LSU’s return to Death Valley on Saturday brings more than just a heavyweight SEC matchup with Texas. It puts two quarterbacks under the brightest kind of scrutiny, with Sam Leavitt and Arch Manning each carrying a season that has swung hard between promise and frustration.
Texas is coming back to Tiger Stadium for the first time in 73 years, and the Longhorns will face LSU for the first time since 2019 in a 6:30 p.m. kickoff. The setting is big enough on its own. The quarterback storyline makes it even bigger.
Manning arrived in Austin with Heisman buzz and opened the year looking every bit like the player Texas had been waiting for. In the first four weeks, he helped deliver wins over Ohio State and Tennessee while completing 63.5% of his passes for 862 yards. After Texas knocked off the Buckeyes in Week 2 and climbed to No. 1, it looked like Manning had the Longhorns positioned exactly where they wanted to be in the national title picture.
Then came the rough stretch. Losses to unranked Oklahoma in Week 6 and unranked Florida in Week 7 changed the conversation fast, and Manning has had to deal with the kind of public criticism that comes with being the face of Texas.
“[Manning is] very gritty and everything runs through him,” LSU’s Princewill Umanmielen said. “He’s the power of the offense, for sure. Whenever he’s up, they’re up, and if he’s down, they’re down.”
Leavitt’s season has followed a different path, but the same basic pattern of high expectations getting tangled up in setbacks. LSU fans weren’t sure what to expect when the year began, but the Tigers got a loud answer in the opener against Clemson. Over the next four weeks, Leavitt threw for 1,044 yards and completed 63.8% of his passes, and LSU spent time in the AP Top 10.
The Week 3 loss to Ole Miss interrupted that momentum, and the Tigers have since dropped games to Kentucky and Alabama, preventing them from putting together a three-game winning streak three different times this season.
Leavitt has taken plenty of the blame, especially after the Ole Miss game, where he had a season low in passing yards and struggled to run the ball while scrambling on most downs. The Alabama loss brought a similar feel. He threw for 380 yards, but LSU managed only 13 points at home, and when pressure mounted, he went 0-for-4 on fourth down.
“I think that we didn’t play clean enough football within our rules,” Leavitt said following the loss to Alabama. “You know, we put a lot of work in - that’s one thing that we pride ourselves on is we go to work, we do a lot of walkthroughs, we do a lot of meetings, we come back. And so that’s a difficult thing to see us not execute as well as I wanted to.”
The contrast between the two quarterbacks now sits at the center of Saturday’s game. Manning is still fighting the idea that he’s merely an average quarterback and hearing the familiar talk that his last name helped him land the job at Texas. Even with the Longhorns sitting at 7-2 and still inside the Top 10, he hasn’t fully won over the fan base.
Leavitt, meanwhile, has started to push back against the doubts that followed the Ole Miss and Kentucky losses. Stronger outings against Mississippi State and Auburn helped show what LSU can look like when the passing game has time to breathe and routes can develop.
For LSU, the stakes are tied directly to that quarterback arc. The Tigers lead the SEC in both passing and rushing, and a win over Texas could help steady Leavitt’s season after the early hype, while also serving as the first step in a last-ditch push for a playoff berth.
“I feel like everybody just knows what’s going on,” safety Ty Benefield said in Monday’s press conference. “I feel like there needs to be [less] talking and more action. The initiative we’re taking is practice the way you play so practice has to be, you know, at all time premium and that’s really it.”
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