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An ironic facet of Texas’s upcoming backfield transition: The Longhorns are getting less professional at quarterback. This isn’t only true on the field—though Arch Manning does fit the “raw” descriptor well. Everything about Quinn Ewers’s college career, from growing the mullet to the year at Ohio State to the Texas homecoming to cutting the mullet, read as a calculated move. No football family calculates like the Mannings, but unlike this newest heir to the scene, Ewers always looked like he was in on the architecture of his own five-year plan. Manning? A college kid. Sometimes a human sprinkler of confidence, other times wide-eyed, he spent his redshirt freshman season perpetually in combat with his own preternatural gifts.
Texas faces bigger questions in 2025 than those which involve Arch Manning. The offensive line should return only one starter. Most of the defensive line is poised to move on, as are the strongest links in the secondary. It’s Texas, and it’s Texas under Steve Sarkisian, so talent will rise to fill the gaps the NFL Draft creates. But there are gaps, and it’s not impossible that Sark or defensive coordinator Pete Kwiatkowski will draw interest for an NFL job. A lot’s going on. We’ll hear about none of it. We will hear about Arch Manning instead.
This is all fair. Arch Manning isn’t Texas’s biggest story, but he’s football’s biggest story at Texas. We all want to know what Arch Manning will be. We all want to know whether Arch Manning will be what’s been promised.
Four questions for the 2025 Texas Longhorns, with one big answer at the bottom:
1. Does the coaching staff stay intact?
If there are changes at Texas, they’re likeliest to happen further down the staff, among position coaches. One would assume Kyle Flood and AJ Milwee are locked into their jobs unless Archie Manning greenlights a change, and despite the offense losing its footing down the stretch, it’s unlikely Sarkisian will want to switch lieutenants. Kwiatkowski receiving NFL calls is possible, but there aren’t any serious rumblings about it right now, nor are there any specific rumblings involving Sark himself. (Though the list of candidates for the Cowboys gig is still coming together.) Even if Kwiatkowski or Sarkisian does land an NFL interview, Texas will not be outpaid for their services. The most likely scenario is that Kwiatkowski and Sarkisian both stay put, though we’ll get to one specific Sarkisian scenario in question four.
2. How fast can the offensive line come together?
Forget Texas. This might be the biggest question for Manning himself. Kelvin Banks Jr. is into the draft. Cam Williams will probably follow. Two more starters from this year’s line exhausted their eligibility.
DJ Campbell probably won’t go pro, Trevor Goosby saw some action in big games this year, and Cole Hutson started as a freshman in 2022, so the 2025 unit will debut with a healthy amount of experience. Where experience is lacking, talent will be strong. This is Texas, after all. But for a line making its first start together at the Horseshoe in Columbus, with every eye in the country on the quarterback behind it? There’s a lot of pressure on this unit to keep the pressure off of Number 16.
It’s so easy to focus on a quarterback’s wide receivers. Even NFL teams fall into this trap, chasing Keenan Allen while their line rots from within. But although Texas’s wide receiving corps will feature some true freshmen, that’s not the concern for Manning. The concern is that the retooling offensive line isn’t ready for Ohio State’s retooling defensive line come Labor Day Weekend, putting the Longhorns behind the eight-ball heading into trips to Gainesville and Athens and a visit from Mike Elko’s second Texas A&M team.
3. Can Colin Simmons win the Heisman?
Every first pick in the last 28 NFL Drafts has been a quarterback, offensive tackle, or defensive end/edge rusher. Slowly but surely, we’re all putting together how important those last two positions are in college football. How did Nick Saban win national championships with Jake Coker and Matt Mauck? Disciplined play at the skill positions and dominant play in the trenches.
Colin Simmons won Freshman of the Year this season over all-world wide receiver Jeremiah Smith. Could the pair meet again at the Heisman ceremony?
Watch sack numbers and turnovers. In 2021, Aidan Hutchinson recorded 14 sacks but only two forced fumbles. Will Anderson Jr. recorded 17.5 sacks but didn’t force any fumbles that year. Back in 2012, Manti Te’o’s seven interceptions were a huge talking point within his candidacy. Hutchinson finished a distant runner-up to Bryce Young. Te’o was a narrow runner-up behind Johnny Manziel. Anderson finished fifth the year of Young and Hutchinson. If Simmons can put up Anderson sack numbers and Te’o turnovers, one has to imagine he’ll have a chance. That’s going to be really hard to do. He does get two shots at it, though, unless the NFL changes its eligibility rules.
