How Arch Manning handles formidable fame

“It’s not what everyone thinks it is, and what it’s all cracked up to be.” — Madonna, in 2005, on the subject of fame.

Fame, which used to have more patience, took its time cozying up to Archie Manning six decades ago, an era when high school football players didn’t get famous and recruiting garnered little attention, analysis or hyperventilation.

When a Mississippi State coach tried to lure Manning to Starkville by noting that Ole Miss had signed eight quarterbacks that offseason, it came as news to Manning, who remembers briefly scrambling for information about those other quarterbacks. “We got the Memphis paper. We didn’t get the Jackson paper,” he said of the primitive media landscape. When he reached Ole Miss and freshmen lacked eligibility, he spent a year in the company of anonymity. He played three seasons at Ole Miss, where they’re building a statue of him nowadays — wait, there wasn’t one already? — and where fame caught up to him even as he never craved it but also did not mind it and sunnily handled it.

A mere two generations down the tree, the second of the Mannings’ nine grandchildren has just begun an eighth football season of being famous even as he remains technically 22. His fame began cantering during his freshman year of high school and had reached a full-on gallop by graduation. His surname and his country’s love of stars intensified it. He topped these funky late-20th-century inventions called recruiting rankings, and like all such souls, walked around with a working knowledge of which prep quarterbacks excelled and where they might be headed.

All along his way from tot to 6-foot-4, he got a point-blank panorama on fame, watching two uncles star for so long that they combined with his grandfather for a gobsmacking 47 seasons at NFL quarterback. He grew up around New Orleans, where the citizens long have seen the famous drop in. You might say he carefully developed a clear-eyed view of what fame was and what it wasn’t, except that he seemed to gather those observations posthaste. “Arch always said growing up, I can remember him being 6 or 7, ‘I want to play quarterback one day in college, but I don’t have any interest in being famous,'” his father, Cooper, said in a telephone interview, a few days after his grandfather had said, “Yeah, he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like it. He’ll handle it. He doesn’t seek it. He likes low-key … He’s not a limelight guy. He really does like the locker room, likes his teammates.”

And so three years ago, Arch Manning reached a football program so visible it can feel like a castle on a national landscape, the University of Texas, a place where a game like the one with Ohio State coming Saturday night can feel so anticipated as to feel deluging. He arrived blanketed with fame as someone who did not crave it and does sort of mind it even as he knows how to sunnily handle it. “I’d say it’s fair for me to think it’s a little absurd,” he said of the concept of fame as he sat on a stairwell in mid-August at the Texas practice facility. “I really just like playing football with my buddies and going to school and hanging out with friends, and if I were to take something away from my life, it would definitely be that.

“But you know, I’ve grown to accept what it is, accept who I am, and make the most out of it, and just kind of expect everything. I had a good talk with Matthew McConaughey, and he’s kind of helped me navigate that area of my life, and he said, ‘You know, don’t be surprised by anything. Take everything with a grain of salt. Accept everything. There’s no escaping it. It’s only gonna get worse, the better you play. So, accept everything.'”

He looks two branches up the tree at his grandfather and says, “Yeah, I think him, being the biggest role model, he treated everyone with respect, was nice to everyone, said yes to everyone, was gracious, and that’s what I try to be. Obviously, sometimes, it’s difficult to say yes to everything, but that’s what I try to do, and I try to treat everyone with respect.”

Underpinning his preference that fame might refrain from being so damned steadfast, there lies a worry both very real and maybe even endearing. “He was also particularly sensitive” as a child, Cooper Manning said, “to thinking anybody was looking at him as if he was getting any sort of special treatment. No one likes the boss’ son that’s doing nothing and getting credit.”

In his early teens at the annual Manning Passing Academy, he’d choose staying in dorms with friends and pizza over going to meetings with college quarterbacks. And one day this summer, Cooper Manning found himself in Austin and asked, “‘I’m in Austin. Could I come to practice today?’ He’s like, ‘You’re coming to the scrimmage on Saturday. That’s enough.’ I think I’ve been to two practices in his career.”

