Some will take delight in this news, given that they have become fatigued with All Things Manning. Others will realize that it doesn’t really mean anything, that it doesn’t change the very real possibility that Arch Manning will rule the NFL for as long as his uncles Peyton and, to a lesser extent, Eli did.
Via the New York Post, Arch struggled in his first Texas spring game, throwing a total of 13 passes and generating only 30 yards.
Texas coach Steve Sarkisian declared that Quinn Ewers will be the starter for 2023. Sarkisian did not fill out the rest of the depth chart, where the candidates include Manning, a true freshman, and Maalik Murphy, a redshirt freshman.
“Arch -- those are his first 15 practices of his life in college,” Sarkisian said. “So sometimes we can rush to judgment on where guys are at.”
Before the spring game, Sarkisian appeared on the Longhorn Network and commented on the latest in a line of three generations of Mannings.
“He’s doing well, give him a lot of credit,” Sarkisian said, via the Post. “It hasn’t been perfect. He’s throwing interceptions like every freshman quarterback would. He’s made misreads. He’s lost his ID twice on campus.”
It’s fair, given Manning’s profile, his name, and his already off-the-charts NIL earnings, to pay attention to what he does, and to discuss it. It’s not fair to draw broad conclusions based on his limited time in college football.
For now, he’s just a kid finding his way -- and that’s fine. He’s far from a finished product as a freshman in college. Most of us aren’t, weren’t, or won’t be. Thinking back to my own first year of college, thank God for that.
All that said, it was odd, to say the least, to see only brief mention of Arch Marrning’s performance in the ESPN.com article about the Texas spring game, with the article subtly deflecting blame for his show on the observation that he “often didn’t have much time to throw.” Given the extensive business dealings between ESPN and the Mannings, however, it’s probably no surprise that they opted to find a way to see the glass as not half-empty.
That raises an interesting point going forward. How will ESPN cover Arch, given their ever-deepening ties to the Manning family? Will they be fair and objective? Will they downplay and/or make excuses when things aren’t great, as they apparently did over the weekend? And when things go well, will the hype and over-the-top positivity be relentless and unrestrained?
Time will tell. For now, time is what Arch needs to become the best version of whoever he will be, both on the field and beyond it.