The more relevant question for Texas’s defense is how effectively they replace Jahdae Barron and Andrew Mukuba in the secondary, and whether Malik Muhammad can grow into his potential and become a strong CB1. (I’m assuming Michael Taaffe comes back.) The more fun question is this one about Simmons.
4. Does Sark have confidence in Manning?
Game after game, once Ewers returned from injury, media and fans asked for Manning. Game after game, Sark declined to make the call. Manning did enter in relief of Ewers briefly during the first Georgia game, but everything after that was for short-yardage running and short-yardage running alone. Manning didn’t throw a single pass in his last four appearances of the year.
Sticking with Ewers made sense. Ewers was a very good college quarterback. Never making Manning throw a pass? Not inserting more Manning packages into an offense scrambling for answers? That was stranger.
There are a few possible explanations for Texas’s approach to its backup quarterback. One is that Sarkisian wanted to avoid a QB controversy and was willing to sacrifice a little offensive upside to do that. One is that Sarkisian wanted to fix the offense Texas already had instead of trying to add a second sub-offense on short notice. One is that Sarkisian didn’t trust Arch Manning.
One is that Sarkisian didn’t trust Arch Manning.
Manning doesn’t play like a Manning. He plays like collegiate Josh Allen. We know there’s Manning in him, somewhere in his brain, but we haven’t seen it yet. The quarterback bred to be the first overall pick lacks the polish of the birthright-less passer he replaces. Is that going to be a problem? We don’t know.
This year, it wasn’t actively a problem. But it could have been. On Manning’s one run against Ohio State, he landed carelessly with the ball, only narrowly downing himself before fumbling it. He fumbled his final snap against Clemson. Against Louisiana Monroe, one two Manning starts while Ewers missed time, the prince chucked the ball downfield like he was Brett Favre, and in true Favre fashion, he threw two picks to go with some completed bombs. Maybe Manning would have handled more responsibility just fine. But over the last two months of the season, we saw two things from the potential prodigy: We saw him struggle to protect the football, and we saw his head coach consistently keep him on the bench.
Even if Sark didn’t trust Manning, this isn’t a dealbreaker for the quarterback’s 2025 season. Plenty of coaches don’t trust inexperienced quarterbacks, even if they think the world of their potential. It’s possible that Sark doesn’t trust Manning and that this isn’t a problem at all.
It’s also possible, though, that Sark doesn’t trust Manning and that there’s a deeper issue at play. It’s possible Manning just isn’t that good. It’s a little odd that a quarterback raised in the Manning family would be so unpolished in his second year in a top-ten program. It’s probably meaningful that Sark never turned to Manning in non-gimmick football outside of the first game against Georgia.
There’s an angle here where Manning is really underwhelming behind closed doors and that makes Sark want to jump ship. This is the scenario we alluded to above. This is a narrow, narrow possibility, though, not least because an NFL team would need to want Sark for jumping ship to even be an option.
More realistically, Manning is probably something less than he’s touted to be and more than what the worst collection of evidence suggests. The smart guess usually lands somewhere between poles of possibility. Manning is unlikely to be the quarterback this fall that his recruiting ratings said he would be. That doesn’t mean he won’t get there.
In the meantime? Yes, Manning’s arm will allow Sark to return more often to the downfield passing game. But with an unpolished quarterback and all that youth out wide, shots downfield will be a weapon that’s sharp on both sides. Don’t expect poise and polish from Texas’s offense in 2025. Expect some high highs, 500-yard games and maybe a 70-pointer against someone like San Jose State. Expect occasional mind-blowing self-destruction, the kinds of interceptions that leave neutral fans cackling at the physical comedy of it all. Expect Manning to return in 2026. If you hold Texas sympathies, think of the guy as the work in progress he undoubtedly is.
