The extraordinary mystery of the Tigers’ Tarik Skubal
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Tim Keown
THE IDEA HERE is to profile the Detroit Tigers‘ Tarik Skubal, the most dynamic and charismatic pitcher in baseball, a young man whose run of dominance over the past three seasons is approaching historic levels. This gig is pretty straightforward: We seek answers from the past to the questions raised by the present. How did this mountain of aggression, a man who occupies the pitcher’s mound like an invading force, develop this all-consuming drive? What motivations and grudges and insecurities boil inside him, and what dots on his personal timeline tell the story best?
Where did he come from, and how did he get here?
The key is to ask the right questions of the right people, trigger the best memories, elicit the most profound stories.
Or just have someone read the location on a caller ID.
Russ Skubal, Tarik’s dad, says he noticed the Northern California area code and city of my phone number. I tell him I live nearby, in a little spot called Suisun Valley, a formerly quiet and undiscovered slice of vineyards and hellish wind that has become less quiet and more discovered as it gains prominence as a wine region. “I know it well,” he says. “I used to coach high school basketball right by you.” He lets out a mirthless laugh. “The principal didn’t like me much, so I only lasted two years.”
He coached former NFL wide receiver Stevie Johnson and former NFL linebacker James-Michael Johnson at Rodriguez High and was convinced he would have won a state title if he had been given two more seasons.
“You know, Tarik played two years in the Tri-Valley Little League,” he says. “We lived right around the corner from the fields.”
My response is somewhere between a stammer and a grunt. My wife and I had four sons play in that league. I coached in it for a decade. One or more of my sons had to have played on the same field as Tarik. I undoubtedly saw that name, not a common one, written on a lineup card or scorebook multiple times. I probably wrote it myself.
I did not remember Tarik Skubal.
I texted my son Andrew, six days younger than Tarik, and asked him if he knew he once shared a field with the best pitcher in the big leagues. “What????” he replied. I texted my friend, Chris Foley, who coached his three sons in the same league for as long as I did. “Seriously??” he responded.
This is the man who was named the American League Cy Young winner last season in a unanimous vote after crafting one of just 39 Triple Crown seasons — leading the league in ERA, strikeouts and wins — in MLB history. This is the man who, at 28, is even better this season: 10-2, a 2.02 ERA, a preposterous 0.81 WHIP, 10.5 strikeouts for every walk. This man, the odds-on favorite to start next week’s All-Star Game, someone with a name so unique it would seem impossible to forget, had somehow flickered in and out of our lives without any of us making the connection.
I jokingly tell Russ this doesn’t speak well of my reporting skills, and he says, “Think about this: How many times do you think we sat together in those little bleachers and didn’t even know it? What a crazy world.”
Later that night, in the Tigers’ clubhouse after Skubal beat the Athletics for his ninth win of the season, I tell Tarik what I learned from his father. “Holy s—,” he says. “Holy s—.” We set out to piece it together. Do you remember this kid or that coach? Which team did you play on? Remember the cars parked in the mud beyond the left-field fence?
At this point it must be said that Skubal is a remarkably good sport, and perhaps the most accessible, friendly and accommodating superstar in the game. The combination of a 90-minute rain delay and a sloppy game against the Athletics means it’s nearly 11 p.m. as he stands at his locker and happily reminisces. He just pitched six innings and gave up four runs; not his best, but the Tigers won, and Skubal says, “If that’s what qualifies as a bad game for me, I’ll take it.” He left the dugout and went directly to the weight room, where he put himself through his customary post-start, two-hour weight workout. “Total body lift, and I go decently heavy,” he says. “Bench, row, split-squads, dead lifts — you’re going to be sore after a start, anyway. The idea is to keep your high days high and your low days low.”
We’d spoken at his Comerica Park locker two or three times before the revelation of our shared but forgotten past, and he’s as blown away — well, almost — as I am. He’s immediately transported back to Cordelia Tri-Valley Little League, where the wind blasted through the massive eucalyptus trees so violently you could close your eyes in the dugout and imagine you were hearing waves crash against rocks, and where the tall weeds behind the outfield grass were home to legions of ticks that made their way home on just about every kid who played.
“The f—ing ticks,” he says. “Every night my mom would check my elbows, my armpits — everywhere.”
Skubal moved from Northern California to Kingman, Arizona, and was all-state in basketball and baseball in high school. Hidden by geography and young for his grade, he had just one Division I offer, from Seattle University. He was drafted by the Tigers in the ninth round after a fine career in Seattle despite Tommy John surgery costing him a year and probably some significant money.
“That’s the beauty of the game of baseball, and the beauty of my career,” Skubal says. “I think my career is pretty relatable to a lot of kids. I hope so, anyway. I didn’t have the most streamlined process. I didn’t have a lot of Division I offers, didn’t go high in the draft, not an immediate prospect, no big signing bonus. I didn’t have any of that.”
I suggest to him that our widespread amnesia regarding his time in our midst tracks with the trajectory of his career, that maybe we hold the distinction of being the first in a long line of people who missed on Tarik Skubal.
THE MOTIVATIONS AND grudges and insecurities, they’re all there, amiably fueling a drive that transforms itself on the mound into an entirely different vibe: a roaring bear of a man, 6-foot-4 and officially listed at 240 pounds, who throws every pitch like it’s an accusation and a dare, each one seeking the strike zone like blood rushing to a cut. His pitching coach at Seattle University and the first person not to miss on Tarik Skubal, Elliott Cribby, describes Skubal’s high leg kick and swerving motion as “a fish chasing a lure in the water,” and I defy anybody to do better.
The route from there to here wasn’t easy from the start. Tarik was born with a clubfoot on his left leg and underwent surgery as an infant. “Tarik never let it get in the way,” Russ says. “He never told a coach he couldn’t run because his foot hurt. To me, it’s the most inspirational part of his journey, and the inspiring part is that you can take any weakness and make it a strength.”
