I still have questions about Texas, but the Cam Coleman-Arch Manning duo isn’t one of them
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When it was clear that Hugh Freeze wasn’t going to be able to right the ship at Auburn, I first threw out the idea in early November.
Cam Coleman and Arch Manning? Sign me up. Those 2 could give each other exactly what they lacked in 2025.
Manning needed a contested-catch guy after Texas lacked 1 of the 29 SEC receivers who had at least 5 contested catches in 2025, and Coleman led the SEC with 13 such grabs (the entire Texas wide receiver room had 15). Manning needed a downfield target after finishing No. 1 in the SEC with 65 pass attempts that traveled 20 yards beyond the line of scrimmage, and he got the guy who was tied for No. 3 in the SEC with 10 such catches.
Coleman, on the other hand, just needed a quarterback and an offensive play caller with a pulse. With all due respect to Payton Thorne, Jackson Arnold, Ashton Daniels and Freeze, it was fair to question that during the last 2 years on The Plains. It wasn’t a coincidence that in the first 2 games of the post-Freeze era, Coleman got the most targets of his career (20), and he had 15 catches for 208 yards with 2 touchdowns.
So yeah, when we found out on Sunday that Coleman was taking his high-priced talents to Texas for 2026, I nodded in approval.
It made a ton of sense that those 2 joined forces. I’d love to know what that recruitment looked like when Coleman visited Austin. I assume that Steve Sarkisian just looked at Coleman and said, “we all know why we’re here. Let’s make this thing happen.”
It’s happening, and suddenly, the ceiling of that Texas offense is higher than any point that it was at in Year 1 of Manning as QB1.
That probably would’ve been true with simply the natural progression of Manning, but adding Coleman and his massive catch radius to an offense that also got key returns on the offensive line with Trevor Goosby and Connor Robertson is promising. We can dig into whether the ground game will bounce back after an extremely disappointing season ended with former 1,000-yard back Tre Wisner and CJ Baxter hitting the portal, but Steve Sarkisian‘s history with prolific ground games coupled with adding 1,000-yard rusher Raleek Brown from Arizona State and flipping NC State transfer Hollywood Smothers from Alabama doesn’t have me questioning that unit.
Texas is now ready to win shootouts … which it might need to
The Coleman move and the Texas offseason spending in general suggests this 2026 team will have a different identity than the 2025 group. It’s a transition year on defense. Getting home-run play threats on offense like Coleman and Smothers, who tied for No. 4 in FBS with 6 runs of 40+ yards, suggests Sarkisian knew that Texas was going to need to win high-scoring games. He can deny that publicly, but replacing the multi-year defensive production that the Longhorns lost to the NFL Draft was probably always going to yield that.
Then the firing of Pete Kwiatkowski happened. Even if you think that group disappointed down the stretch, albeit with some key injuries, it was a bold move by Sarkisian to fire Kwiatkowski and hire Will Muschamp as his defensive coordinator. The last time that Muschamp had total defensive autonomy was when he was the head coach at South Carolina in 2020. The last time that Muschamp led a top-50 scoring defense without the help of Kirby Smart/Glenn Schumann was the 2017 season when South Carolina finished No. 25.
Muschamp is indeed a question mark. That unit is the type of question mark that should probably slow down the preseason Texas hype train, which got ramped up on Sunday with the Coleman announcement, and understandably so. Coleman and Manning will enter the 2026 season as one of the elite duos in the sport, and if Ryan Wingo cleans up the drops issues (he had 7 in 2025), suddenly we’re talking about one of the most explosive offenses in the country.
Remember, as much success as Texas has had the last 3 years with a trio of double-digit win seasons, the offensive production went in reverse. Last year was the worst offense of the Sarkisian era both in scoring (30.5 points/game) and yards/play (5.96). Texas finished No. 41 in the FBS in both areas after being held to 23 points or less in half of its games vs. Power Conference competition.
If those 2025 offensive numbers repeat themselves, Texas will whiff on a Playoff berth again
Better yet, the calls for Sarkisian to give up play-calling duties will be deafening.
With Coleman in the fold, though, Sarkisian got someone who won’t be scheme-dependent in the way a new-look Texas receiver room often felt in 2025. That’s why seemingly everyone wanted the 19-year-old wideout. Sure, the play-calling and quarterback play limited him at Auburn, but being that prolific with downfield and contested catches with a quarterback who often refused to cut it loose said a lot about Coleman’s game. If that’s on display in a more consistent way with Manning, there’s reason to believe that Coleman can one-up the production of Sarkisian-era early-round Texas receivers like Matthew Golden, AD Mitchell and Xavier Worthy.
Does Coleman’s potential give Texas enough juice to be worthy of a preseason No. 1 ranking for the second consecutive year? Given the defensive personnel questions, it shouldn’t, though given how that played out for Texas in 2025, one would think avoiding that type of preseason hype would be a positive development.
The irony is that when the Longhorns were the preseason No. 1 team for the first time ever in 2025, many were willing to overlook the major offensive turnover. If that happens this year, it’ll be the opposite.
Whatever the case, Coleman’s arrival speaks to the sense of urgency on The Forty Acres. We know why he’s in Austin.
Time to make this thing happen.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
