With the 2025 college football season just days away, the hype surrounding the top teams is reaching its zenith. That’s especially true for the Texas Longhorns and their golden boy QB, Arch Manning.
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Coming into this campaign, the Longhorns are ranked No. 1 in the nation despite last season’s CFP semifinal loss. Manning, meanwhile, is the favorite to be the No. 1 pick in the 2026 NFL Draft and holds the highest NIL valuation in the nation ($6.8 million), according to On3.
All seems well in Austin, Texas, right now. Even hot take pundits like Colin Cowherd can’t really come up with anything too serious to worry about. For Cowherd, the only potential concern for Manning and the Longhorns in 2025 is if the QB gets a little too cocky when running the ball.
“I worry about him being too confident and not sliding. Because he’s really athletic,” Cowherd said on The Joel Klatt Show.
“A couple of times last year, I’m like, ‘Bro, it’s like Lamar Jackson first year. Get down. Stop running into linebackers Justin Herbert.’ That’s the only thing I worry about. He’s gonna be so amped up and so fired up that he’s just not gonna slide and he’s gonna do an Andrew Luck and give someone the shoulder,” the analyst added.
At 6’4″ and 220 pounds, we can see why Manning might want to put the shoulder down from time to time. His high school coach timed him at 4.6 in the 40-yard dash, and he reached a speed higher than 20 mph on an 80-yard touchdown run last year. He’s what his uncles could never be: a dual-threat QB.
In fact, he’s got a lot more of his namesake—his grandfather, Saints legend Archie Manning—in him than he does his more famous uncles, Peyton and Eli.
That said, he probably has a little bit of all three. Arch did grow up surrounded by the Super Bowl success of his uncles, after all. And as Cowherd explains, it makes him more prepared for big moments on the football field than perhaps anyone else could be.
“Manning family dinners are a big event. Texas football practice feels like a big event. So you say, ‘Oh, it’s the first game against Ohio State.’ Do you know how many big games Arch has gone to that weren’t his? But like, it’s like the Mannings are American football royalty. In the history of the sport, there’s this one family that is royalty… I never worry about the Mannings, and the moment.”
Opening up the season against the defending champions (No. 3 Ohio State) is never easy. But like Cowherd said, Arch Manning has kind of been raised and molded for just such a moment. If anything goes wrong with the 21-year-old prodigy, it certainly won’t be because of nerves.
