Steve Sarkisian on Arch Manning: 'He can only do what's called'

In a season where the Texas Longhorns were expected to be national championship contenders on the back of excellent quarterback play from Arch Manning, head coach Steve Sarkisian has seen his team fall flat. Now, sitting at 3-2, the Longhorns have their backs against the wall are are looking for answers.

Amid that difficult start, there’s been mounting criticism surrounding Manning. In the Florida game, that criticism extended into holding the ball too long, with the implication being that it’s made him indecisive or led to sacks. However, Sarkisian defended his quarterback, explaining he has to play within what’s being called.

“I think to Arch’s defense,” Steve Sarkisian said. “He can only do what’s called, right? Definitely would not put that on him. You know, I think we went into that game with a mindset of we wanted to attack them vertically down the field. We felt like that was where they were susceptible. And clearly they were. We hit a couple, we didn’t hit some. You know, we missed a couple.”

Arch Manning would complete just 16 of 29 passes for 263 yards and two touchdowns to go with two interceptions in the loss to Florida. The Gators, in particular, took away the quick passing game, and Texas tried to push the ball downfield instead. In the process, that made it difficult for the offense to get into a consistent rhythm.

“And every game is different in the approach of how we try to attack people. We had some opportunities for some more rhythmic, quicker throws. It didn’t come to fruition the way we would have liked. But again, every week, every game’s got its own formula for success for us of how we’re going to try to attack an opponent,” Sarkisian said.

“And the flow of the game to your point then dictates kind of where you start leaning into and where you start going. I thought Florida, to their credit, Ron Roberts is a great coach. They did a good job of understanding that that was where we probably needed to go, and then tried to take that away from us and made that aspect of our game difficult and forced us to kind of hold the ball a little bit more. So, credit to them on that. But we’ve got to be more creative to find ways to get some of those more easy completions.”

The challenge for Texas is that the schedule doesn’t get any easier from here. Next up, Texas needs to be ready to play Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl. There, Manning will face one of the statistically best defenses in the country that wants to dictate the game to the Texas offense.

David Pollack: Arch Manning taking blame that belongs to Steve Sarkisian

One analyst who feels there’s too much blame falling on Arch Manning is David Pollack. In his opinion, it actually should be falling on Steve Sarkisian’s shoulders. In particular, he’s concerned about the play calling not putting Manning in a position to succeed.

“What we’re gonna see from the national media, it is what it is, but it’ll be a pile fest on Arch. It’ll be a big dog-pile and everybody’s gonna crap over Arch because he hasn’t been playing great. And he hasn’t. He hasn’t played great, but let’s not let the most important part off the hook. The most important part is I think Sark, I think that’s a big deal. That’s a big person that deserves some of the blame. When we talk about Sark and his record, first of all, we’ve talked about everybody and NIL. NIL helped the state of Texas as much as anyone,” Pollack said.

“That is a big time deal for them. They’ve got so much money and it makes it so easy to continue to be successful when you have that much money. At the same time, when you look at Texas and their roster and the ability they have to spend and they’ve had a couple of good seasons, you have to look back a little bit and say Sark is 2-8 against Top-10 teams at Texas. We’re gonna talk about Arch because he’s not playing well. But whose job is it to make sure he plays well? It’s the coach’s job. It’s the offensive play caller’s job… who is Steve Sarkisian.”