Alright. It’s — what is it, seven-forty. We were not supposed to be recording today. This is a bye week. Nothing happens on a bye week. We had a whole plan to do a lazy little mailbag, talk about the schedule, maybe rank the away uniforms, go to bed. And instead I’m sitting here and Shane is somewhere in his house making a noise I’ve never heard a human make.
That was real. That was a real sound. My wife came in to check on me.
So for anybody who has been, I don’t know, on a plane, or living a healthy life for the last three hours — Michigan State has hired Nick Mansour. Twenty-eight years old. From Flint. Went here. Was in the marching band here. And he is now the head football coach of Michigan State University, with, uh — I’m reading the release — “full authority over football operations.” Roster, recruiting, NIL, staff, offense, defense. He calls both sides of the ball. All of it. So.
He was in the band.
He was in the band.
No — like, I need to sit in that for a second, because I keep saying it out loud and it doesn’t get less insane. Trombone. He played trombone. In the marching band. At the Final Four run he was in the basketball band on bass guitar. That is a fact about our head football coach. That is on his — that’s his résumé, Will, that’s a line on the actual document.
It is on the document. I want to try to do this the right way tonight, though, because I think the reflex — and I felt it too, my phone lit up and my first text back to somebody was just a keyboard smash — the reflex is to spend an hour going “ha ha, band kid, ha ha.” And that’s the easy pod. I could do that pod in my sleep. I don’t think it’s the honest one.
No, do the ha-ha pod. I want the ha-ha pod. I’ve earned the ha-ha pod. Do you know what I’ve been through as a Michigan State fan? Do you — I have earned the right to just be a moron about this for an hour.
You’ve earned it. I’m not taking it from you.
Thank you.
But I also think if we just do that, we’re gonna wake up tomorrow and everybody else did that, ESPN did that, Barstool did that, and there’s gonna be like four people in the country actually trying to explain how a Power Four school walked into a room and came out with a twenty-eight-year-old. And I’d rather we be four of those people. Even if the explanation is ugly.
Okay but see, that’s — when you say “explain,” my back goes up, because there’s a version of this where we sit here and we go “ah, actually, if you really think about it, it’s brilliant,” and I will drive to your house, Will. I will get in the car. Because it’s not brilliant. It might be a lot of things. It is not brilliant. Nobody sane does this.
I’m not gonna call it brilliant. I promise. I want to walk the — okay, let me just try to lay out the how, first. How did we get here. Because I actually think “how” is the whole story tonight, way more than “is he good.” Nobody knows if he’s good. He’s coached one season of anything by himself.
One. One season. High school. In Brooklyn.
One season as a head coach, at a high school, in Brooklyn, yeah. So there’s no film on him as a college coach because there is no college coaching. So let’s do the how. And I think you have to start — and this is the part nobody outside our fanbase will sit still for — you have to start with just how broken this thing was. Like how far down the well the program was before this happened.
[groan] Do we have to do the whole — do we have to relive it? I live it every day, man. I don’t need the — I have the whole timeline tattooed on the inside of my eyelids.
We don’t have to do all of it. But somebody listening in Ohio needs the context, because their read on this is “lol Michigan State is a joke,” and I need them to understand it’s not that it’s a joke. It’s that it’s tired. There’s a difference. Tucker blew up in the most public, most humiliating way a program can blow up. Then we do the responsible thing, we hire the steady guy, the culture guy, Smith, the guy you’re supposed to hire —
And it was fine. It was — no, it wasn’t even fine. It was gray. It was just gray. Which is almost worse. At least Tucker was a fireball, you know? At least there was a story. The last couple years were just — nothing. Nothing days. Lose to somebody you shouldn’t, beat somebody you should, go seven-and-whatever, everybody shrugs, portal empties out in December, and you do it again. Gray.
