Something extraordinary has happened before the Texas–Tennessee game: the respective message boards and the internet have found common ground. ESPN and its proxy drive-by left-wing sports media have spent decades with a raging boner for the Manning family.

Tennessee knows the history. Vol fans have spent nearly 30 years believing the national media helped engineer Peyton’s 1997 Heisman loss. Peyton was the old target. Arch is simply the newest one.

Every expression, joke and answer gets fed into the machine until the same people manufacturing Manning content become deeply concerned about what all this attention is doing to him. And now the Tennessee boards are whispering about another setup: ESPN getting Peyton onto GameDay and putting him in the made-for-TV position of choosing between his alma mater and his family. No evidence—just the hillbilly back channels humming again. Somebody even passed around the earlier LWS post warning about exactly that.

ESPN doesn’t even have to dirty its own hands anymore. The freelancers, wannabes, almost-made-its and social-media hall monitors are the Manning-content irregulars: no ESPN badge, no direct orders, just an amazing ability to smell the same outrage at the same time. ESPN lights the flare, the auxiliaries swarm X looking for clicks, and by lunch Arch Manning’s facial expression has become a national emergency. ESPN gets the circus without having to employ every clown.

Meanwhile, the Texas board is fighting over Arch. DGet234 says Holly Rowe didn’t create the pile-on and points toward the broader media. jmr9114 says leave her alone. TexasEx09 boils the national emergency down beautifully: “She made Arch sad and that makes me sad!!!”

Across enemy lines, UTClassOf62 suggests Arch has been media-trained until he answers questions like a Kroger self-checkout. Matt4RockyTop says ESPN has “emotionally waterboarded the boy since high school.” And JasonVols22, whose relationship with English remains informal, asks: “Could they of gave Arch somthin that makes him act robotical?” Nobody followed up. Finally, some journalistic restraint.

It’s the old stick/bicycle meme in its purest form. Drive-by left-wing sports media gets on the bike, finds a MANNING, jams the Manning stick into its own spokes, eats pavement, grabs its knee and starts posting from the asphalt: Arch is rude. Arch is entitled. Arch needs to grow up. Maybe this will teach him something. The kid gets picked apart until he learns to stare straight ahead and give them nothing—and then they’re pissed because they finally built the robot they’ve been complaining about.

And because no message-board discussion is allowed to die with dignity, hwhondaman eventually wandered into Sydney Sweeney, which somehow fit perfectly. To this crowd, a pretty blonde in a pair of jeans is apparently a greater threat to women than a man walking into their locker room.

Saturday, Texas and Tennessee can resume hating each other.

Until then: leave the damn Manning alone.