Skubal was raised in small-town Kingman with three brothers who became four when Tyler, three years older than Tarik and a freshman in high school, asked his parents if his friend Wil Jones could live with them. Wil was navigating difficult family circumstances, and Tyler remembers the conversation lasting “five minutes, tops,” before the Skubals agreed. “Our core principle as a family and as educators is to do what’s right for kids,” says Russ, now an elementary school principal. Wil, an excellent basketball player who loved to compete at just about anything, fit the family dynamic.
Tarik’s competitive zeal, exemplified by his combustible nature on the mound, came to national attention during Game 2 of last season’s AL Division Series in Cleveland. After the fifth of his seven scoreless innings, Skubal stormed off the mound to a resounding chorus of boos and quite obviously yelled at the Guardians‘ fans to “shut the f— up.” His mother, Laura Skubal, took to social media to chide her son with an age-old mom move: the invocation of the middle name. “Tarik Daniel!!” she replied to a post showing her son raging. Tarik responded the next day by saying that he hadn’t heard that admonishment since high school and that he found it “interesting” that his mom would have a problem with his language since he remembers her being tossed from high school gyms during his and his brothers’ basketball games.
So the fire burns hot, and it appears to have been set organically. “I probably wasn’t the greatest father,” Russ says, laughing. “I believe life has a natural pecking order. Everybody talks about building up kids’ self-esteem. The way I see it, self-esteem comes from the word self. You have to believe you’re awesome yourself. Nobody can do that for you.”
Tyler, now 31, was Tarik’s most frequent and most combative opponent. They would wrestle or play one-on-one basketball games, what Tyler calls “Skubal Games” played by “Skubal Rules,” which meant the defense calls fouls and “nobody ever thinks they foul, so most Skubal Games started out competitive and ended up as boxing matches.”
Tyler, described by his dad as “competitive but nice,” would complain to his parents about Tarik’s persistence.
“He won’t stop hitting me,” Tyler would invariably say.
“Well,” Russ told him, “hit him back.”
“I did, but he won’t stop.”
“Then you didn’t hit him hard enough.”
They all cite the same stories, putting their fingers on the same dots on the timeline: Tarik in seventh grade, playing in a championship basketball game to complete an undefeated season, entering the team huddle after the third quarter, his team down double digits, and declaring, “I’m not losing this game,” and then going out and scoring 12 points in the final six minutes to prove it.
Tyler left Kingman and played college basketball at Dubuque for a season. He came home for a break after Tarik had led his junior varsity team to an undefeated season, and Russ, ever the coach, decided it was time for a test. “I wanted to see how good Tarik was,” he says now, so he arranged for his sons to play one-on-one — Skubal Rules in full effect — to see whether Tarik could hold up against his stronger brother.
“I worked him pretty good,” Tyler says. “If I remember it right, I started out up 7-0 and then it became a Hack-a-Shaq. I don’t think we shook hands after that one. He’s always had an absolute love of competition. That’s where the fun is, getting lost in the battle. That guy that roars off the mound, yelling at the world? That’s the guy I’ve known my whole life.”
GIVEN THE AGE proximity to my youngest son, I asked Skubal, back at his locker after the A’s game, if he was on the 9- and 10-year-old all-star team. “I was an all-star every year I played,” he says, which elicits a playful eye roll from teammate Alex Cobb, sitting two lockers to the left. Skubal said he thought he was on the 11-12 team as a 9-year old (Cobb: another eye roll) but didn’t get on the field. It clearly still chafes — “Stupidest thing ever,” he says. I don’t think this happened in our league, but I don’t say anything. He moved around a few times when he was little. The leagues and the teams probably smudge in the brain after nearly 20 years.
Finally, I play the ace.
“If you were on that team, I thought you might remember sifting through the infield dirt to find my son’s teeth.”
Skubal’s eyes widen in both pure wonder and sheer terror.
Bingo.
“That’s your son?” he asks.
I nod.
“Oh. My. God. Dude.”
He takes a moment to compose himself and puts one of his massive hands over his mouth, perhaps to keep a wayward clubhouse projectile from delivering unto him the same fate. He turns to the few teammates who remain at his end of the room: Cobb, Tommy Kahnle, Casey Mize.
“This thing scarred me,” he tells them. “He’s at second base. We’re doing double-play stuff. Guy at third base fields it, throws it. He loses it in the sun. He lost how many teeth? Like, eight?”
“It was two,” I say, “but he’s …”
Skubal is not hearing any of it. He’s back there on that field, a little boy again, feeling the shock shiver through his body, seeing the ball and the teeth and the blood. He’s seeing teammates and coaches panning for teeth out near second base and someone holding up an incisor like the World Series trophy. Fine. You win. Eight it is.
“It was unbelievable,” he says. “I was there, so I was on that team. I’ll never forget it. That was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen on a baseball field. Teeth were everywhere. Blood was everywhere. They were sifting through dirt to get busted-out teeth. And then they put them back in!”
Cobb shudders a little and winces. Deep inside every pitcher lives a fear of taking a ball to the teeth, and Cobb — 37 years old, 13 years in the big leagues — appears to be hating the direction of this conversation as he hangs on every single detail.
“And he played!” Skubal says. “He stayed on the team! He played the next week! His teeth were, like, dead. Weren’t they dead? I’ll remember that the rest of my life. I swear. It was crazy. It was the most blood I’ve ever seen on the baseball field. The most blood I’ve ever seen.”
I send Andrew the recording of Skubal’s animated recollection of one of his worst days.
“My god that’s beautiful,” he texts back.
