Ohio State & Oregon share the top line in the Big Ten media poll
Michigan State hires Nick Mansour, 28 — calls offense AND defense
Penn State still sorting a post-Franklin identity; Franklin now at Virginia Tech
Ann Arbor buzz on QB Bryce Underwood entering Year 2 of the Moore era
Cignetti's Hoosiers open as a legitimate league contender — again
USC, Washington, UCLA face a combined nine cross-country conference trips‘Innovation or Desperation?’
Welcome in. Big board, one name, and it's the name this entire sport has been arguing about since the second it broke. Michigan State — trophy case, chip on the shoulder, a program that thinks of itself as a heavyweight — hands the whole operation to a 28-year-old. Never coached a college snap. Marching band alum. Calls the offense, calls the defense, runs the roster. Put the question on the screen and let's go. Innovation… or desperation? Coach, you're twitching.
I'm not twitching, Dana, I'm grieving. For the profession. Let me be clear about what this is, because everybody wants to dress it up. Bad programs dress desperation as vision. That's the story. Michigan State had a stretch of ugly, they lost the room, they lost the recruiting trail, and instead of doing the hard boring work of rebuilding a program, they found a kid with a nice slide deck and a following and they called it "the future."
PowerPoint is not program building. I've sat in that chair. Six a.m. in January, a kid's mother is crying in your office, a booster's threatening you, your D-line coach just took another job — nobody in that room cares about your evaluation Twitter account. Nobody.
So you're saying he can't —
I'm saying everybody loves a young genius until November. Until it's third-and-goal, down four, at Michigan, and the noise is coming down out of that stadium, and the genius has never once had to hold a locker room together after a loss. That's when we find out. And I don't think it's close.
Okay — and this is where I get off the bus a little, Urban, respectfully. Because the public reaction to this has been lazy. Everybody heard "band kid, 28, no experience," wrote the joke, and went to bed. I actually did the homework.
Here's what interests me. This isn't a guy they plucked off a couch. He built a real evaluation background — scouting, personnel, roster construction — the exact stuff everybody in this sport now says is the whole ballgame in the portal-and-revenue era. He hired a veteran offensive coordinator in Sheridan to run the quarterback room. He's got Joe Rossi, a grown-man defensive coordinator with actual credibility, a guy who is not going to sit there and nod. He's got a personnel director out of that same evaluation world. So the "kid alone with a laptop" picture people are painting? That's not what the org chart says.
Oh, so he's a genius because he hired adults.
No — I'm saying he's not stupid, which is a different claim than the one you're making. I'm not guaranteeing this works. I want to be crystal clear: I am not standing here telling you Michigan State cracked the code. I'm telling you the reasons everyone's giving for why it can't work are the wrong reasons.
Name me one. One reason it's wrong.
"He's never coached." He's coached. High school offensive coordinator, high school head coach. Is that Big Ten? Of course not. But the specific complaint — that he's never stood in front of a team and had to teach and lose and come back Monday — is factually not true, and people keep saying it because it's easy.
High school. In Brooklyn. Joel, do you hear yourself? That's the résumé we're comparing to the Big Ten East? I've had graduate assistants with more program experience than this man has, and I wouldn't hand them my special teams.
Brady — you played the position, you've been in the meeting rooms. Where are you on a 28-year-old signing off on both sides of the ball?
That's the part that stops me, and it's not the age. I've been around brilliant young offensive minds — the sport's full of them now, half this league is run by guys who were graduate assistants ten minutes ago. It's the "both." Calling offense and calling defense as the head coach. On Saturday the game moves fast, and those are two completely different brains. There's a reason the best staffs split that up. As a structure? I don't love it.
But — and Joel's tugging me here — the offensive thinking I've seen out of this guy is legitimate. Making the picture simple for a young quarterback, the motion, the spacing, protecting a first-year starter. That's real, modern, quarterback-friendly football. I understand exactly why a young quarterback signs up for it. I just don't know how one man does all of it once the lights are on.
He can't. I'll answer it for you. He can't.
You don't know that.
I know November, Joel. I know what the twelfth week does to a coach who's improvising. You get thin, you get hurt, you lose two in a row, and then you find out whether there was anything underneath the idea.
Hold on — hold on, one thing before we widen this out. My question for the room: is Michigan State being brave here, or are they gambling because the safe hires stopped feeling safe?
