Ohio State beat Texas 14-7 on college football's opening weekend, spoiling Arch Manning's big debut and committing the most egregious of crimes against The Discourse: making people who bloviate about sports sound dumb. Truth be told, the score does not indicate just how much OSU dominated Texas, as the Buckeyes' quarterback, Julian Sayin, was put on training wheels for his first game. Manning did not look great. He struggled with OSU's defensive scheme, over- and underthrew multiple receivers, and really just looked overwhelmed and timid throughout. Even for the Manning skeptics, he played worse than expected.
But in the same way as people were too quick to anoint Manning as the next football savior, many are now, after one game against one of the best teams in the country, making a mad dash to declare him the ultimate bust of all busts, a disgrace to the family name. Mind you, there are many other problems with Texas's offense beyond Manning. The offense as a whole looked discombobulated, their receivers couldn't get much separation, they had no real run game, and head coach Steve Sarkisian seemed to call his most vanilla game plan yet. All in all, Texas looked like a team that has to figure out an identity and help their quarterback feel comfortable, which is hardly a death sentence for the season or a budding QB's reputation.
There is a lesson to heed here about the perils of hype and celebrity. Going into the season, almost the entire argument supporting the case that Arch Manning was the next great superstar QB was based on his last name itself. For years, there had been questions about why his high school teams hadn't won the state title, and why, if he really was the can't-miss prospect people said, he hadn't beat out Quinn Ewers in his previous two years in college. When he did play, he looked ... fine. He did good things but also things that made him seem not quite ready for primetime. And yet, all of those legitimate reasons for doubt or at least caution were thrown aside in favor of the narrative of the infallible Manning bloodline. None of that is the kid's fault; it's just the situation he's been put in.
At this point, the entire Arch Manning phenomenon testifies more than anything to the branding power of the Manning family and the projections that come with a famous last name. Manning's recruitment was a masterclass in brand optimization, using the tantalizing prospect and mystery of another great Manning QB to maximize hype and minimize actual contact. In retrospect, it seems that the reason the Mannings were so careful about Arch's recruitment was in order to find him a place where he could get the development time his game clearly still needed. But as the chosen heir to the royal line of Manning quarterbacks, the opportunity to project our future hopes and past nostalgia onto him before he'd even taken a college snap was too great to resist.
The beauty of Manning, like Shedeur Sanders before him, is that he upends the long-held myth that sports are the last bastion of true meritocracy. In reality, access, connections, and money are a huge help in getting you to the top in sports, too. As Shedeur also demonstrated, that celebrity can afford you a lot of goodwill and patience. Manning will get better, and as he does, the commercials will get more prevalent and the hype will return, because hype is the name of the game. But none of it will necessarily actually benefit this kid in the long run, or make him the quarterback we've already decided he must be.