A young man widely viewed as a notch above everybody else yearns to dwell amid everybody else. He’s a personable guy uninterested in a personable persona. “I would start with, he’s a normal guy,” Texas coach Steve Sarkisian said in August. “I think Arch Manning is a normal guy.”

He performs but does not relish his lucrative NIL duties, Sarkisian said. Guard Brandon Baker uses the word “approachable.” Receiver Ryan Wingo, who took Manning to his hometown (St. Louis) in June 2025, goes with, “Outgoing, for sure.” Defensive lineman Hero Kanu deploys “ordinary.” Center Connor Robertson includes the word “normal” and says, “You know, I think if you met him kind of randomly, and had no idea about football, you wouldn’t think he’s the starting quarterback and comes from the family that he does.” Said Cooper Manning, “I would say if he’s meeting people and someone’s all rah-rah about him being a quarterback, he’s probably going the other way.”

A SINGLE FAMILY tree demonstrates fame’s blaze across the past six decades in the country that gave the world Hollywood. Fame has lost all patience. It has become less enchanting. It has augmented generous helpings of pickiness. It has developed more avenues. And it has mingled into so many places that in his plight against it, Manning does have one humongous friend: the great Austin.

The loss of patience screamed in that famous media day of the Sugar Bowl national semifinal of 2023-24, when Arch Manning sat down as a magnet for reporters who knew full well their audiences’ durable hankering to hear from anointed stars even when the anointed stars haven’t done enough to say much. That capped a season in which Manning had thrown five passes (completing two!). “At first,” he said, “when I first got here, and I hadn’t played a down, it was hard to wrap my brain around why someone would want a picture with me. And I was a little bit, you could call it a little bit of anxiety, like what the hell is going on. But now I just try to treat everyone with respect.”

With fame not so bloody hasty in 1967, Archie Manning’s first year in Oxford, Mississippi, entailed toiling on a bygone construct known as the freshman team. He had to adhere to the whims and wishes of two varsity players assigned as demanding “big brothers.” He washed their cars. He fetched food for them at night if they beseeched. One, an offensive lineman named Alan Bush, “wore short-sleeved shirts, buttons up with a fly collar,” Archie Manning said. “That’s kind of what fat people wore, in those days. He must have had fifty of them, and he’d wear them all down to the last one, and he’d give them to me to run to the laundry. I barely could bring them back; I had like 40 shirts.” Manning wore a beanie per strict custom. Varsity players shaved his head, which sapped his confidence about seeking dates, and the Ole Miss freshman team beat Mississippi State that year with motivation after varsity had threatened a fresh round of shaving in the event of defeat.

Freshman team head coach, and former Marine, “Wobble” Davidson, drilled the lads with the idea of weeding out the less serious, such as the 11 who did not return to school after a loss at LSU.

How many freshman teams have reunions?

That one just did.

Of course, Archie Manning also played college baseball at shortstop.

Where Arch Manning has appeared on NFL draft lists roughly since birth, Archie and Olivia Manning returned from their honeymoon in Acapulco, Mexico, in January 1971, aimed to move into a new apartment, and fielded a phone call.

“The PR guy at Ole Miss, Billy Gates, called me, and he said, ‘Do you know tomorrow’s the NFL draft?’

“And I went, ‘Yeah, I think I did but I just forgot.’

“He said, ‘You’d better get over here, because people have been calling. New England’s been calling. New Orleans has been calling. Houston’s been calling. They’ve got the first three picks. You’d better get over here at 9 o’clock in the morning, that’s when the draft starts.'”

The Saints chose him second that next morning, of course, and then Gates said, “You can’t leave here, we’ve got to make a picture. So AP came over and made a picture.”

Pause.

“So I went to my 10 o’clock class.”