Both. Honestly? Both, and that's the answer nobody wants to say on television. A program that's been burned three times running looks at the "safe" retread and goes — that's not safe either. That's slow-motion failure with a résumé attached. So they swung. It's a gamble. I don't think it's a stupid gamble.
It's a gamble with a fanbase's autumn. Those people show up in the cold. They deserve better than being somebody's experiment.
Can I say the quiet thing, though? Who was Michigan State beating for a hire? Genuinely. Name the coach with real equity who takes that job right now, in that division, with that building's recent history. They weren't picking from a list. That's not a defense of the hire — it's context.
Then you take the guy nobody's heard of who's been coaching offensive line for twenty years and you build. You don't hold a press conference and pretend you invented something.
Alright. Park it. Because Michigan State is one story in a league that is on fire in about six other places, and we're going to go through every one of them. Stay with us.
We're back, and I know I promised you the rest of the league. You'll get it, I swear. But we're not leaving East Lansing yet, because there's a decision on the table now, and it's the first actual football decision this man has made where anybody can hold him to it. Michigan State's quarterback is Leo Hannan. Redshirt freshman. Which means it is not Alessio Milivojevic, who by every conventional measure earned that job last season — took a bad offense and kept it upright, took the hits, was the steady thing in a building that had nothing else steady. Coach. You've made this call from the other chair.
I have. And this is it. This is the whole thing I've been trying to say for twenty minutes, and now I don't have to argue theory, because he did it for me. Dana, he didn't just pick a quarterback. He stood in front of a hundred and twenty men and told them that doing everything right doesn't get you the job. That's the message. I don't care what words came out of his mouth at the podium, that's the message that got received, and every one of those kids received it the same way.
You know what a fifth-year offensive lineman hears? He hears: I don't matter. He hears, my three years of showing up, that's not currency in this building anymore. And that lineman's not going to say a word. He's going to nod. He's going to be great about it in August.
And then?
And then it's the second week of November, it's twenty-nine degrees, they've lost a couple in a row, and he asks those men to give him something extra. And he won't get it. And here's the cruel part — he'll never know why. There's no film of a team quietly deciding it doesn't owe you anything. It just happens, one guy at a time, in September, and you find out in November when there's nothing left to fix it with.
Alright, I want to take the football part of this seriously, because it's actually the most interesting decision anybody in this league has made this summer, and it deserves better than "he disrespected the veteran."
Here's the choice, honestly. Milivojevic is the floor. And the floor's real — it's competence, it's the ball goes where it's supposed to go, the operation doesn't embarrass you, you're never the reason you lost. In a lot of situations that's the correct pick and I'd make it. But look at where that program actually is. The floor gets Michigan State a season nobody remembers, and then it's December and they're having the identical conversation they've had every December for four years.
So the answer is play a kid who's never —
The answer is: if the thing that changes your program is sitting in your building, the year you find out is the year nobody's expecting anything. That's the argument. That's a real argument, Urban, made by real people in real buildings. You get twelve chances a year to learn something about a young quarterback, and you can't buy those back later.
Now — I want to be careful. I'm not telling you Hannan's the guy. I've got no idea. Nobody does, and anybody on television telling you they know how a redshirt freshman handles a road environment is lying to you. It might be a mess. It might be the kind of mess you don't recover from in Year One. All I'm pushing back on is Urban's framing, because "he told the locker room effort doesn't matter" — that's not what a locker room hears. A locker room hears "we're playing the guy who gives us the best chance." They've been ranking each other since spring. They already know who they think it is.
They know. And sometimes they're right and the coach is still wrong to say it out loud.
Brady. You're the only one at this desk who has been the guy in that room. What actually happens?
It's a specific kind of awful, and I don't think people outside it understand the shape of it. Losing a job you knew you were going to lose — that's survivable. You saw it coming, you made your peace in April. Losing one you thought you'd already won is different. Because for months you've been the guy. You've got the checklist in your head. Every meeting, every walkthrough, you're checking things off — did that, did that, handled that — and you're right. You did do all of it.
And then somebody tells you it wasn't the checklist. It was never the checklist. That's the part that gets guys, because there's nothing to fix. You can't go work harder at being someone else.
So what do the older players watch for now?
