My phone’s For You page has normalized things that would have broken the internet in 2019: stitched-together celebrity pairings that never happened, AI voices reading real quotes over fake footage. I scroll past most of it the way I scroll past a razor ad. It registers as content before it registers as fake, and by the time I’ve sorted out which one it was, I’m three videos further down the feed.
That’s the scroll Arch Manning grew up on, and it’s the only way his answer on Monday makes any real sense. Asked about an AI video showing his coach, Steve Sarkisian, slapping ESPN’s Holly Rowe to the ground, Manning laughed and called it hilarious. He apologized a day later. I don’t think he laughed because he’s cruel. The laugh was reflex. A fake video of violence against a woman had already been fully processed as a meme format before his brain caught up to what it actually showed, and the only reason any of us noticed is that the guy laughing happens to be the most famous 21-year-old in college football.
The moment he was reacting to happened two days earlier. Saturday night in Austin, Texas beat No. 1 Ohio State 24-23 in the comeback win over Ohio State that started all this, a fourth-quarter finish that’s supposed to be the whole story for a week. Sarkisian didn’t stick around for Holly Rowe’s on-field interview afterward. He said “Texas fight. Hook ‘em!” and walked. That’s the real footage. Somebody ran it through an AI editor and rebuilt the ending: same “Hook ‘em,” same walk-off, except the fake Sarkisian turns and slaps Rowe, who’s shown falling face-down onto the turf. It spread all weekend, and by Monday it was sitting in Manning’s media availability, waiting for him to react to it on camera.
He did, in a clip that outlasted the game itself. “I saw an AI edit of Sark’s interview,” Manning said, laughing. “Of him slapping Holly Rowe? It’s hilarious.” The clip did what clips like that do now: it stopped being about Sarkisian or Rowe and became about Manning’s face doing the laughing, cut, captioned, and pushed past 20 million views by outlets that don’t normally cover Texas football at all.
https://twitter.com/awfulannouncing/status/2099879734272242061
I’ve spent enough time on K-pop fandom Twitter to recognize what happened in that press conference. Deepfakes and edits that splice real footage into scenes that never occurred aren’t shock content to a certain slice of internet user. They’re Tuesday. The format is so familiar that the content inside it barely registers before the joke does. Manning wasn’t asked to evaluate a video of a coach hitting a broadcaster. He was asked to react to a meme, using the same reflex a nineteen-year-old uses scrolling past a fancam at 1 a.m., and the reflex answered before the content did.
By Tuesday, Manning had posted an apology on Instagram calling his response “insensitive” and writing, “There is nothing funny about it.” He went further than the standard non-apology: “It’s easy to say I didn’t mean it, but I know my words and actions were hurtful,” he wrote, addressing Rowe by name: “I have a ton of respect for her and appreciate her showing me grace in this moment.” Rowe responded on X that the two had spoken privately and would “move forward with respect and kindness.” The Association for Women in Sports Media backed her publicly, calling her someone who “exemplifies the professionalism and integrity AWSM strives to support and celebrate,” and adding, correctly, that “the normalization of violence against women in any capacity is not acceptable.”
All of that happened in roughly 48 hours: laugh, viral clip, apology, forgiveness, institutional statement. It’s a fast, complete accountability cycle, and it caught exactly one person — the guy who laughed at a video for a few seconds. Nobody made the account that actually built the fake slap answer for anything; it’s still anonymous, unmentioned in every story written about Manning’s apology. Sarkisian, the man the video is actually about, the one whose face was digitally made to hit a woman on national television, hasn’t said a single public word about any of it. No outlet has him on record. ESPN, asked directly, declined to comment. He’s the only person in this story with nothing to apologize for and nothing to defend, and somehow he’s also the only one who hasn’t had to say anything at all.
It’s not even the first time an AI mistake in sports media has landed on the wrong person this year. ESPN blamed a human for an AI mistake instead of the system that produced it, and finding a face to blame instead of a process to fix is starting to look like the default setting for how this industry handles AI screwing something up. This story didn’t stay contained to college football’s corner of the internet, either. It reached reporters who don’t normally touch Texas at all:
https://twitter.com/AdamSchefter/status/2099961926901989686
I keep coming back to the accountability part, because it’s supposed to be the piece that makes this feel resolved. Manning said the wrong thing, owned it fast, apologized specifically and by name, and Rowe extended him grace in return, which is about as clean as public contrition gets. But that resolution only covers the person we could actually see laughing on camera. It doesn’t touch whoever built the video, and it doesn’t touch the coach the video was actually about. The platforms that let a fake clip of a man hitting a woman circulate for two full days never had to answer for any of it either. We’re apparently very good at holding a famous 21-year-old accountable for a few seconds of a bad laugh. I’m still not sure we’ve figured out how to hold anything else in this chain accountable for the rest of it.