And you can go further back than that, that’s the thing, this didn’t start with Tucker. The end of the Dantonio years, the program stopped adapting. The sport moved and we didn’t. Development fell off. We stopped hitting on recruits, and then when the portal became the whole game, we were bad at that too. So it’s like — layer, layer, layer. And every hire is supposed to fix it and doesn’t. So the trust is just gone. Not the fans’ trust in the team. The whole thing. The trust between the fanbase and the athletic department, the trust in the Board —
Oh, don’t get me started on the Board of Trustees. Don’t. We don’t have the runtime. Because if this pod becomes a Board of Trustees pod, I will unsubscribe from my own show.
I’m only bringing it up because it’s load-bearing. This school has spent a decade finding new and creative ways to step on itself. On the field, off the field, the leadership stuff, the stuff that has nothing to do with football and matters more than football. There’s just this — background hum of “of course something’s going wrong at Michigan State.” And I don’t think this hire makes a lick of sense to anybody until you get how tired those people were. Like institutionally tired. They’d run the safe play a bunch of times and the safe play kept losing.
Okay, so, I hear you, and this is where I actually — this is the one part I get. Like, if I’m being fair for one second and then I’ll go back to being unfair. The problem with hiring the safe forty-nine-year-old coordinator from wherever, the guy with the good handshake — is we’ve done it. We keep doing it. And it keeps producing gray. So at some point “safe” stops feeling safe, right? Because you know exactly how it ends. You’ve seen the movie. Seven wins and a tearful presser in year four.
That’s exactly it, yeah. When you already know the precise way the next four years let you down, a huge swing starts to feel reasonable. It isn’t. It just beats the movie you’ve already sat through three times. That’s the desperation part, and I want to be honest and call it desperation, because that’s what it is. This is not a confident program flexing. This is a program that ran out of safe moves it believed in.
Right, but desperation makes you do dumb things, that’s the whole — that’s the definition. Desperate people don’t make good decisions, they make loud ones. So you’re kind of arguing my side here, buddy.
I might be. I might be arguing both sides all night, fair warning. But here’s the piece that turns it from “desperate school hires a random guy off the internet” into whatever this actually is. The interview. And I can’t confirm the details, this is what’s floating around, so take it as smoke — but the thing everyone who was in the building keeps saying, or keeps sort of saying without saying, is that the interview was not close. That he walked in and it wasn’t a guy auditioning. It was a guy who’d already thought about the program longer and harder than the people who ran it.
See, and this is the part that makes me insane, because I’ve read the same stuff and I hate that it works on me. Because “great interview” — Will, come on. Do you know who gives great interviews? Con men. Communications guys. People whose entire job is to be persuasive in a room. And that’s literally his background. That’s not a knock I’m inventing, that’s his actual career, he did PR and marketing, he’s a communicator, that is the skill he has the most reps at. So “he was amazing in the room” is the one thing about him I would trust the least.
That’s — okay, that’s a genuinely good point and I don’t have a clean answer to it. That is the exact risk. The guy is, by trade, a person who is good at making you believe things. He’s a scouting-content guy, a draft-evaluator guy, he built a public brand explaining football to people, right, that’s how any of us even know the name. So the same thing that got him the job — he can stand up and make the plan sound inevitable — is the thing that should scare you the most, because charisma is not a scheme and it is not an offensive line.
Thank you. Charisma is not an offensive line. Put that on a shirt. Actually don’t, because our interior line is so bad I don’t want to jinx it worse, we’ll get to that, I have a whole thing about the guards.
We’ll get to the guards. But let me try to actually describe the football, because I don’t want us to be the guys who scream for an hour and never once tell people what he says he’s gonna do. Because he does have a — there’s a real idea here. Whether he can run it is a different question. But there’s an idea, and I think it deserves to be said out loud instead of just “band kid, ha ha” for sixty minutes.
Fine. Sell me. Wait, no. Don’t sell me. Describe it. There’s a difference. You describe it, I’ll decide if I’m sold. I don’t want to be sold, I want to arrive at it on my own like a free man.
Deal. So the phrase — and this is his phrase, this is the thing he keeps saying — is “complex for opponents, simple for us.” And I know, I know, it sounds like a slide in a pitch deck, I can feel you rolling your eyes through the microphone.
