Arch Manning and the failure that it is his 2025 season so far have kicked off a new round of discourse surrounding one of the most infamous words in sport: flop. It’s fair to say Manning, who was the No. 1 player in the 2023 recruiting class, hasn’t lived up to the expectations of the best high school player in the country. But context would prove he’s less of a flop and more simply the victim of having a famous last name.
Be that as it may, Manning might be the most prominent flop when it comes to high school recruits, but he’s far from the only one. In fact, if you look at all the top quarterback names in the 2023 class, every last one of them has an argument for extremely underwhelming performances to start their collegiate careers.
From @TheAthletic: Many people are having a bad year in college football, but Arch Manning is having one of the worst. The quarterback has gone from preseason Heisman Trophy favorite and projected No. 1 NFL Draft pick to a man synonymous with failure. https://t.co/faDb4krVzT pic.twitter.com/8vgzTPOu47
— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 7, 2025
Manning is the only one of the five-star quarterbacks that’s still with the team they committed to, while Nico Iamaleava and the drama around his transfer has become bigger news than leading Tennessee to the College Football Playoff last year. Jackson Arnold has fizzled out after a strong start to his tenure at Auburn and Malachi Nelson could realistically be benched at UTEP after bouncing from USC to Boise State.
We can talk bad about Manning, how badly he’s played this season and how Texas is largely struggling because he’s not playing well. But he’s far from the biggest ranking mistake even in his his own class; this is just the nature of the beast when it comes to evaluating high school football players.
The subjectivity of high school football recruiting rankings prove just how hard talent evaluation is
Nelson is a bigger flop than Manning, if we’re being honest. Nelson, the No. 5-ranked quarterback in the country back in 2023, is on the verge of being benched at UTEP; seriously, think about that. Nelson transferred from USC to Boise State because he wasn’t going to beat out Miller Moss and Jayden Maiava. He couldn’t even beat out Maddux Madsen in Boise last year.
If he were really this bad, how did he manage to be considered one of the top 15 high school players in the country? Talent evaluation is hard at the high school level, and the class of 2023 is exhibit A. Plus, all it takes is some context to realize that Manning wasn’t playing elite talent in high school.
When Manning was at Isidore Newman, they were a 2A school, the second smallest classification in the state of Louisiana (with 5A as the largest). The talent at the 2A level isn’t anything close to the largest schools, so to think Manning could go from playing against 150-pound defensive lineman to 250-pound defensive lineman that are also quick, without skipping a beat, is irrational.
This is the challenge with high school rankings and deciding which players are the best. You have your consensus, elite athletes and then you have the rest of the pack. If we took Manning’s name out of it, he probably would have been a four-star prospect at best, possibly a three-star.
As for the rest of the 2023 quarterback class, if we were to re-rank them, a good portion of the four-star players would have jumped up to five-stars. The one exception is Dante Moore: He’s probably the least talked about quarterback of his class despite arguably playing the best. Which, this season, if you aren’t being talked about, that’s probably a good thing, because this quarterback class isn’t off to the greatest start.
How Dante Moore became the poster child for the 2023 quarterback class
Why Moore has emerged as the best of the five-star quarterbacks in his class shouldn’t be the question, so much as why did we forget about him? After all, he spent a season with Chip Kelly at UCLA before swallowing his pride and learning from Dillon Gabriel in Eugene for a year. Now that he’s the starter and collecting big wins in the process, this shouldn’t be a surprise at all.
Moore is seemingly the next quarterback behind Justin Herbert, Bo Nix and Gabriel to have success at Oregon and turn into an NFL prospect. Though he had a roundabout way of landing with the Ducks, the fact that he ended up there, and is thriving in the process, just makes too much sense.
Other than Iamaleava leading Tennessee to the CFP last year, Moore is essentially the most successful of the five-star quarterbacks in the 2023 class. His next biggest test will be against Indiana this weekend, when he faces Fernando Mendoza for the second time in his career. If Moore leads Oregon to yet another top-10 win, he’ll absolutely be considered the best one of the bunch.
Hopefully that will bring more attention to him. The 2023 class has gotten a lot of criticism, but it’s fair to give some praise where it’s due. For Moore, he’s earned the right to get some attention for being the one quarterback in the class that hasn’t struggled and is defending his five-star ranking.