Word spread. The Tri-Valley Little League dads of 2006-07 were having a moment. The texts and phone calls were flying. It turns out Tarik and Andrew were teammates on the all-star team the following summer as well. Andrew didn’t remember Tarik, and Tarik didn’t remember Andrew, only his teeth. We’re all electrons bouncing around the universe, finding our own orbit, until we walk headfirst into a reminder that we’re all connected. One dad in our circle remembered Skubal but hadn’t linked it to what we’re seeing now. My friend Foley was the manager of that all-star team. He wrote to me, “Silva always gives me s— about keeping Michael off that all-star team. I just called him and told him why Michael didn’t make it.” Foley’s son, Matthew, known as “Chewy,” was on that team. I read Skubal a different text Foley sent me that day:
“Sent this to my boys: Never forget, there was a time when the manager looked into the dugout and tossed Chewy the ball and told him to take the mound when Tarik Skubal was available and ready to go.”
Skubal booms out a big laugh.
“I bet Chewy deserved it,” he says.
SKUBAL’S REAL BASEBALL origin story begins on a Wednesday night in Peoria, Arizona, late September of his senior year in high school. He was pitching in the Arizona Fall Classic, an annual travel ball extravaganza, and he was on: hitting 90 mph with his fastball, keeping hitters off balance, showing hints of the mound presence that would come to define him. For the first time, the scouts noticed — “We couldn’t get out of the parking lot,” Russ says — and Tarik went home with a wad of business cards from pro scouts and one from a college pitching coach: Cribby.
Three days later, on Saturday morning, the Skubals made the three-hour drive back to Peoria so Tarik could pitch again. Sore and exhausted from playing a high school football game the night before — he was, no surprise, a lineman — Tarik threw 82 to 84 mph, and the postgame parking lot was clear sailing.
“They all thought it was a fluke,” Tarik says.
Except Cribby, who kept at it.
“I’m not calling that guy,” Tarik told Russ. “There’s no way I’m going to school up there.”
But Russ persisted, and Tarik called. Cribby invited him to Seattle for a camp during Christmas break. “Not an official visit,” Russ is quick to point out. “We paid for the flights, the hotel, the camp.” Seattle University’s head coach, Donny Harrel, was dealing with a family situation that kept him away from the camp, and he left Cribby with strict orders that no scholarships would be offered until he got back.
Cribby watched Skubal throw — wearing, as he remembers it, K-Swiss shoes that Russ bought in a hurry because rain moved the camp indoors — and immediately offered him a scholarship.
“I could look in his eyes and see everything you could ever want if you’re trying to build a program,” Cribby says. “I couldn’t let him go home without an offer. He was hiding under a rock, and I was terrified someone was going to find him.”
Skubal didn’t know about Perfect Game, the one true religion of the travel ball set, until he talked to college teammates. He didn’t know the first thing about how professional baseball worked, only that he wanted to play it. “It’s a good thing I didn’t get drafted out of high school,” he says. “I didn’t know anything, but I guarantee I would have signed. I would have been, ‘Sure, let’s go play.'”
Skubal, citing his family’s financial constraints growing up because his father was a schoolteacher/coach and there were five boys “eating everything in the house,” wants to take an active role within the Major League Baseball Players Association to bring equity to youth baseball. “We weed out players because of financial burdens,” he says. “I think kids are playing too much baseball. I encourage kids to play all sports, but it’s hard when 12-year-olds are getting recruited. Now you think you have to be good at 10. I wasn’t good until I was 26.”
The humility is endearing and genuine, and Skubal was a late bloomer, to be sure, but that senior year in high school was a turning point. Russ remembers pro scouts traveling to Kingman to watch Tarik throw a bullpen after he had committed to Seattle. “That was my only outside source that he might be good,” Russ says. “When people drive to Kingman and want to stop, there must be a reason.”
Skubal’s sophomore season at Seattle, he struck out 10 in a Friday night start at UC Irvine with superagent Scott Boras in the stands, and the next day Skubal, his parents and Cribby were guests at Boras’ Newport Beach office. “We were looking around like, ‘Is this really happening?'” Cribby says. Boras became Skubal’s adviser shortly thereafter, and at the end of the 2026 season — or sooner, if the Tigers pony up a megadeal to extend Skubal — Boras will negotiate a free agent deal that could hit $400 million.
In spring training of 2022, before he became this guy, before last year’s Cy Young season that helped drag the Tigers — a team that unloaded players at the trade deadline — to the playoffs, and before he followed it with a season that looks as if it might be even better, Bryce Harper stood in the batter’s box and told Tigers catcher Jake Rogers, “This guy is the best lefty in the game.” Harper struck out and announced, “That guy’s going to win a Cy Young,” as he walked back to the dugout.
So maybe it’s more accurate to say Skubal didn’t become great until he was 26, after he used the rehabilitation time following flexor-tendon surgery in August 2022 to transform his changeup from a reliable swing-and-miss offering into the most formidable pitch in the game. Everything he throws revolves around the changeup, a pitch that takes up residence in the hitters’ minds and works its magic even when Skubal doesn’t throw it. His fastball-changeup combination is almost laughably unfair. He commands the fastball in ways that shouldn’t be possible for a pitch traveling at such speeds; in a typical setup, he will slice the outside corner with it and then throw the changeup, coming out of the same tunnel with the same arm action, to the same spot, only to have it drift off the outside corner, leaving hitters swinging like so many cats chasing so many lasers.
Skubal’s career is proof that joy, and not just spiteful vindication, can come from proving people wrong. When he signed his contract, for an above-slot bonus of $350,000, a fine sum but far less than the $1 million he could have commanded without the arm injury, he told Cribby, “It’s fine. I’m going to make my money in the big leagues.”
“In my eyes, I haven’t accomplished anything in this game,” Skubal says. “That’s what keeps me hungry. I haven’t won a World Series, and that’s all that matters. And when, God willing, I win a World Series, I’ll probably tell you I haven’t accomplished anything because I haven’t won two. That’s just how I was raised.”
When I ask him how his life has changed in the past year, with the accolades and the attention and the growing consensus that the game is seeing something it hasn’t seen since vintage Justin Verlander or Clayton Kershaw or maybe even Pedro Martinez, Skubal thinks for a moment and says, “My coffee maker broke, and I’m just going to buy a new one. Just buy a new one, right? I tried to fix it for a little bit, but nah, I’m going to buy a new one. That’s a luxury, I guess.”