The Answer
Even if Sarkisian massacres the transfer portal, it’s hard to see Texas’s defense improving upon this past season’s performance. The offensive line should be good, but it too shouldn’t improve. At quarterback, Texas will probably be a little bit worse, though inconsistency can be an asset if timing is fortunate.
Overall, I don’t see how that sums to a greater whole than 2024’s. And though the 2024 Texas Longhorns were good, they were not great. Their average final ranking across our preferred SP+/FPI/Movelor aggregate lands them between fifth and sixth.
We don’t know what to expect of Ohio State and Georgia (we’ll get to them over these next couple weeks), but we do know those two will be among the three or four most talented rosters in the country. Texas plays both of them. Texas plays both of them on the road. The Longhorns are also a top-four talent program, but Texas’s 2025 talent is looking young. Add in the lack of continuity and added Arch Manning intensity to the traditional Texas microscope, and the firestorm around that Ohio State game is going to be intense. Plenty of Texas teams the last fifteen years have cracked under far less attention from the outside.
Texas was built to peak in 2024 and 2026. They should be good in 2025, but they should not peak. Between those trips to Columbus and Athens, the trip to Gainesville, and the visit from A&M, it’s hard to see them going better than 10–2 in the regular season. Maybe that gets them to the SEC Championship. Maybe they win the SEC Championship. But come playoff season, the likeliest thing is that there are multiple football teams better than the 2025 Texas Longhorns.
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This was the first offseason look-in of many we’ll do over the next few weeks. They’ll change in nature the further we get into the winter—we’ll be addressing smaller-deal teams, and the transfer and coaching carousels will be more settled—but this is the kind of thing we’re planning on doing for Penn State, Georgia, Oregon, the national championship participants, the playoff also-rans, and a couple dozen other noteworthy teams. We’re going to aim for a Monday-through-Friday cadence until basketball gets too busy for us to maintain it. At that point, we’ll probably pivot to something weekly-ish as we head into spring ball.
There will be breaks, of course, to talk about the national championship itself, and if there’s a big college football news day, we’ll also take a break to talk about that. If you liked this, please keep reading over the weeks to come. The tentative schedule for this week and next is to talk about Penn State, Oregon, and Georgia the next three days, and to then focus fairly exclusively on Notre Dame and Ohio State through next Thursday. After that, we’ll start getting to the other playoff teams, to the playoff near-misses, and to anyone else (North Dakota State, etc.) whom we find interesting enough to talk about.
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News from the last few days, and reactions to it:
Penn State’s reportedly in the market for a new defensive coordinator, with Tom Allen leaving State College to take the job at Clemson. Allen’s reportedly excited about living closer to his daughters, and I’d personally offer that coaching defense in the ACC sounds a lot nicer than coaching defense in Jeremiah Smith’s conference. Penn State will presumably find somebody good, but Allen had a strong unit this year, and not only thanks to Abdul Carter.
Miami’s got its own defensive coordinator, hiring Corey Hethermen away from Minnesota. The Gopher unit ranked tenth this year in defensive SP+, but the culture’s a little different in Miami. It’s not worlds away, and if Hethermen was the driving factor behind Minnesota’s defensive prowess then yes, Miami should improve defensively. But it might take some time, and there are a lot of good coaches who did not achieve good results at The U.
Marcus Freeman’s name is getting attention in NFL reporting, but there’s no indication the coach has any desire to leave Notre Dame. Sark is getting mentioned but with less frequency and less concreteness than Freeman, of whom at least the Bears have been named as a potential suitor. There’s speculation about Deion Sanders going to the Cowboys, but Bill Belichick’s name seems likelier. That isn’t to say it’s likely, but as was briefly the case last week, it’s possible we’re going to find out how much a coach in waiting Steve Belichick really is at UNC.
On the transfer front, Alex Orji committed to UNLV, whose new head coach—Dan Mullen—coached Alex Smith, Tim Tebow, and Dak Prescott in their college days. Orji’s more like Tebow than Smith or Prescott, and he’s not Tim Tebow. But in the Mountain West? He could be fun again.
Elsewhere, Pierce Clarkson—a former four-star and a Louisville backup—will join Louisville’s quarterback room. He’s not expected to start, but he could. Lane Kiffin doesn’t have an obvious ace to replace Jaxson Dart. Not yet, anyway.
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