Credit: Alan Youngblood/Gainesville Sun
By Sean Keeley on

The 2025 college football season has not gone as Arch Manning likely expected it to.

The phenom Texas quarterback came into the year riding high on a hype train that positioned him as the Heisman Trophy favorite who would lead the Longhorns to a national title before being selected with the first pick in the 2026 NFL draft.

It hasn’t worked out that way so far.

Five games into the season, Texas is 3-2 with losses to Ohio State and Florida, and the quarterback has often struggled to showcase the talent that was supposed to make him The Next Great Manning. Despite coming into the season at No. 1 in the polls, the Longhorns don’t look like a lock to make the College Football Playoff, and there have been rumblings that Manning might stick around another year to improve his draft stock.

Now, while there has been much discussion about Manning as a disappointment, there’s been equally as much about how the expectations heaped on him were just as unfair. Thanks to his last name and incessant hype from people like Paul Finebaum (“Arch Manning is the best college football quarterback we have seen since Tim Tebow“) and outlets like the Wall Street Journal (“Arch Manning Is the Biggest College Quarterback Prospect Ever.“), It seems in retrospect that it would have been nearly impossible for the Texas quarterback to succeed.

In the wake of a bad loss to a mediocre Florida Gators team, Manning and Texas find themselves back in the crosshairs of critics. At The Athletic, Will Leitch penned an article titled “Is Arch Manning college football’s first flop? Why his slow start feels unprecedented,” which is fine but perhaps a little clickbaity considering Ron Powlus exists.

However, when the article was shared on social media via the New York Times, which owns The Athletic, the framing was slightly different.

“Many people are having a bad year in college football, but Arch Manning is having one of the worst,” read the post on X. “The quarterback has gone from preseason Heisman Trophy favorite and projected No. 1 NFL Draft pick to a man synonymous with failure.”

The word “failure” is what has caught the attention of many people in college football. Regardless of whether or not you bought the Arch Manning hype or always figured he would struggle, many folks in the CFB world united around the sentiment that “failure” was too harsh a word for a guy who had been Texas’s starting quarterback for five games.

For what it’s worth, we reviewed The Athletic’s coverage of Manning leading up to the season, and they were relatively cautious about whether he would meet the lofty expectations laid out before him. Like many sports outlets, they covered him extensively, but criticism that they were among those overhyping him seems misplaced.

Many thinkpieces are being written about Manning these days, but there is probably one yet to be penned about how the media hype cycle, which moves at record speed these days, consumed him so quickly while his story is still being told.

About Sean Keeley

Along with writing for Awful Announcing and The Comeback, Sean is the Managing Editor for Comeback Media. Previously, he created the Syracuse blog Troy Nunes Is An Absolute Magician and wrote 'How To Grow An Orange: The Right Way to Brainwash Your Child Into Rooting for Syracuse.' He has also written non-Syracuse-related things for SB Nation, Curbed, and other outlets. He currently lives in Seattle where he is complaining about bagels. Send tips/comments/complaints to sean@thecomeback.com.

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