Arch Manning’s hype before the 2025 college football season began was through the roof and it came crashing down when fans didn’t see as good of a performance as they expected from the Manning prodigy.
The Longhorns star began his career as the team’s starting quarterback for the first time in the 2025 season and it took him some time to find his rhythm and perform like fans expected of him.
Despite receiving massive backlash over the first few weeks of the season, Manning stayed resilient and kept working on his game, which drew massive praise from his head coach, Steve Sarkisian, during a recent interview with Chris Fowler.
“Ninety-nine percent of kids would have melted last year if they had to endure what he endured, and all Arch did was get stronger,” Sarkisian said. “The players in that locker room love him. I mean, he’s a guy’s guy. That was always the thing that I was on him about, and I love this about Arch, but I would say, ‘You need to go lead. You’re the leader.’
”He would say, ‘I just don’t feel like I’ve earned it yet.’ That’s important to him, that he earns everything he gets. But the players were the ones building him up to go lead. They wanted to follow him, and the moment he did, you could see a difference in our team.”
Steve Sarkisian Expresses Excitement About Texas’ 2026 Squad
Steve Sarkisian’s Texas missed its spot in the College Football Playoffs in the 2025 season and is now working hard to turn things around for the upcoming season, be it through hitting the transfer portal or getting players trained properly during Spring practices.
Sarkisian told Fowler that this year would be the first time he feels the program has top-level talent across the board, at every position.
“But, yet, we also have the depth behind it across the board,” Sarkisian said. “I felt like we’ve had years where we’ve been elite at a couple positions and maybe we hadn’t had anything behind it, and it would have been really scary to think what would have happened if certain guys went down.”
The Longhorns ended the 2025 season with an overall record of 10-3.
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