Peter

The entire Arch Manning - Texas marriage will go down as a case study in how to mismanage a young QB. If Sark crashes out this season the last week will be a microcosm of why Texas keeps squandering super talented rosters. Last week he tells us Arch would be praised if he didn’t have a different last name. A few days later he says Arch’s job status is up for evaluation. Nobody in college football draws a wider range of headlines than Arch Manning, and his coach consistently pours gasoline on that fire. I watched Carson Beck throw 3 INT’s straight off a bye in Jacksonville after throwing three picks in Austin and Kirby Smart got up to the podium and talked about the psychological toll of playing the position and the ways that different moments in a game can impact confidence. Was a portion of the UGA fanbase thirsty for some red meat and the prospect of a open QB completion? Hell yeah. Would it have helped UGA create calm around a chaotic QB? Absolutely not. Every time Sark shows up at SEC media days he tells us Texas has its best roster ever and is finally ready to compete for a national title. The story on Manning choosing Texas was often told to make it seem like Austin was a place where he could fit in and be more anonymous than he would in a true college town. Then his coach did national features before last season saying he was tempted to play Arch in 2024, and framing a new starter as the missing piece to the title puzzle. It’s convenient to build excitement and give signals that you’re doing a good job, but none of that can ever replace wins and losses. Pete Kwiatowski fielded one of the best opponent adjusted pass defenses college football has seen in the last decade and got axed because Sark needed a head to feed the board after his big product launch failed and he didn’t want to admit his fingerprints were on the defective side of the ball. Texas’s NIL recruiting strategy has often come down to offering 2x or more for the highest profile recruits. Landing big names is great PR but how would you feel if you’d played well and bought in as a junior and now you have to take less money than an unproven frosh who showed up out of shape and is already eyeing the portal? Ultimately it is hard to build a winning culture when the players on the team see the leader of the program choose short term convenience over long term gain. After 2023 I gave Sark tons of credit for creating alignment amongst a fractured booster base. All those resources are an amazing tool but they have also created a natural path towards all of this short term thinking. Texas has too many stretches where it plays like an all-star team who is getting theirs instead of 11 dudes on a mission