Arch Manning's senior season

For a lot of high school football players, the senior year is where you can really see the potential of a player truly materialize before they have to undergo another transition to the college game. For Arch Manning, things work a little differently.

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Arch Manning’s senior year concluded in late November in the quarterfinals of the playoffs. Isidore Newman went 8-3, finished second in their district, advanced to the second round of the playoffs, and there lost. The Greenies have been up against it the last four years, despite boasting Arch Manning on their team, trying to navigate the local challengers at their level of the playoffs. Southern University Lab, who blew them out, featured Notre Dame-bound linebacker Jaiden Ausberry who had 10 tackles against Newman.

You can see him creating problems for Manning and Newman here.

On300 Notre Dame LB commit Jaiden Ausberry surpassed former five-star Dylan Moses (Alabama, Jaguars) with his 384th tackle (and counting) along with a TD in the Div. III quarterfinals

More on Ausberry: https://t.co/yedyu75Bue @MikeTSinger @BGInews pic.twitter.com/9zxtasXMy5

— Sam Spiegelman (@samspiegs) November 30, 2022

Some of the tougher games on the schedule for Newman were pretty illustrative of what Texas is getting from Manning when he arrives in January as an early enrollee. His game isn’t really oriented around high school ball, although he’s obviously great it, nor does he have the sort of skill set which is typical of college stars. Manning has more finely tuned skills which show up when executing higher level tasks.

Arch, the structured quarterback

One of the issues Newman had against University Lab was the erasure of Manning’s off-schedule playmaking by Ausberry. Manning is pretty athletic for a 6-foot-4, 215 pound pocket passing prospect and was accustomed to being able to get outside of the pocket and make plays up until facing squads with with 4.6 speed at linebacker.

He’ll have some success playing on the move in college, Manning has some burst and can definitely get going in a straight line, but overall he’s not truly a dual-threat and lacks the lateral agility to beat good athletes in space 1-on-1. Where he’s at his best is where you’d expect, looking off coverage and throwing accurate balls from the pocket on play-action or dropback concepts.

Within the structure of their offense, Manning was effective, but the structure of their offense wasn’t enough to beat more talented teams. Here’s how they were lining up much of 2022 or in the playoffs:

The receivers were split pretty wide as Newman attempted to spread out opponents in order to try and run the ball on the coverage-oriented nickel and dime packages they tended to face. They had to play big tight end Will Loerzel (6-foot-5, 240 pounds) quite a bit after losing Will Randle to injury and while he’d flex out at times, he was more of a blocker and didn’t have Randle’s knack for getting open. When Newman wanted to get serious about throwing from 4-wide sets they’d sub in a fourth receiver.

These power sets didn’t really maximize the potential of the dropback passing game because the spacing wasn’t great for some of their route patterns. They tried to mix a few two-man combinations to the field only to be thwarted by how far the quick routes were from the box. Meanwhile the run game wasn’t championship caliber.

Against University Lab the starting Newman running back had nine carries for 24 yards while Manning added 15 carries for 81 yards and a touchdown. Against top level competition, Newman generally had to rely on quarterback run game to make real headway running the ball.

Here’s an example of the Newman offense at their best, a couple of winning plays on the road against Belle Chasse after they failed to control the game by running the ball:

pic.twitter.com/adBLzkROZ1

— Special asst to the special asst to the HC (@Ian_A_Boyd) December 19, 2022

In the first example they get their slot receiver on a big safety on the wheel route, Manning sees the corner committed to the post and drops it in for a score. The second example was the game winner, Manning saw the deep safety shaded to the other seam route and threw away from coverage to the other seam route for a wide open touchdown.

It’s hard to build a high school offense around this style of passing game, even with Arch Manning (and a good left tackle). The overall quality and cohesion necessary across the offensive line and the chemistry between quarterback and receivers is hard to come by. As it happens, Newman lost one of their key pro-style weapons when Randle went down. When they’d face teams who could throw waves of athletic pass-rushers at them, like University Lab, things broke down and the run game couldn’t rescue them.

When they could protect Manning and attack teams with these spread passing sets, Arch could do some special things.

Arch at Texas

To make the most of the Arch Manning era, Texas needs to offer the right amount of structure for a quarterback groomed from birth for pro-style offense. There’s two main avenues for Texas in achieving that goal.

First, the Steve Sarkisian plan which Texas is already safely on the path to realize. That consists of fielding a power run game which can generate easy opportunities on play-action. Manning may not be a dual-threat in the college game to the extent he was in high school, but he’s more than athletic enough to move around in the pocket or on rollouts.

The other is with a progression passing game, on dropbacks with no play-action and four or five receivers getting out into patterns. This requires quality at tackle but also cohesion from all five offensive linemen along with the running back and quarterback and the receivers in the event of a blitz. Another crucial piece is at tight end, pro-style passing games tend to marry run and pass best when the tight end can be an extra man boosting one or the other.

Texas is on track to have a good line in position to run the ball and protect Manning when he’s reading the field, putting weapons around him shouldn’t be hard either. Players like Ja’Tavion Sanders are hard to come by though and he should be in the NFL by the time Manning is throwing the ball in Austin.

Sark and his staff have been working to find a tight end in this class who can create the sorts of matchup problems which can make a pro-style passing game sing. It may prove one of the keys to his time at Texas.

Manning isn’t the sort of quarterback who makes college offense easy, he’s the sort who who makes a good offense devastating, which should be exactly what Sark needs in the future.