I’m rolling them so hard. I can see my own brain.
But strip the language off it and it’s not a crazy thought. The idea is: on offense, you want to look like a lot of different things to the defense — formations, motion, personnel groupings, moving guys around — so the defense has to prepare for a ton. But for your own players, and specifically your quarterback, the actual decision he has to make at the snap gets smaller. You’re using all that window dressing to shrink the read. Make the field simple for the one guy who has to process it fast, make it a nightmare for the eleven guys trying to figure out what’s coming.
[pause] …okay. Keep going. I’m not — I’m listening, I’m just not saying anything, keep going.
And on defense it’s the 4-2-5 world. Five defensive backs on the field basically all the time, lighter, faster, more versatile. Simulated pressures — where you show blitz and don’t bring it, or show nothing and bring it, and the offensive line and the quarterback can’t tell which. Gap discipline, everybody fits the run, you stop the run with speed and leverage instead of just being big. And he wants DBs who can do everything — cover, blitz, come fill against the run. It’s a modern, light, disguise-heavy defense. Which, by the way, is what everybody good is kind of doing now. That part is not exotic.
See, and that’s — okay, so here’s me accidentally doing the thing you said not to make me do, so I hate this, but — the Tre Bell thing. Right? Like they’re already talking about Tre Bell as this nickel, slot, cover-blitz-fit-the-run guy, and when you say it like that, that player makes sense in that defense. Like I can actually see the shape of what they want him to be. He’s the little proof of concept. Do this one guy right and you can kind of see the whole idea working and —
— no. No. Nope. I hear myself. I hear what I’m doing. I just talked myself into the 4-2-5. On a Tuesday. Because of a slot corner. That is exactly what he does to people, that’s the con, I just did it to myself in real time, unpaid, I did the con to myself for free. I’m so mad.
[laughing] You did. You genuinely did. That was — I watched it happen.
Don’t — don’t enjoy it. I feel dirty. Because here’s the thing, and this is why I’m clawing my way back out of it: the idea being coherent is not the question. Lots of ideas are coherent. My fantasy football strategy is coherent. It’s coherent right up until Sunday. The question is whether a twenty-eight-year-old who has never called a college play in his life can execute a coherent idea against Notre Dame’s defensive line. And those are so, so different, Will. The whiteboard is undefeated. Everybody’s great on the whiteboard.
That’s the whole ballgame, yeah. And this is where I stop being able to defend it even a little, because — okay, let’s just list the risks, let’s just say them, because I think if we don’t say them out loud people will accuse us of being sold, and I am not sold, I want that on the record. Risk one, the obvious one: he’s twenty-eight. He is younger than some fifth-year guys were before the eligibility stuff changed. He’s six grades apart from — you know the Piwowarczyk thing?
The — yeah, the walk-on. The linebacker kid. What’s the — remind me.
So there’s a walk-on on the roster, Chris Piwowarczyk, SAM-type kid, and I guess Mansour went to the same high school and was actually in the same graduating class as this kid’s older sister. They’re like six grades apart. Coach and player. Six grades. That’s the one that got me, honestly. Not the band. The band’s funny. The “he’s basically the same age as a guy on the team’s big sister” — that’s the one where it hits you how young this is.
That’s — okay, no, that’s genuinely unhinged. Like, some of these players have been recruited by grown men their whole life and now the head coach could’ve been at their sister’s graduation party. As a peer. I can’t. Okay, risk two, go.
Risk two: never coached in Power Four. At all. Not as a GA, not as an analyst, nothing. There’s no “oh he was a quality control guy at Alabama for two years so he’s seen how it runs.” He hasn’t seen how it runs. The travel, the machine, the twenty-hour days, the compliance, the boosters, the sheer scale of a Saturday in the Big Ten — he is going to experience all of that for the first time while also being the guy in charge of all of it. That’s not a small thing. Guys who’ve done it their whole careers get eaten by that.