Fame can seem less enchanting now, and not just because of influencers. It’s more and more of more, having fumbled its nuances. Kanu just arrived from Ohio State last January and quickly shared a communications class with Manning. “And nobody knows me, I just got here,” Kanu said, “and we had class together and we leave, and there were like twenty people running up to him. It was like my first-ever class there, his second week, and I was like, ‘Dang. Second week and people still run up to you like that.’ But he’s taking his time and talking to everyone which I love and appreciate for him, but it’s like, I wouldn’t see him like that, you know, I wouldn’t be like, ‘Oh, that’s Arch Manning, let me go run up to him,’ because he’s just a regular person like everyone else, you know.”

In the collegiate fame Archie Manning lived, when he and friends would travel by car to, say, Jackson, Mississippi, and they might stop for, say, groceries, the friends would strategize that Manning should write the check, for that made it very likely that nobody would have to pay. Nobody would have to pay because the check wouldn’t get cashed. The check wouldn’t get cashed because the store owner would pin it to the cash register as a souvenir of a brush with legend.

“My teammates made fun of it,” he said of fame, “and made fun of me and laughed about it.” That became the habit and the method. When a regional sensation turned up in the form of the song “The Ballad of Archie Who,” penned by a Mississippi postal worker named Lamont Wilson, and derived from a Tennessee sneer about “Archie Who,” Manning’s teammates would spice up any gathering by dragging out the 45 and giving it a spin. “We had little stereos, you know,” Manning said.

Even the wedding of Archie and Olivia Manning, set for Thursday, Jan. 21, 1971, in Olivia’s hometown of Philadelphia, Mississippi, had humor mingled with its frenzy. Governor John Bell Williams sent highway patrolmen to help with the crowds.

Otherwise, Archie Manning remembers walking the campus of then-6,000 without impediment or incident. He remembers fellow students as gracious but not intrusive. He can’t remember anyone ever taking a picture. (“Had to have a Polaroid to take someone’s picture,” he said.) He can’t remember ever getting even mildly second-guessed out there walking in the world, as Texas players say has happened on occasion to his grandson.

In fact, it seems that some of the earliest taunting Archie Manning got from the Ole Miss campus happened in the early 2000s, and by telephone to New Orleans. Apparently, he reckons, Ole Miss quarterback Eli Manning had found his way to a media guide because, as the followers of sports and fame had become pickier in general, Eli had an assessment:

“Your numbers weren’t all that good.”

That’s perhaps harsh, but for an All-American and a subject of statewide folklore, Archie Manning’s numbers show how people perceived and praised their athletes back then more out of a feeling, out of something more organic. In three seasons, he completed 402 of 761 passes (52.8%) with 31 touchdown passes and 40 interceptions, and rushed for 823 yards and 25 touchdowns, 14 in his junior year. Ole Miss did beat Alabama and LSU twice within three seasons, and did win the Liberty and Sugar bowls, and that seemed plenty. As further evidence of a less-finicky era, Archie Manning revisits the afternoon of Nov. 15, 1968, in Knoxville, Tennessee, when he decorated a 31-0 loss with six interceptions.

“Six!” he said this summer. “It’s hard to throw six!”

When his first son Cooper once threw five in a high school game, Archie Manning made a point of waiting up for him so he could reassure him he still did not surpass his father. When his middle son, Peyton, got to Tennessee in the mid-1990s, Peyton managed to locate the VHS of the six interceptions and make note of it, a reminder that this family tree is a tough crowd. Yet Archie Manning can’t remember any derision at all in the ensuing week after 31-0 and six. It’s possible he can’t remember because, he said, “I just laid low,” and yearned for the next kickoff to arrive. He can’t really remember any negative press, even as he says, “I didn’t read my clippings. I probably did a little bit. But there weren’t many clippings. That’s the difference in Arch. My god.”