Two things, and they're watching both this week, not in November. One: what Milivojevic does the first time the freshman has a bad series. Does he get off the bench and go stand next to him, or does he find something interesting to look at down the sideline? Everybody sees it. Everybody. And two — this is the one nobody talks about — what the head coach does the first time it goes sideways. If he flinches, if he starts hedging, if there's a week where suddenly it's a "situation" — he's finished with that room. You don't get to make this call and then get nervous about it.
Urban's right that there's a cost. I'd just say the cost gets paid on those two things, not on the announcement.
And he's twenty-eight. Which one of those two do you like him for?
I don't know. Honestly. That's the only reason I'm still watching.
Hold it there — hold it, we've got a hard one. Now we widen out, because there are thirteen other buildings in this league with their own problems and some of them are worse. Back in sixty.
Camera back. Michigan State isn't playing in a vacuum, they're playing in the biggest, meanest league in the country. Top of the media poll it's chalk — Ohio State and Oregon. Joel, is there daylight between those two and everybody else?
There's a gap, yeah. Ryan Day at Ohio State — the roster's absurd, the standard is national title or the year failed, and that's every single season now. Then Lanning at Oregon has built a talent machine. Speed everywhere, portal hits that actually stick, and they reload instead of rebuild. Those are your co-favorites and it's not particularly close to the third team.
And into that you drop a first-time head coach who's got Oregon coming to his building late in the year. That's almost unfair. Mansour's learning the job in real time against two of the best rosters in America. There's no soft landing left in this league.
Ryan's got a machine and he still can't sleep. That's the part people miss about Ohio State. Winning eleven there is a bad year. You want to know how hard this job is at the top of this conference? Ask the guy at the top of this conference.
Speak to the neighbor, then. Michigan. Sherrone Moore, and nobody in Ann Arbor can stop talking about Bryce Underwood.
And there's your contrast on one screen, isn't it. Michigan's got a five-star quarterback the entire country chased. Michigan State's got a head coach whose headline credential is that he played the trombone. You want to know how that rivalry sounds this year? It sounds like that. They go to Ann Arbor in Week 10, and we'll see how cute the innovation is at three o'clock in the afternoon in that stadium.
See, but Michigan's got its own questions and nobody wants to say them out loud either. That's not a finished product. There's real pressure on that staff to show the last couple of years meant something, and having a great quarterback doesn't fix an offensive line or a secondary. My whole point about the Mansour reaction is that everybody's behaving like the rest of the Big Ten is a stable, well-run collection of institutions and Michigan State is the lone circus. Look around. Look at the actual league.
Well — exhibit A, then. Penn State. They fired James Franklin. He's at Virginia Tech. A program that was a permanent fixture is suddenly a question mark.
A decade-plus of stability, gone. New voice, new direction, and a fanbase that got used to nine and ten wins and now genuinely does not know what it is. So when we're clowning Michigan State for chaos — State College is in the middle of its own identity crisis, and that one came with a much bigger buyout.
Thank you. That's exactly it.
Don't lump those together. Penn State fired a coach who won ten games because ten wasn't enough. That's ambition. Michigan State's firing people because they can't get to six. Those aren't the same crisis and you know it.
Fair — but the instability is the same water. New coaches all over this conference this year. Everybody's chasing a model. Michigan State just picked a louder one.
Then there's the West Coast wing. USC, Washington, UCLA — Lincoln Riley, Jedd Fisch. Brady, the map got a lot bigger. Is this league physically too large?
Logistically it's wild. You've got kids flying three time zones for a conference game and then trying to be in class Monday. Travel, body clocks, recovery — that's a competitive variable now, not a talking point. There's a version of this season where somebody's playoff résumé comes down to a west-coast trip nobody wanted in a month where they had nothing left.
It's a television map, not a football conference. I coached in this league. The idea that East Lansing and Los Angeles are conference rivals is a spreadsheet's idea of a rivalry. But that's the world, so you adapt or you get left, and crying about it doesn't win you a game in October.
Which — Urban, that actually helps my argument, and I don't think you meant it to. If the job now includes cross-country logistics, sports science, revenue-share math, a two-hundred-name portal board — those aren't football-coaching skills. That's operations. That's a front office. Everybody keeps describing the modern job and then hiring for the 1998 version of it.
Hold on —
No, no, hold that. Hold that thought, Coach, because that's the last block and you're going to want the whole floor for it. One more before the break, and this one might sting in East Lansing. Indiana. Curt Cignetti. Storybook run all the way up the mountain. Coach — what does Indiana's rise do to the Michigan State conversation?