And risk three which is the one that actually makes me the most nervous and I don’t think people are talking about enough because they’re stuck on his age — he’s calling BOTH sides. Both. Offense and defense. On game day. By himself. Do you understand — Will, coordinators, plural, that is a two-person job, minimum, it is arguably a four-person job with the whole staff, and this child is going to do it alone with a headset while also being the CEO of the entire program. When does he — like, on a third-and-seven, is he thinking about his offense or is he thinking about the corner blitz he wants to dial up on the next drive? You can’t do both. Nobody does both. There’s a reason nobody does both.
That one scares me more than the age too, honestly. Because he’s gonna get older. He is not gonna get more seconds between plays. There’s like twenty-five of them and that’s the whole allotment. And the counter to it — the thing the program would say — is that’s exactly why the staff looks the way it looks. Which is the next thing I wanted to do, the staff, because I think it’s either the most reassuring part of this or it’s a fig leaf and I genuinely can’t decide which.
The adults. You mean the adults they hired to babysit him.
I mean the adults, yeah, though I wouldn’t say babysit. Sheridan on offense — Nick Sheridan — that’s a real, veteran, been-around guy, especially with quarterbacks and the passing game. And the way it’s been described is Mansour calls the plays but Sheridan is the one who structures the teaching, right, the week-to-week, how you install, how you actually get it into the players’ heads Monday through Friday so it’s clean on Saturday. Which — if that’s true, that’s a real division of labor. That’s the young guy having the ideas and a veteran making sure the building doesn’t descend into chaos.
And Rossi on defense. Joe Rossi. Which — okay, that one actually does make me feel a little better, and I’ll say why, it’s because Rossi is a legit, hard-nosed, conventional-credibility defensive coach. Like that’s not a yes-man hire. That’s not a guy you bring in to nod. That’s a guy with his own résumé and his own way of doing things. And so my hope — my little flickering ember of hope — is that when Mansour’s twenty-eight-year-old brain wants to do something insane, there’s a Rossi in the room who can go “no.” Like an actual no. From an actual adult.
Right, and there’s a Whitman too, Marcus Whitman, the personnel guy, comes out of that same scouting-content world, the evaluation stuff — the idea being he builds the boards, finds the undervalued guys, and pushes back when Mansour wants to chase a name instead of a fit. So on paper the whole thing is built to argue. Mansour has final say but he’s surrounded by people with the standing to tell him he’s wrong before he decides. That’s the pitch, anyway.
But here’s the thing that nags me. And I’m not gonna say anything I can’t back up, so I’m gonna say it careful. If you have to hire that many accomplished adults to make the hire survivable — doesn’t that kind of tell you the hire isn’t survivable on its own? Like, you don’t build a cage around a plan that works. You build the cage because you’re scared of what’s inside it. And also — how long does a Rossi, a guy who’s a real coach with real credibility, how long does he take orders from a kid before he starts wondering why he isn’t the one — no. I’m not doing that. I’m not gonna sit here and manufacture a locker room story on day one. I don’t know anything. Nobody does. It’s day one.
Good. Don’t. I was gonna stop you. We don’t know how any of those rooms actually feel and it’s not fair to the guys to invent it. What I’ll say is just — the building has real people in it with their own authority. It’s not eleven interns and a mission statement. Whether that saves it or whether that’s just a nicer way to fail, I don’t know. I keep saying I don’t know. I’m gonna say it a lot tonight.
It’s the title of the episode. It should be. “I don’t know, man.” That’s the whole show.
[laughs] Alright, I have to bring up the quarterback thing, because if we don’t, the comments will do it for us and they’ll be meaner about it. He’s starting Hannan. Leo Hannan, the redshirt freshman. Over Milivojevic. Over Alessio, who — let’s be fair — steadied the whole thing last year. By any normal measure Alessio earned the job. He went out there when it was ugly and made it less ugly. And Mansour’s going with the young guy for the ceiling.
