Arch Manning finally unlocked his talent, but there's a massive catch for Texas

The immense struggles of Arch Manning in his first three games as the full-time Texas Longhorns starter have been the talk of college football in its entirety. After all, for a player who was the preseason Heisman Trophy favorite, one of the most-hyped recruits in the history of the sport, and someone billed as the guy to finally get Steve Sarkisian and Texas over the national championship hump. And he's played like a bottom-five quarterback in the SEC this season.

Or at least he was playing at such a low level until he got to take the field in Austin on Saturday evening against Sam Houston. For the first time, inferior competition or not, we got to see what Arch Manning looks like when he's on, and it was truly a thing of beauty with how dominant he was against the Bearkats.

Manning came out and carved up Sam Houston in every way he saw fit. Through the first seven drives for the Longhorns, the redshirt sophomore signal-caller led the Longhorns to scores on every possession while throwing for three touchdowns to go with 309 yards and two rushing scores as well. He laid waste to the Bearkats — just like he should've done against San Jose State and UTEP before them.

Perhaps just as importantly, too, we saw Arch get his swagger back on the field after a rushing touchdown — and a stroke of good fortune to avoid a taunting penalty as well.

Just getting a glimpse of that, especially with SEC play and Red River looming, is massive for Texas fans to see. And it could very well be the start of Manning's career and what it was supposed to be. However, the catch with the young quarterback's outing is that we might not know entirely what it means until he's up against competition in the conference in two weeks.

Arch Manning dicing up Sam Houston has an obvious catch

While it's great to see Arch Manning treat inferior competition as such, it's worth a reminder that Sam Houston is one of the worst FBS teams in the country so far this season. They entered Week 4 with a winless record and a defense that ranked 136th in the country in EPA per dropback. This is a truly awful defense that he dominated.

Again, the fact that he wasn't doing that before against similar competition is part of the equation, and something that should be considered progress. It's also worth noting that the celebration was a continuation of other things we saw return that had been missing with Manning.

In his demolition of Sam Houston, there was a distinct lack of wonky side-arm throws, bad footwork, and overall poor mechanics — you know, the things that were glaring at Texas fans in the first few weeks of the season when their quarterback was struggling. For someone who many people were, perhaps rightly, saying had the yips, the fact that the yips went away could be important no matter who they were playing.

But that, obviously, begs the question of if the level of competition in Sam Houston was simply the catalyst for Arch Manning looking like the player he was supposed to be for the Longhorns, or if they were the jumping-off point to get him to that level. There are going to be plenty of people who say it's the former and, considering we'll have to wait two weeks to see him again, that'd be hard to refute.

However, it'd be impossible for any Texas fan to look at this outing and the stark contrast to how Manning started the season and not feel a bit more hopeful about the Longhorns' outlook than they did coming into the matchup with the Bearkats.