Dallas.

Together, they lost 23 starters, including a whopping 26 chosen in the NFL Draft. They each have a new quarterback (Arch at Texas; sophomore Julian Sayin at Ohio State). In fact, Arch will operate behind an O-line returning a single starter and has a receiving group that lost its top three pass-catchers from a year ago.

Ohio State, meanwhile, has an almost completely new defense (eight of top-10 tacklers gone) and a new coordinator in Matt Patricia, the former Detroit Lions head coach who replaced Jim Knowles, now at Penn State.

In general, there are a lot of new faces.

Prepare for dropped balls, missed tackles, busted coverages and blown assignments.

Perhaps, for Arch at least, that’s not a bad thing.

“I think a little adversity will be good for him and good for us, to see him overcoming that,” Sarkisian says.

Arch is a realist. Earlier this summer during one of their golf outings, he listened to Taaffe reel off his goals for the year — conference title, national championship and the Heisman Trophy. Again, Taaffe said this.

Arch looked at him as if he were crazy. “Bro,” he said, “I haven’t even really played!”

In some ways, Arch has already met adversity. Remember the Texas-Georgia game last October in Austin? Sarkisian pulled Ewers and inserted Arch for the final two series of the first half. He promptly fumbled on a delivery, Georgia recovered, kicked a field goal and took a 23-0 halftime lead on the way to a win.

Letting such a highly ranked, talented player sit on the bench for two years wasn’t the easiest decision, Sarkisian acknowledges in an interview with Yahoo Sports earlier this month. While Ewers held a strong grasp of the Texas offense and was a good player, he suffered so many injuries that it was “challenging,” Sarkisian said, not to insert Arch more often.

“The hardest part was when Quinn was battling through the injuries,” he said. “It was like, ‘What’s best for us, the team?’ In the end … I told the [Manning] family on Day 1, 'I’m going to play him when he’s ready to play great — not when he’s just ready to play.'”

Work and play ... with help from Peyton

On one of his first few days at Texas, Arch Manning’s phone buzzed with a FaceTime call from his new head coach.

On the other end, he watched Sarkisian, laughing at the time, hold up to the phone Arch’s team-issued ID badge — the one he’d lost. Arch left the badge in English class. A person found it, scanned it to actually enter the UT football building and, thankfully for Arch, returned it.

Sarkisian had a good laugh about it. And then, weeks later, Arch lost the badge again!

Teammates poked fun at him for the rookie mistakes by calling Arch by his full name, Archibald. Archibald this and Archibald that.

See, he is just one of the guys.

Well, kind of.

He’s got a few benefits that few other players have, like escaping this summer to Cabo, where Arch and Taaffe pelted golf balls into the ocean from uncle Peyton’s beachside villa. Peyton schooled the young bucks on how to balance workouts and vacation during the football offseason.

“Friday and Saturday, I drink my margaritas," Peyton told the two, “but I have a cold tub and hot tub here. Every morning, I'm in there.”

You can do both: work and play.

“It’s the mental side,” Taaffe said. “You’ve got to get away for a couple of weeks, but you’re always thinking about how I can get better, how you can get a step on Tom Brady.”

Arch mixes plenty of play with work. After all, he’s 21.

If he’s not golfing, he’s wakesurfing on nearby Lake Travis. And you can often find Arch dining with friends at one of Austin’s popular TexMex staples, Matt’s El Rancho, where he’s recognized enough that he can’t be ordering the Matt’s Knockout Martini, Taaffe says with a laugh.

But he does devour the restaurant’s famous queso dip.

“It’s hard to beat,” Taaffe said.

Arch plays basketball with teammates, too. In fact, he teams up with his new left tackle, Trevor Goosby, for some alley-oops that, from time to time, find their way back to an angry Sarkisian, who’d rather not see his star quarterback and tackle tossing long balls down the court and hanging from basketball rims.

“Sark yells at me,” Goosby said. “I tell him, ‘Coach it’s in my nature!’”

See, Arch really is just one of the guys.

Hasn’t every seventh-grade quarterback exchanged passes with receivers A.J. Brown and DK Metcalf only for the video to leak and prompt a dozen coaches to call with scholarship offers? Hasn’t every child born received their first college offer at birth (David Cutcliffe, who coached both Peyton and Eli, called Cooper when Arch was minutes old)?

Hasn’t every college freshman posed for photos with girls while walking to class in their very first semester, before even participating in a single practice?

This is all normal, right?

Sure, he’s just one of the guys.

“It’s easy to buy into the hype, ‘Oh! I’m on a team with Arch Manning,’” Wisner said. “But the player and person he is … he makes it easy. He comes in and he works. He’s a normal person.”