Okay and I want to be really clear about something because Alessio doesn’t deserve to get turned into a punching bag in this — I’m not mad at the kid, Alessio was thrown into a fire and he did the job, he stabilized a bad situation, that’s a real thing and he should be proud of it. So this isn’t “Alessio bad.” This is “I don’t trust the twenty-eight-year-old’s risk tolerance.” Those are different complaints and I want them filed separately.
They are different, and to Mansour’s credit — and I’ll give him this — the way he’s talked about it, he has gone out of his way not to make Alessio sound like a placeholder. He’s protecting both of them publicly. He’s not out there going “the old guy was holding us back.” He’s framing it as a ceiling decision, not a knock on the other guy. Which is at least the right way to handle a room where you just told a kid who did everything asked of him that he’s QB2.
And look — the logic isn’t nothing. If your whole plan is “simplify the field so a physically gifted quarterback can rip it,” then yeah, you probably do want the higher-ceiling arm, the guy who can make the throw that changes a game, over the steady guy who checks it down and keeps you at seven wins. Like the QB pick actually rhymes with the offense. If you believe the offense. Which. You know. Jury’s in the parking lot on that one. But — okay, I don’t want to spend the whole night on the quarterback because honestly the quarterback is the least weird thing about this hire. The weird thing is the head coach.
Hang on. One more thing and then we drop it, and it’s not the football part, we did the football part. What does a decision like that do to a room? Not the depth chart. The room. I keep thinking about some fourth-year guy in that building.
I’ve been sitting on this for an hour. Everybody wants to talk about upside and nobody’s talking about the fact that a kid did every single thing you’re supposed to do — took the hits, didn’t whine, held a bad offense together, stayed when the whole thing was on fire — and the answer was still no. That’s the part that’s got its hand around my throat.
Yeah.
So what do you say to that guy? If you’re twenty-two watching that, what’s the lesson? It used to be, do it right and you get yours. That’s the deal every coach sells every kid in every living room in America. And now it’s, nope, we like the other guy’s upside better. I don’t know what you tell a room after that.
And to be fair, and I hate being fair right now, that deal’s been a little bit of a lie for a long time —
Don’t. Not yet. Let me be mad for thirty more seconds.
Go ahead.
And it’s not about the two quarterbacks, I need people to hear that. Leo Hannan didn’t do anything to anybody. He got told he was the starter, what’s he supposed to do, decline? He’s probably in there feeling like he has to apologize for existing. Nobody clip this and go, Locked On’s down on the freshman. I’m mad about a principle.
And that distinction probably decides whether this becomes a real problem. If a room decides it’s about the two guys, you get factions, that’s poison. If it decides it’s about the rule — what are the rules now — that’s colder and it lasts longer. I don’t know which one it is and neither do you.
And that stuff doesn’t show up in August. It shows up in November when it’s cold and somebody misses a block and somebody else notices and doesn’t say anything. That’s how rooms go. Not a blowup. Guys just quietly stop doing the extra thing for each other.
That’s real. Okay. Uncomfortable part.
Do the uncomfortable part.
Every coach who ever rebuilt anything did some version of this. Every one. Go look at any program that got turned around and somewhere in year one there’s a guy who did everything right and got passed anyway, and nobody remembers his name because it worked. When it works we say he was decisive. When it doesn’t, that same call is the thing everybody points at and goes, that’s where he lost the locker room. Same call. The only variable is whether they won.
I hate that. And I can’t argue with it, which is worse.
I hate it too. But you can’t call it unforgivable and also say you want a guy who makes hard calls. Pick one. I’ve been picking both all night.
Counterpoint. There’s a difference between unsentimental and reckless and neither of us knows which this is. And he’s got no track record to lean on. When a twenty-year coach does it, the room goes, well, he’s seen this before. This guy hasn’t seen anything before.
That’s a lot to ask. The one thing I’ll say — and I think it’s what’s kept a lid on this — is he’s never let anybody make Alessio the fall guy. He’s had a hundred chances to say we needed more explosiveness, and every one of those is a nail in that kid, and he hasn’t taken one.