It embarrasses it. Flat out. Cignetti walked into a program this sport laughed at for a hundred years and he won — and he did it with grown-up, meat-and-potatoes program building. Evaluate, develop, be harder than the other guy. No slide deck. No band. So when Michigan State tells me the only path forward was a 28-year-old and a philosophy statement, I say: Indiana did it the old way, last year, in your own league, with worse history than you. What's your excuse?
Or — counterpoint — Indiana proved the ceiling isn't set by your logo. That's the exact bet Michigan State's making. You can read Cignetti two ways.
One of them's right.
The uncomfortable version is that Cignetti had thirty years of scars and Mansour's got none. That's the real difference, not the philosophy.
And on that, we take a break. When we come back — the bigger question underneath all of this, and Coach has been holding it for four minutes, so buckle up.
Here's where I want to land this. Forget Michigan State for a second — actually no, keep them in frame, but zoom out. The whole sport is drifting toward the front office. Portal, revenue share, roster management, evaluation. Joel, is the head coach of the future basically a general manager?
I think the job already changed and a lot of people haven't said it out loud. The modern head coach spends more hours on roster construction, retention, the portal board and the money math than on install. That's simply what the calendar looks like now. So the question Michigan State is accidentally asking this sport is: if that's the job, why are we still only hiring people whose entire résumé is play-calling and ladder-climbing? Why not hire the person who's best at the part of the job that decides seasons?
The NFL sorted this out decades ago. The general manager and the head coach are two people, on purpose, because the skills fight each other. What's interesting — and a little terrifying — about Mansour is that he's trying to be both at 28. If it works, everybody copies it inside two hiring cycles. If it blows up, every athletic director in America points at East Lansing and says, that's why you don't.
Now let me have it. You two are describing a job that doesn't exist. Yes, the roster stuff matters — I lived through the start of it, I'm not a caveman. But you are talking about football like it's a fantasy league with a bigger budget. Somebody still has to walk into that locker room at halftime, down thirteen, with an offensive line getting whipped, and change what those men believe about themselves in eleven minutes. There's no board for that. There's no spreadsheet for that. And I've never once seen a résumé tell me who could do it.
I agree with that.
Then we're done.
We're not done, because you can agree the halftime thing matters and still notice that we have zero idea who's good at it before we hire them. That's the whole point. We pretend the résumé predicts it. It doesn't. Half the guys with the perfect ladder-climbing résumé have gotten fired in this league in the last four years.
Brady, split it.
I'll split it like this. If Michigan State had hired him as a general manager and put a 55-year-old head coach in the building, half the country would've called it forward-thinking and moved on. They didn't do that. They stacked every job on one person and gave him a title that reads like a corporate reorg. That's not a model — that's a bet on one guy's stamina.
So put the bow on it. Is Michigan State accidentally ahead of the curve, or is this a program embarrassing itself in front of the entire country? Coach, you first, because you're going to talk anyway.
Both can be true and both are bad. Maybe — maybe — in five years everybody's hiring an evaluator to run the building. Fine. But you don't hand the keys to a twenty-eight-year-old with an HR manual's worth of titles, a marching band story, and not one scar on him, and then call yourself a visionary. You call yourself lucky if it works. Michigan State didn't get ahead of the curve. They got desperate and they got a press release out of it. And I promise you — everybody loves a young genius until November. Then the schedule shows up, and the schedule doesn't watch the highlight reel.
And I'll take the other side, calmly, because Urban isn't wrong about the risk — he's wrong about the certainty. Nobody at Michigan State is promising you this works. Not even them. What they did was decide that the part of the job everybody now admits is the job — evaluation, roster, fit — should be run by the person who's best at it rather than the person with the longest résumé. That might be early. It might be a disaster. But "we tried the obvious thing and it failed for a decade, so we tried a real idea" is not embarrassing to me. Ask me again in November. That's the only honest answer anybody's got.
They don't have to wait that long. Notre Dame's on the schedule in Week 3.
In South Bend. Thank you, Brady. That's the answer. September will tell you everything November was going to.
Perfect place to leave it — and speaking of the Irish, they headline our Week 1, that Sunday primetime meeting with Miami, and then they loom over Michigan State a couple of weeks later. So the measuring stick is coming fast, and it's coming in prime time. Innovation or desperation: we did not settle it, which means you'll be watching, which means it worked. More Big Ten Now on the other side.