Skubal calls the Cy Young “the highest award a pitcher can win,” but through the first half of this season he is putting together an argument to be in the AL MVP conversation. If he can somehow pass Aaron Judge and possibly Cal Raleigh, he would become the third full-time pitcher this century — and just the third full-time starting pitcher since 1986 — to win an MVP award. He is economical and dominant, the rarest combination in an era when it’s near-biblical for hitters to work counts in an effort to chase starters as early as possible.
“Part of my process is that I’m 100 percent bought-in on executing every pitch,” Skubal says. “I expect each one to go where I want it to. I don’t let any negative thought enter my mind. I don’t hit my spot 100% of the time. I probably hit my spot 20% of the time, but the game’s best do it a little less than me. I’m not trying to be perfect.”
Skubal listens patiently to a recap of something his manager, AJ Hinch, said a few days after Skubal threw the best game of his career, and one of the best games of anybody’s career — ever. Against the Guardians on May 25, Skubal threw a 94-pitch complete game shutout (a “Maddux” in pitching lingo, and Skubal’s first complete game) and struck out 13. His last pitch was a third strike to Gabriel Arias at 102.6 mph, the fastest strikeout pitch thrown by a big league starter in any inning in the Statcast era.
The complete game issue is among the most tiresome of the terminally exhausting subset of analytics vs. old-school. Always remember that Bob Gibson threw a complete game every four days and Juan Marichal once threw 227 pitches and now everybody’s soft and managers are afraid to let anyone face the same hitter three times. Hinch, whose job is to assess baseball games as dispassionately as possible, said he would let more starters pitch into the ninth if they, like Skubal, threw 85 pitches and allowed no runs through eight. But the calculus of his job is to determine whether a starter’s 107th pitch to start the ninth is going to be better than closer Will Vest‘s first pitch.
Skubal listens to this as if he has heard it before — maybe every time he is removed from a game — and didn’t believe it then, either. This is a man for whom “five and dive” constitutes the three most mortifying words in the language. But does his manager have a point?
“Yeah,” he says, the whatever in his tone as obvious as the sun. “But I’ll always think my pitch — whichever one it might be — is the best option.”
You like it old-school? Skubal will make your old-school look brand-new.
MY WIFE FOUND the official photo of that all-star team, taken days before the tooth incident. Kneeling bottom left, the proof: 9-year-old Tarik Skubal, with Andrew Keown standing directly behind him. Skubal’s posture is straight out of an anatomy textbook: his dark eyes set in a steely glare, his right hand above his left as they rest on his right thigh. The tan line on his right wrist gives him away as a kid who spent most of his summer wearing a baseball glove. Nearly every other 9- and 10-year-old is looking out from under a cap either pulled down too low or cocked too high. They’re all slouching or leaning or just looking like kids who can barely remain still long enough for a shutter to click. They’ll all be rolling in that dirt and grass within seconds.
One little boy, however, is all business. “Even then he was a little serious,” his father says. Tarik, in fact, is the only one who looks as if he has higher aspirations than the 9- and 10-year-old all-star team. He’s posing not for the job he has but the one he wants. He looks as if he knew, even back then, that someday everybody — even those who don’t remember — would come to see it.
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Dave Wilson
THIBODEAUX, La. — In the middle of a sweltering August day in south Louisiana, Archibald “Arch” Manning, son of Cooper, grandson of Archie, nephew of Peyton and Eli, roams the fields of his ancestral homeland, the Manning Passing Academy, where quarterbacks are grown.
This is Year 29 of the MPA, and Arch’s dad and uncles have been present for every one, beginning when Cooper had just graduated from Ole Miss, Peyton was a freshman at Tennessee and Eli was a camper as a sophomore in high school.
Archie, the patriarch of football’s first family, surveys 48 of the best college quarterbacks in America — this year’s counselors. There’s one who stands out: A moppy-haired 6-4, 200-pound Texas Longhorns quarterback, who just happens to be his grandson.
“Arch has come full circle,” he said.
Archie, 76, has nine grandchildren. Eli’s four kids in New York. Peyton’s twins in Denver. But Cooper’s three –May, who just graduated from Virginia, Arch, a junior at Texas, and Heid, a sophomore at Texas — all grew up in New Orleans and were constants in his life.
Arch, his namesake, is the one who has gone into the family business and today is a big day. Last year, Arch didn’t compete in the skills competition or serve in any official capacity, wanting Quinn Ewers to represent Texas at the camp.
Now, Arch is the starter at Texas. But more importantly on this day, he’s a Manning Passing Academy counselor. At the sight, Archie’s memories start playing out in his eyes; he sees 4-year-old Arch, roaming the fields at Nicholls State, wearing an MPA T-shirt.
“He wore glasses when he was a little boy,” Archie said. “I can remember how excited he was when he first got to be a camper — eighth grade — a real camper, and stay in the dorm. I used to sneak off and watch his 7-on-7 games. I remember one year his coach was Trevor Lawrence. That was pretty cool. And now he’s a full counselor. Unbelievable.”
It’s the first step in a big year for perhaps the most famous quarterback in college football history.
“Just climbing the ladder,” Arch said.
Now, summer camp is over, Arch is on the top rung and the hot-take economy awaits his first start. He’ll lead No. 1 Texas into Columbus, Ohio, to take on No. 3 Ohio State on Saturday (noon ET, Fox), opening the season as ESPN BET’s leading Heisman candidate.
For two years, Arch has laid low, but that hasn’t stopped the hype. At Sugar Bowl media day in 2023, a throng of reporters surrounded him while the starter, Ewers, waited at a nearly empty podium. Whenever Arch entered games, Texas fans took to their feet. When he lost his student ID the first week on campus, it made the local news. When his picture went missing from the wall of a local burger joint, a citywide search ensued.
