Comparing Arch Manning and Bryce Underwood's statistics ahead of the Cheez It Citrus Bowl

The 9-3 Michigan Wolverines will take on the 9-3 Texas Longhorns in the Cheez It Citrus Bowl this week. Both teams narrowly missed the College Football Playoffs as the 18th and 13th ranked teams nationally. Both teams also feature former 5-Star quarterbacks who started for the first times for their programs this season in Arch Manning at Texas and Bryce Underwood at Michigan. Neither of them had the type season their fans were hoping and expecting them to have, which leads to a very interesting quarterback comparison for this game. Let's dive into how each quarterback performed for their teams this year below.

Arch Manning

Arch Manning entered the year as a possible Heisman trophy front runner and projected 1st Round NFL Draft Pick. However; things took a turn for the worse rather quickly as he faced that vaunted Ohio state defense in week 1 and he never really recovered from the performance in terms of the national perspective on him for the rest of the year.

He would go on to complete 61.4% of his passes for 2,942 yards with 24 TD's and 7 INT's on the season. He also added 244 yards rushing and 8 TD's on the ground. Arch got a lot of flack for how he performed early on in the season for Texas but he actually had a pretty good year for his first year as a starter. A lot of national pundits wrote him off after just a couple starts and seemingly never checked in on him again to revisit their earlier opinions despite what he was doing later on in the season. He improved a lot in his first year as a starter from the beginning of the year to the end.

He's still a very talented quarterback and with this full season of starting experience, he will enter the 2026 college football season as one of the top returning quarterbacks in the country for Texas next season.

Bryce Underwood

Bryce Underwood has high moments in 2025 as a true Freshman starter but was largely a disappointment compared to what fans expected of him. He completed 61.1% of his passes for 2,229 yards with only 9 TD's and 6 INT's. He also added 323 yards and 5 TD's on the ground. The lack of passing TD production was quite disappointing but it was partially because Michigan had so much success on the ground this year that he didn't ask him to pass a lot near the red zone.

Bryce Underwood's stats don't tell the full story though either because Arch Manning attempted 77 more passes than Underwood did and he also had a much better wide receiver core to throw to at Texas than Bryce did at Michigan. Texas also wasn't nearly as good at running the football as Michigan was this year so they needed their QB to do a lot more of the heavy lifting for the offense than Michigan asked Bryce Underwood to do for them.

Conclusion

Overall, Arch Manning had a better season than Underwood but he also is three years older and more has much more college experience even if this was his first year starting. Arch had two full seasons to practice against college football players and get ready for when he received the starting nod as opposed to Bryce Underwood who had to do all of it on the fly because he started from the jump as an 18 year old true Freshman.

In this game, you have to give the nod at quarterback to Texas and Arch Manning because he was just much more productive this year as a starting quarterback. Bryce Underwood though in my opinion might have shown enough to me this year that he may end up having a better overall career than Arch once its all said and done. Needless to say, both of these quarterbacks have the look and pedigree of future 1st round NFL Draft Picks whenever they declare for the Draft and it'll be a very fun quarterback matchup to watch in this game where they're pitted against each other in the Cheez It Citrus Bowl.

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