Peyton Manning may be forever linked to Tennessee, but when it comes to family, he’s making his pick clear: Arch Manning and Texas come first.
The former Volunteers star was asked about the split loyalties inside the Manning family, with Peyton having played at Tennessee, his father and brother Eli suiting up for Ole Miss, and Arch now leading the Longhorns. His answer left little doubt about where he stands when his nephew is on the field.
“I love my University and my alma mater; I root for them unconditionally, but nothing's more important to me than my family,” Manning said. “When you have a nephew playing, I pull very hard for him every Saturday.”
He doubled down on that point with another blunt reminder that family wins out in this case.
“That's pretty much a no-brainer that you're pulling for your nephew to play well,” Manning concluded. “But like I said, everybody knows pretty strongly where my loyalties lie on all other Saturdays.”
Manning’s Tennessee résumé still looms large. He was a consensus All-American, earned 1998 SEC Male Athlete of the Year honors, had his No. 16 retired by the Volunteers, and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2017.
Still, the family split is real, and this season it’s about to get even more visible. Arch and Texas are headed to Knoxville this weekend for Texas’s first SEC game of the season, putting Peyton’s words to the test against his old team. A few weeks later, the Longhorns will also face Ole Miss, the school tied to Eli Manning and Archie Manning.
The Manning football tree runs deep through the SEC, but the old college ties don’t seem to outweigh the personal ones inside the family. Eli and Archie haven’t publicly weighed in on what it’ll be like to watch Arch face their Rebels, but it would be easy to guess their reaction lines up with Peyton’s.
And then there’s Cooper Manning, Arch’s father and Archie’s eldest son, who has been in the stands supporting his son every Saturday in burnt orange. Cooper was once headed to Ole Miss himself, where he received an athletic scholarship to play wide receiver and follow his father’s path, but a diagnosis of spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spine that leads to pinched nerves, ended that plan before he could take the field.
That makes Arch the first of this third generation of Manning football players to get a shot at the college level. The family schools still matter, but on Saturdays like this one, the man in the spotlight matters more.
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