All of this happened despite the family’s best efforts, not because of it.
“He ain’t even pissed a drop yet,” Archie protested when I contacted him about this story.
There are inherent advantages to being a Manning. They seem to be imbued with a mix of self-effacing humor and a relentless pursuit of excellence. But Arch is the first Manning to emerge into the world that social media created. We didn’t even know which schools Peyton visited. We didn’t have pictures of Eli popping up on our phones every day.
While Arch’s road to becoming his own Manning started off in much the same way as his uncles, his experience since has been unlike anyone else’s.
I. The Manning whisperer
DAVID CUTCLIFFE SAW the future in 1969 at Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama. Cutcliffe, then 15, was there to see No. 15 Alabama playing No. 20 Ole Miss in the first night game ever televised in color. Though Cutcliffe was there as an invited guest of the Crimson Tide, and would go on to graduate from Alabama, he instead came away with a new hero.
No player had ever thrown for 300 yards and rushed for 100 in a major college football game. But that night, in a duel with Alabama’s Scott Hunter, Archie completed 33 of 52 passes for 436 yards and two touchdowns and ran 15 times for 104 yards and three scores. Bear Bryant and the Tide prevailed 33-32 but Cutcliffe was smitten.
“He was the only thing I could watch as a young high school guy,” Cutcliffe said. “Man, I’m watching Archie Manning. I didn’t want to see anybody else after that game.”
He had no idea that he would end up in Archie’s living room in New Orleans nearly 25 years later, trying to sell him on sending his son to Tennessee, where Cutcliffe was the offensive coordinator for Philip Fulmer. Both men laugh remembering when Cutcliffe visited and regaled Peyton with some film, while Archie, who was sitting in, drifted off for a nap.
“I’m probably the only coach in history that’s ever bored Archie Manning enough to put him asleep,” Cutcliffe said. “He has never bored me. He’s one of my favorite human beings on the face of the Earth.”
Between 1994 and 1997, with Cutcliffe as his mentor, Peyton became Tennessee‘s all-time leading passer, throwing for 11,201 yards and 89 touchdowns. Then, as the head coach at Ole Miss, he coached Eli from 2000 to 2003, as the quarterback also set school records with 10,119 passing yards and 81 TDs. So naturally, Cutcliffe always planned on making a pitch for Arch, and he didn’t wait long. He had a courier bring an Ole Miss scholarship offer to Cooper in the hospital the day Arch was born in 2004.
Cutcliffe was out of coaching when Arch actually committed to Texas, but he got to coach him after all. He started working with Arch at 10 years old.
“He was a talented youngster, a middle schooler,” Cutcliffe said. “He’s always been strong. You could see the physical abilities. But what I liked about Arch is Arch liked working. He does not have to be forced into work.”
Cooper was an All-State, 6-4 wide receiver before spinal stenosis ended his career, and Cooper’s mom, Ellen, is in the athletics Hall of Fame at Sacred Heart in New Orleans, where she ran track. Arch certainly had the right parents to be a world-class athlete, but the Manning family knows well that speed can’t be handed over in a will.
“Peyton, he was really determined,” Archie said, laughing. “One day he just asked me, ‘Dad, why am I not fast?’ I didn’t have an answer for that. Eli followed in that same mold. But I can remember when Arch first started playing flag football, the other boys couldn’t pull his flag. They couldn’t get him.”
Cutcliffe, who now works as a special assistant to SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, visits Arch in Austin and sometimes sits in on quarterback meetings and watches practice, which the Texas coaches encourage. Now, he can’t wait to watch Arch scramble around, the same way he couldn’t wait to watch Archie play that night at Legion Field.
“I think it’s a thing of beauty,” Cutcliffe said. “The fact that his name is Arch — short for Archie — it’s only appropriate.”
II. The lightness of being a Manning
FOR 29 YEARS, the Manning Passing Academy, Archie’s baby, has trained quarterbacks across the country, including 25 of last year’s 32 NFL starters. Archie is uniquely aware of the family’s role in the football ecosystem and understands the pressure on QBs. But he can’t understand all the attention showered on Arch before he has started a season opener in college. Archie is no fan of the discourse.
“It’s just so unfair it just kills me,” Archie said. “Even my old friend Steve Spurrier, on a podcast, he blows up Arch.”
In June, Spurrier appeared on “Another Dooley Noted Podcast” and noted Texas was a trendy pick for the SEC championship. “They’ve got Arch Manning already winning the Heisman,” Spurrier said. “If he was this good, how come they let Quinn Ewers play all the time last year? And he was a seventh-round pick.”
So Archie tries to keep his steady and remain a grandfather, preferring to stay out of the spotlight, but so many people have his phone number that he still becomes the go-to guy for a quote about Arch. Archie texts all nine grandchildren, who call him Red for his hair that was once that color, every morning. It could be a Bible verse, a motivational message, a thought for the day. Archie talks football sparingly, instead keeping it simple with Arch: He reminds him to be a good teammate, or checks on how practice is going.
“I get a lot of texts from him,” Arch said with a smile. “He can’t hear well. So he texts.”
And he might stick to texting. Archie has been bewildered at times during Arch’s college tenure by the way his quotes turn into headlines, like when he told a Texas Monthly reporter he thought Arch would return for his senior year.
“Yeah, I don’t know where he got that from,” a bemused Arch told reporters in response, noting that Archie texted him to apologize. For Archie, it was a reminder of how far his voice can travel, and why he has to be careful.
He tells a story from a decade ago. Arch was making the transition from flag football to tackle in sixth grade. While Archie was driving Arch to a baseball tournament, the grandson asked for his grandfather’s wisdom for the first time.
“Red, I’m going to be playing real football this year for the first time, and I’ll be the quarterback,” Arch said. “You got any advice for me?”
Archie lit up.
You’ve got to know your play, Archie told him. Stand outside the huddle. When you walk in that huddle, nobody else talks. You call that play with authority and get ’em in and out of the huddle. That’s called “huddle presence,” and it’s among the most important things for a quarterback.