No, he hasn’t, and I’ll give him that. And Alessio’s handled it better than I’m handling it and I’m a grown man with a mortgage. If he ever looked around I’d get it, I wouldn’t hold it against him one second — I’m not saying he is, I don’t know anything, don’t clip that. I’d just understand it, because he’s a person.
Everybody forgets the roster’s full of people. We talk about it like a video game. It’s twenty-year-olds who eat lunch together tomorrow.
And go block for each other on Tuesday. I don’t know how you carry that around.
By winning, mostly. That’s the ugly answer. Win five in a row and every one of these questions evaporates.
And lose five and it’s the only story there is. Yeah. Okay. Anyway. I’m getting sad, can we go somewhere else. Like I said, the quarterback’s still the least weird part of this.
Agreed, let’s move it. The roster in general — and I don’t want anyone hearing this and thinking we’re saying the cupboard’s secretly full, because it’s not. This is not a loaded team that just needs a spark. Cam Edwards is a legit back, that’s a real portal add, he’s probably the best player on the team on day one. The linebacker room is the group I trust most — Hall, Crawford, White, there’s depth and speed there, it’s athletic. It’s not perfect, the coverage stuff can lag, but if you’re looking for a floor, it’s the linebackers.
And now do the part I’ve been holding in for twenty minutes. The interior offensive line. Because you can draw up “complex for opponents, simple for us” on the whiteboard until the marker runs dry, and none of it matters if a defensive tackle is standing in your quarterback’s lap two seconds after the snap. The guards, Will. The center. That group might decide this whole season more than any skill guy, more than Hannan, more than the scheme. Because if they can’t hold up, there is no scheme. There’s just a twenty-eight-year-old watching his brilliant idea get bulldozed up the middle.
And no amount of philosophy fixes that, right, that’s the boring part nobody wants to talk about. You can have the most modern brain in football and it does not matter even a little if you can’t block a three-technique. I’m gonna learn more from watching our guards in September than from anything anybody says at a podium. And we won’t know for a while. Which brings me to the schedule, because — the schedule does not care about our feelings, the schedule is just sitting there, and it is not gentle.
Walk it. Slowly. So I can feel each one.
Week one, Grambling. Home. And that’s — that should be a get-your-feet-under-you game. That should be the “let the kid coach a real game with the lights on and nobody gets hurt” game. But watch that one closely, because it’s the first look. Not at whether they win, they’d better win. At how it looks. Is it organized? Do they get lined up? Do they burn timeouts because a twenty-eight-year-old is calling both sides and the operation’s a mess? Grambling’s the dress rehearsal.
And then two weeks later you go to South Bend. At Notre Dame. Which — Will, they are not in the same universe as us right now, let’s just be adults, Notre Dame is lightyears ahead of Michigan State as a program, this is not a rivalry, this is a measuring stick and the stick usually hits us in the face. And that’s week three. Week three! He’ll have three games of experience in his entire life as a college head coach and one of them is in that stadium.
And that game’s looming already — like the reason people are watching the Miami–Notre Dame thing this weekend, six versus three, top-five game, part of why our people are gonna have that on is “oh no, we get them in three weeks.” So even the games we’re not in are Notre Dame anxiety right now. And then — you know where I’m going.
Week ten. Say it. At Michigan.
At Michigan. In Ann Arbor. And they’ve got Underwood, the five-star, all the hype, and you already know exactly what the framing is gonna be, it writes itself, it’s “we have a generational quarterback, you have a guy who played the trombone.” That’s the whole week. That’s every talk show, that’s every graphic, that’s the smug — you know the tone. And our twenty-eight-year-old has to walk into that building in November.
“You have a five-star, we have a trombone player.” They’re gonna say it. Somebody in maize is gonna say it into a camera and it’s going to go so viral and I am going to have to see it four hundred times. I can feel it coming like weather. And the worst part — the worst part — is it’s a good line! It’s mean and it’s funny and I would laugh if it were about literally any other school. That’s the pain of it, man. The joke’s right there and it’s about us.