In 2025 at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin, beside a campus of 52,000, in Arch Manning’s third turn as full-time starter, the crowd seemed to conclude that Texas’ first half came up shy of its demands. Boos swirled. “I kind of hate to think,” Archie Manning said this summer, “of what would happen to Arch if he threw six interceptions.” And in an era with people more prone to bring up touchdowns-to-interceptions ratio as part of common American English, Sarkisian points out that Manning steered steadily through all early-season rapids to spend the last eight games going 20-to-2. His grandfather said, “A lot of people say, ‘Yeah, he struggled, but he played pretty good at the end.’ He played better than pretty good at the end. He played damned good. His last eight games, he threw two passes that should have been intercepted. No, he threw one. He had two interceptions in eight games, just one was off his receiver’s hands. I grew up being taught, You don’t turn the ball over.”

His old soul within a young body seems to have helped, as nobody speaks of any particular reaction to the harrumphing going round. “He got better and better as the year went on,” Sarkisian said, “and never once did he say at the end of the year, ‘I told you so,’ or, ‘Screw you.’ He was humble. He said, ‘Thank you.’ He praised his teammates. That’s who he is. Here we come into Year 2, and there’s some that are building him back up again, there’s some that are pumping their brakes on him, but I don’t think any of that really drives him one way or the other. I think what drives him is those guys in that locker room with him.”

Now here comes Ohio State, one year after Manning started off in Ohio State’s scary Horseshoe with his miscues celebrated — there’s that fame again — during a hard first half (5-for-10 for 26 yards) and a better second (12-for-20 for 144). To follow him off the field after that 14-7 hardship in the sunshine was to notice somebody with supportive teammates, who kept stopping by to soothe him. So here’s another chance, this latest of can’t-miss college football night games, 57 years after Archie Manning starred in one of the first, Ole Miss’ 33-32 loss to Alabama in Birmingham, during which Manning got all-that-good numbers: 33-for-52 for 436 yards and two passing touchdowns, 104 rushing yards and three rushing touchdowns.

That night, of course, serves as a benchmark. It happened just before college football would realize its own fame, with a kickoff moved back because ABC would not move its ratings titan, “The Lawrence Welk Show,” the tame music-variety show which many a kid of the 1960s watched while slightly annoyed among geezer relatives who seemed deeply pleased. “My age group, ‘Lawrence Welk’ was a huge part of our life,” Archie Manning said. “We had to watch every Saturday night.” What a marvel later, then, while he played for the Saints, that when he played in a celebrity golf tournament in Las Vegas, the celebrity in his group ended up being Welk, whom they called “Larry.” Welk’s catchphrase on the show, “Wonderful, wonderful,” he took to the golf course to compliment shots. “I could wait to get to a pay phone to call my mother!” Archie Manning said. “I could not wait! ‘You’re not gonna believe who I’m playing golf with.'”

With so very many avenues these days for the famous and the less famous and the not-really-famous-at-all, it’s still possible to catch “The Lawrence Welk Show” on TV on early Saturday evenings, 34 years after his death.

Archie Manning watches sometimes.

If one’s grandson has to be famous because football is just too fun to opt for, say, the viola, then the best American places to navigate fame circa 2026 would have to include Austin, the mushrooming metropolis with the earthy neighborhoods. It brims with intriguing restaurants here and there and way over there. It excels at coffee even when the air outdoors feels like an incinerator. It always had music; now it has more music. It has F1. It has foreboding traffic. It’s used to the famous stopping through or staying put. There might not be any better indication of its soar in relevance than the first thing one might see upon landing: two jets next to each other, a British Airways directly in from London and a Lufthansa directly in from Frankfurt.

So many people have moved in with so many varied interests that so many of them do not obsess over the Longhorns, meaning fewer souvenir-seekers per capita than for a famous player 30 years ago such as 1999 Heisman Trophy winner Ricky Williams. Colt McCoy, the starting quarterback from 2006 to 2009, occupied the perch in the last era in which every citizen wasn’t carrying around a camera. Facebook had debuted and dominated. He uses a keen memory to mention “Myspace.”