“Well, Red,” Arch replied. “We don’t ever huddle.”
Showed what he knew, Archie said. So he makes it clear he is just around to watch his grandson fulfill his own dreams.
“Arch and I have a really good grandson-grandfather relationship, but I haven’t been part of this football journey,” Archie said.
Arch would disagree, however. While he loves to study Joe Burrow and Josh Allen, Arch says his original inspiration was watching Archie play in the “Book of Manning.” He would go out into the yard and try to emulate Red’s moves. But he also noticed that Archie got hit hard a lot. And that’s the one piece of advice that Archie, who walks with a cane, wants Arch to really take to heart.
“He reminds me pretty much every time I talk to him,” Arch said, “to get down or get out of bounds.”
Every member of the family plays a different role. They humble each other frequently, as any “ManningCast” viewer can attest. Eli loves to remind everybody that Peyton set the NFL record for most interceptions by a rookie. But the family members also are each other’s biggest supporters. Cooper notes how ridiculous it was early in Peyton’s career that he was written off as someone who couldn’t win a championship.
Football is a team sport, and the Mannings are a pretty good team. Archie does the big-picture stuff. Eli and Cooper lived inside the pressure cooker after following their legendary father to Ole Miss; they know how to handle fame. Peyton is the football obsessive who drills down on the details. No matter the problem, Arch has somebody he can ask for guidance.
“I threw a pick in a two-minute drill in the summer, and I texted Peyton, ‘Hey, any advice on how to get better in two-minute?” Arch said. “And it was like a 30-minute voice memo.”
Eli said he keeps it much shorter.
“You can’t try to be someone else. I think Arch is very comfortable in his own skin,” Eli said. “The best piece of advice I’ve ever given Arch is just try to throw it to the guys wearing the same color jersey you’re wearing. If you do that, you’ve got a chance.”
Cooper is the comedian of the family, and Arch’s brother, Heid, got that gift as well. Every member of the family agrees that nobody is having more fun than Heid.
“We go to dinner during the week, kind of a break from football life, and he’s a funny guy, so it’s comedic relief,” Arch said. “I’m blessed to have him at the University of Texas.”
Arch, Cooper and Archie all starred in a recent Waymo commercial for self-driving Ubers. Archie had no idea what they were shooting, just that they were getting together to film something. Arch and Cooper, who was given creative control of the ad, got a kick out of surprising him with the newfangled robot car.
“Really? This is really what we’re doing over here in Austin today?” Archie asked. “I couldn’t believe when it stopped at a stop sign. Blew me away.”
Levity is a key component in the Mannings’ shared DNA. Last year, after Arch’s second start, against Mississippi State, he lamented that he had been tight in his first game against UL Monroe, saying he forgot to have fun.
He said that again Monday, speaking to reporters before he makes his first road start against the defending national champions.
“I’m excited,” Arch said. “I mean this is what I’ve been waiting for. I spent two years not playing, so I might as well go have some fun.”
III. The winding road to Texas
DURING HIS RECRUITMENT, Arch visited a 15-0 Georgia team four times. He did the same with an 11-2 Alabama team. Texas, meanwhile, went 5-7. But Arch liked Steve Sarkisian’s work with quarterbacks and wanted to be part of a resurgence at Texas, a place that had been mired in mediocrity for most of a decade.
“I think he takes a lot of pride in going to Texas, coming off a losing record and being a part of something that’s only getting better,” Cooper said. “That’s when I learned a lot about Arch, not just going and chasing who’s the No. 1 or No. 2 or No. 5 team in the country.”
The Mannings knew Texas. All three of Archie’s sons visited, but they didn’t all have fond memories. The Longhorns had been among Cooper’s first major offers. Then, in December 1991, coach David McWilliams was fired and replaced by John Mackovic, who pulled Cooper’s offer.
Before his senior year, Peyton asked Archie to drive him to schools he wanted to see on unofficial visits. They gave Texas another look and set it up with Mackovic. When the pair got to Austin, Archie said, Mackovic was nowhere to be found. Instead, they met with offensive coordinator Gene Dahlquist, who didn’t even know they were coming.
Peyton asked Dahlquist who else the Longhorns were recruiting and asked if they could watch some film. So the Texas OC, Archie and Peyton watched high school film of other quarterbacks.
“Peyton said, ‘Coach, how do I stack up?'” Archie recalled. “He said, ‘You’re definitely in our top 12.'”
The Mannings know so many people in football that they don’t take sides in rivalries or — generally — hold any slights from the past against schools. They were tight with Mack Brown and his offensive coordinator, Greg Davis, who both had coached at Tulane and knew them well, so Eli gave the Longhorns serious consideration before opting for Ole Miss.
But Archie still says for Texas’ sake, it was probably fortunate that Arch was Cooper’s son and not Peyton’s. “Cooper never held it against them,” he said. “Peyton never forgot that. Anybody that knows Peyton knows that he doesn’t forget.”
Texas fit a specific vision that Arch had for his career. He didn’t want to live life as the most famous man in a small college town. Staying in the state capital and still getting to play SEC football held a greater appeal to him. He wanted to be just one of the guys.
“It’s not like Ty Simpson or Gunner Stockton at Alabama and Georgia, where the whole town rallies around it,” Arch said. “I can go to parts of Austin where no one really cares about [football], which is nice.”
Will Zurik, one of Arch’s best friends and his former running back at Isidore Newman in New Orleans, understands why. He recalled seeing people post pictures and videos of a seventh-grader Arch playing catch with Heid on Instagram. Just a few years later, Zurik said, it wasn’t just social media obsessing over Arch. Things were spilling over into real life. Before their sophomore year, several Newman teammates went to Thibodeaux to the Manning Passing Academy, and Arch came to hang out in their dorm room. Word got out, and all of a sudden, there was a crowd in the hallway.
