Arch Manning vs. the Rest of the SEC QBs: It Can’t Be That Bad, Right?

Many diehard fans or single-team analysts get caught in the bubble of their own program, especially this early in the year.

[Sign up for Inside Texas TODAY for $1 and get the BEST Longhorns coverage!]

They’ve been waiting seven months for their team to make a push for something bigger. For Texas fans, that was the promise of an elite QB who could push them to their first national title game in 16 years.

But when that QB turns out to not be very elite, it becomes all you can think about. It can make it hard to actually observe what’s going on elsewhere. I personally can get caught up in that idea. Texas’ game on Saturday was the only game featuring an SEC player I got to fully watch. I caught some plays from Georgia-Tennessee and the fourth quarter of A&M vs. Notre Dame, but not nearly enough football to make general claims about these players.

When that’s the case, stats can sometimes be our best friend.

With three weeks into the season, every SEC team has gotten a hard enough matchup, and enough other snaps outside of it, to get a gauge of how good they are at the moment. Missouri’s Beau Pribula’s hardest opponent was Kansas, so maybe he deserves an asterisk next to his name, but otherwise every other SEC QB has faced the following:

4 great defenses: Arch Manning vs. Ohio State, Georgia and Tennessee QBs, Mateer vs. Michigan

Great-ish competition: Marcel Reed, Ty Simpson, DJ Lagway, and Garrett Nussmeier

Ole Miss’s good defense: Taylen Green and Zach Calzada

A good Big 12 team: Jackson Arnold vs. Baylor and Blake Shapen vs. Arizona State

Each other and a common opponent: Diego Pavia and LaNorris Sellers

Kentucky: Austin Simmons

Kansas: Beau Pribula

Eight of these QBs have played in really important games already, with another six at least being tested enough to get a good set of snaps that we can care about.

I sorted them into what I think are five of the most important QB stats:

Yards per attempt

Big-time throws / turnover-worthy plays (basically a number to find the efficiency of explosive plays)

AY/A, adjusted yards per attempt

NFL passer rating

EPA/play, expected points added — one of the more accurate single measures of efficiency stats

Here’s how Arch stacks up with the rest of the SEC:

First of all, Zach Calzada.

Now that we’re past that, it still looks pretty ugly for the star boy.

Ty Simpson is having a strong efficiency season so far, bouncing back well after FSU. He’s followed closely by Diego Pavia and Joey Aguilar.

On the other side of things, Manning is way down at the bottom. If you average out every player’s position on this chart, he, Calzada, Jackson Arnold, and DJ Lagway are the only ones who are 12th or lower on average in each of these categories.

Even if John Mateer may seem a bit overrated from what this chart shows, he’s still miles more efficient than Manning, whose only above-average stat is in explosive rate (that BTT/TWP stat). He’s poor in every other stat and bottom of the barrel in EPA/play. Every time he impacts a play, Texas loses -0.4 points.

To put that into context, the opposing team gains a touchdown’s worth of expected points every 15 dropbacks or runs by Manning. Yikes.

Manning does stand out in a few stats. His pressure-to-sack ratio is one of the three best in the SEC, making him really hard to take down on dropbacks. His average depth of target is high, proving he likes to push it down the field. He’s also one of the four or five best running QBs in the conference.

But when you see he has the highest time to throw of any QB in the SEC, yet a bottom-two adjusted completion percentage, it’s hard not to shake your head.

Manning has to figure it out. The Longhorns are going nowhere with a bottom-four SEC offense and quarterback. They may be able to get by a struggling Gators team with arguably a worse QB, but what happens when it’s the Red River Rivalry? What about Georgia? Hell, what about Vanderbilt!?

It needs to get simpler for Manning. Do everything in your power to get that EPA closer to where Marcel Reed or Taylen Green is, two good, not great, passers who impact the game with their legs at an elite rate. If Texas can’t win with him using his arm 30 times a game, it has to win with its defense and his legs.