“And if you did have a camera,” he said in a telephone interview, “it was like a flip phone, snap a pic. It was grainy.” And so: “It was autographs, pretty much.” Fame also entailed a sort of simmering pique, felt from students and even professors after a jarring home loss in 2007 to Kansas State. That made McCoy recalibrate how he handled his fame. But Texas football’s fame might have diminished some by now given how Texas spent 13 seasons from 2010 to 2022 going a lukewarm 83-67.

Going out required some plotting out. “I would always try to wear a hat,” McCoy said, “and try not to wear anything with the [Longhorn] logo. If you wear a logo, a shirt or sweats, it was just impossible. … It got to the point where if we’re all going out to eat, with my buddies,” somebody would say, “If you’re wearing a Texas shirt, we’re not going out.'”

Guard Brandon Baker says, “It’s definitely nice to know that you’re not in a small city, small town. Know that he’s not gonna be ambushed when he steps off of campus. The offensive line, we actually, in the springtime we actually went to VJ’s,” a place near Lake Travis, within but not amid the sprawl, “as an O-line, and Arch, the quarterback. Super easy. Walked in, sat down, had food. A couple people asked for pictures. Left, walked out, and that was it.” They stayed maybe 90 minutes to two hours, Baker reckons, and the tally of people approaching Arch Manning for photos numbered, Baker guessed, “probably about three or four.” Center Connor Robertson stresses that any needling or goading from the public around town is “infrequent,” and says anyway, “I don’t think Arch would really think too much about it.”

He, after all, by many accounts, values a thing that hasn’t changed, a thing in which American football specializes to such a degree that old freshman teams reunite: human collaboration. When human collaboration thrives, it’s an elemental treasure no vaporous force (such as fame) can ruin.

He has heard his grandfather giving the words he sometimes has given to teams: extolling teammate-hood as the most meaningful pursuit in the whole mix. Archie Manning loves to tell the story of when Peyton Manning called him with the melancholy news that running back Edgerrin James would retire, whereupon Peyton proclaimed James the “best teammate I’ve ever had,” and Archie soon asked what made that so, and Peyton said, “Totally accountable, humble, unselfish.”

And so, in Arch, Sarkisian sees “an extremely thoughtful human.” Baker sees an eager checker-upper on teammates: If he “sees guys down, just the first person to come up to them, ‘Hey, everything’s all right? You’re doing good? How’s practice? How’s life been?’ I actually heard him literally last night ask someone, ‘Hey, you good? Forget about football, you need anything, call me, text me, my phone’s always open.'” Defensive tackle Hero Kanu shared: “He doesn’t care about all the flashy things. He loves being around his teammates. He loves his teammates. He just loves spending time with us. You would think somebody of his caliber would walk around in the newest designer stuff, or this or that. He’s with the same type of stuff on every day.”

“Obviously,” Arch Manning said of Archie Manning, “he played two sports. There was no NIL then. There was a freshman team for football. So it’s changed a lot. But I’m glad we’re here, I’ve loved my time here, and just soaking it in every day, and making the most of it.”

“He’s a sweet kid,” his grandfather concludes.

Long ago and also not so long ago, Archie Manning hugged goodbye to his weeping mother and sister to venture the 80 miles from Drew, Mississippi, to Oxford, Mississippi, for college. His father, Buddy, drove. “We hadn’t talked about this type of stuff, so I asked him what he thought I ought to study,” Archie said. “I was a good student, I was valedictorian, and I think my kids were always impressed when they found out I was valedictorian until they found out there weren’t but 48 people in the class.

“I think he told me, ‘Find something you like. Find something you’re interested in, something you enjoy. Study. Work. But more than anything, I just want you to be a good guy.'”

Apparently that ethic has traveled two branches down the tree.