Texas-Ohio State should answer one burning question: Can Arch Manning match the hype?

Expect it to be a top-five matchup. Expect the Ohio State Buckeyes to act as if they are not only the defending national champions, but that they walked over a Texas corpse to earn that title.

There is no denying the fact that the 2025 Buckeyes lost a lot of players who helped make their season memorable. Both the offensive and defensive coordinators left. There will be a new starting quarterback, two new bookend defensive ends, two new bell cow backs and a gaping hole in leadership and production at middle linebacker. But the program is still the standard in the sport in a conference that is growing in strength.

The sport’s last two national champions were both from the Big Ten. The No. 1-ranked team in the AP Top 25 Poll for the final eight weeks of the 2024 season was a Big Ten team. In an era that has been defined by the SEC’s dominance over the past two decades, the balance of power feels like it is shifting with a Week 1 matchup between two teams that not only met in the College Football Playoff semifinals last year, but each was ranked No. 1 in the AP Top 25 at least once last season.

And while Texas, which went 7-1 in SEC play and earned a spot in the conference championship game in its first year in the league, has also lost plenty of important pieces on both sides of the ball, it has gained perhaps the biggest advantage in this 2025 matchup that is likely to make the game categorically different: Arch Manning will start at quarterback for Texas. Not Quinn Ewers.

The NFL told us exactly how it felt about Ewers in April. A player who was once ranked as the No. 1 recruit in the country, led Texas to a double-digit win against Nick Saban’s Alabama team in Tuscaloosa, won a Big 12 Championship and played in two CFP semifinals in two years, Ewers was selected in the seventh and final round of the 2025 NFL Draft.

Manning, who has shown enough in limited competition in 2024, is already projected to be the No. 1 overall pick in the 2026 NFL Draft — or 2027, if he chooses not to enter early. This would lead many to believe that Manning’s skill set could’ve been the difference between beating Georgia in the SEC title game or Ohio State in the CFP semifinal round.

Is it a stretch? Perhaps. But only one quarterback in the FBS in the last 25 years has recorded a 75-plus-yard touchdown pass, a 65-yard rushing score and another 50-plus-yard touchdown pass in the same game: Manning.

In a Week 3 matchup against UTSA last season, Manning completed 9 of 12 passes for 223 yards with four total touchdowns. His 67-yard touchdown rush was the longest by a Texas QB since Vince Young in 2005, and he did that in relief of Ewers. In his only start against SEC competition, Manning completed 26 of 31 passes for 325 yards and was responsible for two passing and one rushing touchdown.

His size, his speed and his arm talent remind many not of his Super Bowl-winning and SEC-legend uncles Peyton and Eli, but of their father, Archie Manning, who was making it happen with his feet before people knew what a mobile quarterback was. At 6-foot-4, 222 pounds, Arch Manning is the closest comparison to Young that Texas has had at QB in 20 years. Since then, every quarterback from David Ash to Tyrone Swoopes has tried to reach the high-water mark Young set, but they’ve all fallen short in one way or another.

For Manning to become the Texas QB most believe he is capable of being, he’ll need to win a championship — a national championship. Steve Sarkisian and Texas have been building a program that can end the year atop the mountain since he first arrived from Alabama, where he coordinated one of the best offenses we’ve seen this century.

This year’s Texas team is stout in the middle, fast on the perimeter and loaded with a roster of players who expect to play for the national title not in a few years, but right here, right now. That is what Manning has to accomplish. That is the bar for success for a program that is running up against the ceiling Oklahoma hit during the Lincoln Riley era. It’s the ceiling Ohio State broke through in Year 1 of the CFP and is now one of just four programs with multiple national titles in the playoff era (Ohio State, Clemson, Alabama, Georgia).

And that is why the Week 1 matchup between Texas and Ohio State, which will take place on Aug. 30 in Columbus and air on FOX, will be so telling. With a win over the defending national champions on the road, very few will pick against the Longhorns the rest of the way. With a loss to Ohio State, though, shovels will find their way to dirt to begin digging the six-foot hole to bury what was once the mighty SEC and its newest jewel, the Longhorns.