QB U: Arch Manning Has Entered the Chat
Plus, Bama's NFL QB problems, and the Josh Heupel Bowl.
Welcome to QB U, another regular feature I’m introducing at this here Substack, in which I highlight a handful of items vaguely related to college football quarterbacks throughout the season. Why quarterbacks? I have this schedule-adjusted Points Above Replacement (PAR) metric for QBs going back to 1956, and I figure I should do something with that. If you have a QB U idea you’d like me to cover, email me1 and I’ll feature it in a future column!
🏈 Manning the Controls
It’s been too long since we’ve had a Manning star at QB on the big-time stage — and definitely too long since a No. 16 in Orange has shredded college defenses while bearing the family name.
So, with no offense intended to Quinn Ewers, who injured his oblique against UTSA last week, the college football world was appropriately excited when Arch Manning — Archie’s grandson; Peyton and Eli’s nephew — entered the game for Texas… and proceeded to have a monster performance, going 9-for-12 for 223 yards and 4 TDs through the air, plus an un-Manning-like 67-yard TD run as well. (“Arch Manning got EVERY OUNCE of Manning athleticism in the UNIVERSE and some,” joked Robert Griffin III.)
Now comes the news that Manning will start for the Longhorns versus Louisiana-Monroe on Saturday, with Ewers still nursing his injury. The Warhawks are probably even worse than the Roadrunners team that Manning and Texas crushed 56-7, so it should be a good chance for Arch to pile up more stats in his first career start as a redshirt freshman.
He’ll need more chances like this, too, if he wants to catch up to the rest of his family. Here’s a look at the progression of Peyton, Archie and Eli by year of their college careers, in terms of lifetime QB Points Above Replacement through each season:
(It’s also worth noting that Archie narrowly outpaced Eli’s output in one fewer season of being allowed to play — freshmen were ineligible for varsity football until 1972 — though Eli hardly saw any action as a frosh behind Romaro Miller in 2000 anyway.)
Arch’s time in the spotlight may not last long, either. If Ewers is healthy, it’s hard to imagine coach Steve Sarkisian benching the guy who had 103.0 PAR/13 last season (one of the best seasons in program history) while leading UT to its only College Football Playoff appearance — no matter how good the kid with the legendary pedigree looks against UTSA and UL Monroe.
🏈 Bama Bummer
I wrote a little about Bryce Young’s benching already, in the context of what it says about the Carolina Panthers and their tendency to spoil quarterbacks. But I still find the situation extremely sad, both in how it potentially represents the end of Young’s potential as a future star and a prime example of how bad organizations feed into the NFL’s vicious QB cycle.
One other subplot to this, however, is the ongoing plight of the Alabama QB alumni in the NFL. Since the 2010 season, the Crimson Tide have used nine different primary quarterbacks, and all were varying degrees of productive in college (even Jake Coker ranked fourth in the SEC in passing yards and TDs in 2015). But of those nine, only two — Jalen Hurts (who later transferred to Oklahoma) and Tua Tagovailoa — topped out as legitimately above-average QBs in the NFL. Obviously the jury is still out on Jalen Milroe; Mac Jones was half-decent as a rookie and slid downhill from there; teams were in trouble if they had to use A.J. McCarron and Greg McElroy; Coker and Blake Sims didn’t even make the league.
And then there’s Young. Looking at the college stats, he wasn’t Bama’s most productive on a per-play basis, though he did generate 125.4 PAR per 13 team games in his Heisman-winning 2021 season before dropping to 111.2 in 2022. But there’s just no correlation between how these Tide QBs do in college and their pro performances anyway. Hurts averaged fewer EPA per play for Bama than just about any of them, and he’s been the best pro. Jones was the best in college and is currently riding the bench for the Jaguars. Sims currently coaches high school football.
But I do feel bad for Milroe, because you know Young’s failure — and the irrelevance of so many other Tide QBs in the NFL — will be in the back of teams’ minds when they are thinking about his place in the draft.
🏈 Believe The Heup
The best game of Week 4 sees No. 6 Tennessee visit No. 15 Oklahoma at the Palace on the Prairie in Norman. And of course, the main storyline of the matchup is Vols coach Josh Heupel — who seems to be well on his way to restoring Tennessee to its former glory — going against his alma mater, which fired him as offensive coordinator back in January 2015.
Heupel is fairly described as royalty in Norman, where in 2000 he led OU to its only national title since 1985. I always loved Heupel’s underdog story, as a lightly-recruited lefty QB who started out at Weber State, tore his ACL and transferred to a community college in rural Utah, yet still somehow worked his way up to a job starting for the Sooners. And the seasons Heupel had in 1999 (108.7 PAR/13) and 2000 (122.6) were the first truly modern passing seasons in the history of a program whose greatest previous quarterbacks — guys like Jack Mildren, Steve Davis, J.C. Watts and Jamelle Holieway — ran an option attack.
Before Heupel had 3,460 yards and 30 TDs in ‘99, no Oklahoma QB had ever thrown for so much as 2,100 yards or 15 TDs in a season. Conducting the attacks of offensive coordinators Mike Leach and Mark Mangino, Heupel helped transform OU from a former powerhouse without a real identity in big-time college football’s post-option era to an exemplar of modern passing efficiency which later gave us Hurts, Kyler Murray, Sam Bradford, Baker Mayfield, Jason White, Landry Jones, Caleb Williams and, now, Dillon Gabriel.
But now Heupel is on the other sideline, with Nico Iamaleava leading the charge for the Vols. Yes, Bob Stoops probably had to move on from his former-QB-turned-coordinator a decade ago, after the Sooners mustered just 6 points in a humiliating Russell Athletic Bowl loss to Clemson. But it will still feel strange to see someone so closely tied to modern OU football go up against the Sooners in such a high-stakes Saturday matchup.
Filed under: College Football, QB U
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