“A hundred kids were outside, banging on the door trying to get in,” Zurik said. Arch’s teammates shooed them away,
Zurik and another of Arch’s friends, Saint Villere IV, are students in fraternities at Alabama. The budding Texas-Alabama rivalry makes their friendship a source of fascination in Tuscaloosa. They constantly get peppered with questions about growing up with the most famous amateur athlete in America.
“If he didn’t play football, he’d be here drinking beer with us right now,” Zurik told them. “He’s just another kid — that just happens to be really talented and have that last name. He’s the most selfless kid I know.”
But even the Arch defenders are very serious about keeping their superstar friend from getting too cocky. When they talk to him these days, they try to keep the focus off football. They instead keep their sights on what’s most important, like when Arch arrived at SEC media days in a standard-issue Southern fraternity fit.
Arch has nailed the “Kappa Sig president begging university leadership not to kick his frat off campus” look. https://t.co/kItB96Wh7F
– Zach Barnett (@zach_barnett) July 15, 2025
“It looked like a big day, almost game-day pledge attire,” Villere said. “I’d give him a seven, eight out of 10.”
“Definitely going to use some work,” Zurik said. “But looks good. Could use a beer in his hands.”
They can’t scroll Instagram without seeing Arch in an ad for Vuori or Uber or Panini or Red Bull or any of the other brands he represents. Manning even admitted Monday that he has a private Instagram account he uses to browse, and when he sees something in the media about him, he clicks “not interested.”
“I don’t know how many commercials I’ve done, but probably too many,” Arch said. “Probably tired of seeing my face.”
Villere has taken notice as well and offered a suggestion.
“It seems like he’s got a little room for an acting coach, maybe, but it’s all right,” he said.
For Arch, having friends who keep him humble is the antidote to the puzzling amount of attention he gets. He lives with five other Texas players. He has his brother around, plays golf and hangs out at the lake. He wants his friends to keep him in check.
“If I ever start talking about any of this stuff,” Arch said, “they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re being a total weirdo.'”
IV. The Arch experience in Austin
AUSTIN MIGHT OFFER Arch a little respite from crowds in parts of town, but there’s no neighborhood there where the Longhorns are nobodies. Arch might want the typical college experience, but that’s impossible.
He has tried his best to keep a low profile. His news conference appearances hovered in the single digits over the past two seasons. He didn’t land any high-profile NIL deals, other than agreeing to auction off a one-of-a-kind signed card for charity through Panini. It brought in $102,500, eclipsing an exclusive Luka Doncic card that went for $100,000 and making it the most expensive item sold on the company’s platform. There’s nothing that Arch Manning can do to be just another guy.
Tim Tebow and Johnny Manziel were off-the-field famous — after they were stars. For Arch, the fame came first, then football. That’s something that none of the Mannings particularly relish.
“The weirdest part of a lot of this is I haven’t done anything, so why am I getting a bunch of cameras in my face?” Arch asked this summer. He seemed perplexed when another reporter asked how careful he has to be not doing shots at a bar.
“I’m 21, so I can do shots at a bar,” he said. Within hours, Athlon Sports posted a story with the headline: “Arch Manning Says He Can Take Shots at the Bar if he Wants.”
Arch got a quick lesson in just how closely he would be watched immediately after arriving at Texas. He lost his student ID, got a FaceTime call from Sarkisian, who was holding up said ID when he answered and asked if he was missing anything. The student who found it had used it to swipe into the football building, walked right into Sarkisian’s office and handed it to him.
“Pretty ballsy,” Arch said.
Then he lost it again shortly thereafter, leading to tweets about his lack of “pocket awareness.” A Reddit post was headlined “Archibald Manning loses his student ID (Again).” When football season came around, fans held up a giant banner of his ID in the crowd.
Arch says he’s good now, because Texas has moved to a fingerprint-based system instead of swiping a card. Still, his dad says he’s not out of the woods yet.
“He can’t lose his fingerprint,” Cooper said. “Well, if someone could lose it, he could lose it.”
And if someone could steal it, they probably would, too. Arch said this summer he didn’t even have an ID anymore to lose, because he thinks someone stole it while he was on vacation in Charleston, South Carolina. And Arch’s name, image and likeness isn’t even safe in Austin institutions.
Dirty Martin’s Place has been slinging burgers since 1926 right off UT’s campus and has become somewhat of an unofficial museum of Longhorn sports. There are paintings of Earl Campbell (who visits at least once a week), old magazine covers featuring legendary quarterback James Street and a photo wall of fame of athletes who visit.
Daniel Young, the general manager at Dirty’s, said his staff fell in love with Arch as soon as he arrived in the spring of his freshman year. He called Arch “a man of the people,” mixing it up at their proud little dive, which was named for originally having dirt floors. They asked Arch for a photo they could mount on their walls.
“He was already a household name,” Young said.
Arch’s picture occupied a prime spot at the front of the restaurant. That is until April 2024, when only a blank space remained where the photo once hung. This was the second time it had gone missing, after some guys took it off the wall and made videos with it before leaving it on a table outside the restaurant. That time, they found the picture within 12 hours. This time, there was no sign of it. Dirty’s offered a reward for the photo’s return via an Instagram post. “Arch is our friend and this was definitely not a nice thing to do,” it said.
Days later, their long nightmare was over. Four students said they found the picture abandoned in an elevator shaft at an apartment complex near campus and returned it, apparently after the streets got too hot. Shelby Burke, Meredith Greer, Anne Blanche Peacock and Georgia Ritchie now have their photo on the wall with Arch’s.
“I could’ve just blown it up again and put it back up,” Young said. “But now it’s kind of become folklore. He’s a fun-loving kid and he couldn’t be just nicer to my staff. And man, I love him.”
Will Colvin, who has manned the grill at Dirty’s for nearly 30 years said he’s fortunate that in his decades at a campus hangout, he’s gotten to know legends, including favorites Campbell, Cedric Benson and Bijan Robinson.
