The Texas Longhorns are the top ranked team in college football. Despite an injury to their starting quarterback, Steve Sarkisian’s roster is stacked and is the biggest threat in college football. As Arch Manning stepped in and showed the offense can thrive with him at the helm, Sarkisian warned the rest of the league about what the backup QB brings to the table.
Talented quarterbacks are a finite resource. Summer camps or focused trainings can help develop more talents, but to play the position is a gift only a select few possess. Arch has it, his surname only confirms the obvious. Manning is synonym of quarterback in football, and Arch has shown he has taken from his family name. Manning threw for 4 TDs as Texas rolled past UTSA, and the comparisons to Eli and Peyton were unavoidable.
Manning only needed a few snaps to showcase his attributes. Despite the relatively small sample size, Sarkisian has seen enough to be re-encouraged on his backup QB. As he witnessed Arch’s legacy game, Sark has sent a warning to the rest of the NCAA.
“The more things we can do really well, I feel like the tougher we are to defend,” Sarkisian said, per Austin American-Statesman. “That’s the run game, the (run-pass option), the play-action pass, the screen game, the drop-back pass. Well, now all of a sudden, we have this element of quarterback run that we can add as a twist, too.”
Arch Manning 16 of the Texas Longhorns warming up before the game vs the BYU Cougars at DKR-Memorial Stadium, Austin, Texas.
Perhaps the biggest play Manning pulled off during the Longhorns 56-7 victory was a 67-yard rushing touchdown in which he went deep into his skills bag to juke a defender en-route to the endzone. Eli and Peyton could only dream of making such play. Those traits should be credited to the athleticism from his grandfather and legendary QB Archie and his dad Cooper who played wide receiver up until college when he had to retire due to a medical condition in his spine.
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The Longhorns will not change their football DNA, though
Having a quarterback that can break out of the pocket and blast through to the second level is fun and is an alternative no team could complain about. However, when a quarterback becomes too much of a runner, problems arise. The most important player on the field cannot be risked constantly on a heavy QB run system. Sarkisian has seen it firsthand before, and is certain that is not the plan going forward.
On the one hand, the Longhorns have no interest in becoming run-heavy because Arch is still their backup quarterback. Despite that fact, Sarkisian still does not believe Manning’s running ability will change the identity of his team when the QB takes over next college football season.
“I don’t think we’re ever going to walk out here and our quarterback’s going to carry the ball 10 to 20 times a game. That’s just not who we are. There’s a lot of ways to skin a cat, but that’s not the way we like to do it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t utilize it some at critical moments to keep people honest. And so that’s kind of how we’ll move going forward.“
