It took less than three weeks for Texas football fans to sound the universal signal for expectations left unmet.
Not every Longhorns fan booed Arch Manning and the Texas offense as it trudged off the field following a three-and-out against UTEP on Sept. 13. The boo birds probably didn’t even represent a majority of the fans inside Royal-Memorial Stadium that afternoon.
Texas quarterback Arch Manning (16) catches a high snap in the second half of an NCAA college football game against Ohio State, Saturday, Aug. 30, 2025., in Columbus, Ohio. (Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman)
Still, the noise symbolized another battle in Manning’s ongoing war against the weight of expectations. That’s a fight he shares with Florida quarterback DJ Lagway, who will oppose Manning’s Longhorns on Saturday.
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Both were former top-10 overall national recruits. Both were among the 10 preseason betting favorites to win this year’s Heisman Trophy. Manning has outplayed Lagway, but neither has come close to matching the hype. As they try to dig themselves out of an early-season hole, they’re also forced to power through the sediment placed by a wide scope of people who are happy to pile on.
“Everybody’s got a phone, so everybody’s got Twitter,” Texas coach Steve Sarkisian said Monday. “There’s 9,000 podcasts going on. The coverage over college football is more and more intense than it’s ever been. And so players are getting put up on these pedestals really quickly in their careers. I felt like this weekend, I could feel some guys pressing.”
Arch Manning isn’t the only big-time QB underperforming
A Week 5 bye presented Sarkisian with a chance to spend a Saturday observing. And he concluded that high-profile players are falling short of the bars set for them by the public across the country. None of the 10 quarterbacks with the best preseason Heisman odds, per ESPN, reside in the top 10 nationally in passing yards. Only one, Ohio State’s Julian Sayin, ranks in the top 10 in quarterback rating. Eight of those quarterbacks hold at least one loss, and three have already been handed two or more.
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Through five weeks, it looks like the public’s preseason forecast failed to accurately project the top quarterbacks in the game. Now coaches across the country are challenged to pick up the pieces produced by shattered confidence.
Managing Lagway’s confidence remains the top objective for Billy Napier, the Florida coach said Wednesday. The former five-star from Willis performed so well last season that it looked like he might single-handedly rejuvenate a Florida program that’s been lost at sea for years. But after an injury-plagued offseason, he’s averaging less than 200 passing yards and has thrown more interceptions (six) than touchdowns (five) for the 1-3 Gators.
“We’re trying to get him caught up,” Napier said. “It’s all about feedback for me at quarterback. … I’m self-correcting, I’m improving my process, in terms of how I communicate, my decision-making, what I can get away with, my accuracy. I think that’s been, ultimately, the challenge for us, trying to get him ramped up. I think this is his sixth week of real practice. He’s working his tail off.”
MORE: How Florida’s defense poses a challenge to Texas football and its QB
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Across the country, quarterbacks are being pushed off pedestals by a public that eagerly erected them mere months ago. LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier, coping with an abdominal injury, is under fire after a slow start to his season. Cade Klubnik has received heavy criticism during a 1-3 start by Clemson. The internet came together to bash Drew Allar for Penn State’s putrid offensive showing against Oregon in primetime last week.
It might seem like a failed crop of top-level quarterbacks. And maybe it is. But the phenomenon isn’t new.
Arch Manning vs DJ Lagway: How often do five-star QBs pan out?
Can’t-miss quarterback prospects miss all the time. From 2000 through 2020, the 247Sports composite rankings gave out five-star ratings to 66 quarterbacks. Thirty-one of them went undrafted in the NFL. Another eight were selected in the fifth round or later. Only 15 went in the first round.
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Since 2008, 45 quarterbacks have finished inside the top five in Heisman balloting. Only 11 members of that group were five-star recruits. The public perception of elite high school quarterbacks doesn’t always match the evaluations issued by coaching staffs across the country, said Josh Heupel, a respected offensive mind who serves as Tennessee’s head coach.
“There’s so many things that go into that guy being a quarterback,” Heupel said. “There’s off the field and things inside the locker room that matter. You look at the physical traits that you want at that position inside the scope of what you’re doing schematically, and then the ability to process and take all that information in. There’s a lot of things that go into that guy being the right guy.”
MORE: Arch Manning is more emotional than Quinn Ewers. That doesn’t bother Texas football
In an ecosystem that crowns quarterbacks at a moment’s notice, sometimes those components aren’t all taken into account before the coronation. When that happens, it’s the quarterbacks who take the abuse, not the outsiders who wrongly — or prematurely — proclaimed their virtues.
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Manning and Lagway aren’t the first five-star superstars-to-be who have run into rough times. But, in the Internet and NIL age, they’re facing challenges that some of their predecessors have not.
“We’ve got to protect our guys,” Sarkisian said, “because they’re not pros yet.
“We’ve got to do a really good job of putting them in the right mental space to where they’re still enjoying playing the game of football with their college football teammates. To me, that’s the point to these guys. I think they’ve got to play for the love of the game. They need to play football, not work football. That’s something we’ve been working on with Arch.”
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