“But I’m going to tell you something,” Colvin said. “This Arch Manning, he stands out. He has this aura about him. He’s going to do great things.”
For Young, it’s time to take protective measures. No matter how Arch and the Longhorns perform against Ohio State, the game tape will be analyzed more than the Zapruder film. A strong performance will send the burnt orange faithful into a frenzy.
“I really need to get that photo bolted to the wall,” Young said.
V. Finally on the field
BRANNDON STEWART, A longtime tech and software entrepreneur in Austin, has watched the newest iteration of Manning mania from an interesting vantage point. In 1994, he was a star Texas high school quarterback who became one of the nation’s top recruits and signed with Tennessee in the same class as Peyton. They roomed together on the road and lived side by side in the dorms as they competed against each other. Stewart played in 11 of the Vols’ 12 games that year. But Peyton started the last eight contests of the season and Stewart saw the writing on the wall.
“Who’s the one person you wouldn’t want to draw to compete against when you show up at college?” Stewart said. “He would certainly be at the top of the list.”
Stewart says it’s funny now that he didn’t know much about the Mannings beforehand, didn’t know how good Peyton was and, growing up in Texas, wasn’t prepared for the intensity of fans in Knoxville. That’s why, he said, he can empathize with how overwhelming the attention must be for Arch. In 1994, there was a strong contingent of Vols fans who thought Stewart, a high school All-American who had rushed for 1,516 yards while winning a state championship for Art Briles at Stephenville High School, was the better fit to replace the similarly athletic Heath Shuler, the third pick in that year’s NFL draft.
“I remember it was like being Troy Aikman in Dallas,” Stewart said. “Everywhere you go, someone knows who you are and they’re asking for your autograph. People were talking about naming their kid after me.”
When Peyton came to Austin last fall to see Arch, he and Stewart went to dinner and saw each other for the first time in 25 years. Stewart said, even as crazy as that 1994 season was for the two of them, he can’t imagine how it would’ve felt with their every move being broadcast every day.
“Back then it seemed like hysteria, but now it’s like ‘Little House on the Prairie,'” Stewart said. “Everything happens so much faster. I’m sure it’s been quite a ride for him. He’s probably pretty well-groomed for it, desensitized to the stuff that happens when you become popular and successful in sports and was able to adapt to it much better than most of us.”
This summer at the MPA, Arch told ESPN he appreciated being able to feel like a “normal person.” He roomed with LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier; two of the most famous people in Louisiana walked around a Thibodeaux Walmart buying snacks. He laughed at the social media frenzy around his trip with star wide receiver Ryan Wingo to his hometown of St. Louis.
“He’s a legend down there,” Manning said.” All those kids want to be like Wingo. They know his dance moves, his touchdown celebration.”
It was the ideal scenario for Arch. He was showing up for his teammates, and someone else was the star. Cutcliffe has watched Arch hype up players on the sideline, celebrate with his teammates and self-deprecatingly deflect questions in interviews like when legendary Texas reporter Kirk Bohls, who has covered the Longhorns for more than 50 years, asked Manning if he gets nervous when he plays. “Nah,” he said, smiling at Bohls. “You get nervous?”
“That’s an Archie Manning trait,” Cutcliffe said. “It’s a Cooper, Peyton and Eli trait. They walk into a room and say, ‘There you are,’ rather than ‘Here I am.’ That’s a rare commodity.”
A.J. Milwee, Texas’ co-offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach who forged a strong bond with Arch and his family while recruiting him and talking nearly every day, said that being raised by football royalty allows Arch to balance all of the excitement surrounding this game.
“He has real competitive fire,” Milwee said. “He can get juiced up, he can get jacked up, but he’s grown up in a world of quarterbacks. As quarterbacks, we’re taught to be flatliners.”
As a kid, Cooper thought Arch might be a wide receiver like him. But when he coached him in flag football, Arch seemed to have more fun throwing the ball to his buddies so they could all catch a lot of passes.
That’s the plan for Saturday.
“Arch has been a quarterback since he was little, running around,” Cooper said. “I think he made the right call. Don’t listen to your parents. Do what comes natural.”
The world awaits Arch’s arrival on the biggest stage. Sarkisian said the one thing that’s most amazing about Arch’s evolution over the past two years is how much he hasn’t changed.
“He’s normal and that’s what I love about him. It’s not some guy who feels like he’s untouchable, he’s better than everybody else,” Sarkisian said. “You can’t go a day without seeing somebody talking about Arch Manning. He’s a direct representation of our football program and this university and … we respect him for the way that he does it.”
But it’s time to see him do it in uniform. And Cooper believes he’s ready.
“What’s the pressure?” Cooper said. “He gets to play. Pressure is when you don’t know what you’re doing. I think he knows what he’s doing.”
ST. LOUIS — First baseman Willson Contreras has been suspended for six games and fined an undisclosed amount for his tirade during the St. Louis Cardinals‘ 7-6 win over the Pittsburgh Pirates on Monday night.
Contreras has informed Major League Baseball he will appeal the suspension, which means it will not take effect immediately. He was in the lineup for Tuesday night’s game against the Pirates.
Contreras threw a bat that mistakenly hit Cardinals hitting coach Brant Brown and tossed bubble gum on the field after he was ejected. Manager Oliver Marmol also was tossed during an animated argument with the umpires after a called third strike in the seventh inning.
Contreras said he didn’t understand why he was thrown out of the game. He said he argued balls and strikes with plate umpire Derek Thomas but didn’t address a specific pitch and didn’t say anything disrespectful.
“Apparently, he heard something [he thought] I said. I did not say that,” Contreras said.
Crew chief Jordan Baker told a pool reporter that Contreras and Marmol were ejected for “saying vulgar stuff” to Thomas. Baker also said Contreras made contact with the plate umpire.
After Monday’s win, Marmol agreed with his player.
“We’ll have to dive into it to make sure what Willson’s saying is what happened,” he said at the time. “But I believe him.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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