And you don’t even get to week ten easy. Nebraska, at Wisconsin, Illinois, Northwestern, the trip out to UCLA — the league’s enormous now, you’re flying to Los Angeles for a conference game, everybody’s figuring out what that even does to a body. And then after Michigan it’s Washington, Oregon, at Rutgers to close. Oregon might be the best roster in the country. So there’s no soft landing anywhere on this thing. You’re taking a guy who has never done a single piece of this and going, great, do all of it, starting now, in the deep end.
Okay so — let’s do the thing. Let’s do the two lists. Because I need it, therapeutically. What calms us down and what makes us panic. You go first, do the calm one, because if I go first I’ll just scream.
Okay. What would calm me down. If Grambling looks organized — clean operation, no clock chaos, guys know where to line up, they play fast and it looks coached, not improvised. That calms me down, because it tells me the day-to-day machinery works and the adults in the building have it under control. If early on it’s clear the players believe it — like if you see the linebackers flying around and playing free, that tells you the message got through the door, which is half the job. And honestly? If Mansour, when it goes bad, and it will go bad at some point — if he handles a loss like a grown-up. Doesn’t spiral, doesn’t get cute, doesn’t blame a kid. That would tell me the maturity’s there even if the résumé isn’t.
See, those are all reasonable and that’s why you do the calm list. Okay, mine. What makes me panic immediately, day one, no waiting. If week one against Grambling is a disorganized mess — if it’s twelve men on the field, if it’s timeouts because nobody’s lined up, if it’s a scramble — I will not sleep until December. Because that’s the both-sides thing, that’s the “he can’t actually run the operation” thing showing up in the very first game. If the interior line gets caved in by a lower-level opponent, I panic, because it only gets worse from there. And — and this is the real one — the first time something goes sideways and it feels like there’s nobody actually steering. Like the first sign that it’s a twenty-eight-year-old in over his head and the adults couldn’t stop it. That’s my nightmare. Not losing. We lose all the time, I’m built for losing. My nightmare is losing and it looking like chaos, because chaos is how you know it’s broken at the root.
That’s fair. And I think the honest thing is those two lists are gonna both get fed all season. Some weeks it’ll look organized and some weeks it’ll look like chaos and we’re gonna sit here on Sundays trying to figure out which one is the real thing and which one was noise. And we won’t know for months. Maybe not for a year. This is not a thing that resolves in September.
Can I — can I ask you something and I want a real answer, not a podcast answer. Are we even allowed to be curious about this? Like, is that permitted? Because part of me — the part I’m ashamed of — part of me is a little bit interested. Not hopeful. I want to be clear, not hopeful, I have no hope, hope is for people who haven’t watched what I’ve watched. But curious. Like I want to see what happens. And I feel like being curious is a betrayal of everybody who’s furious right now, and everybody has every right to be furious. So am I allowed?
I’ve been chewing on that all afternoon, actually, because I feel it too and I don’t totally trust it either. Here’s where I landed, or where I am right now, ask me again next week. I think you’re allowed to be curious as long as you’re honest that curious isn’t the same as convinced. The people who are mad are right. This is an unserious-looking hire from a school that has not earned any benefit of the doubt, and it might blow up spectacularly, and it might be one more thing Michigan State did to itself. All of that can be true and you can still want to watch. Those don’t cancel each other out. Being curious isn’t signing anything.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think the thing Mansour himself said that got under my skin the right way — because most of what he says gets under my skin the wrong way — was something like, nobody has to believe this today. Right? Like he’s not asking us to buy in. He said the school doesn’t get to ask for trust, it has to earn it. And I — I hate how much I respect that. Because it’s the opposite of what a con man says. A con man tells you to believe right now. This guy’s telling me I don’t have to. And I don’t know what to do with a guy who tells me I’m allowed to doubt him.
That’s the part that keeps me from being all the way out on it. Not that I’m in. I’m not in. But he’s not selling the thing the way a fraud sells it. Doesn’t mean he can coach. A guy can say all the right humble things and still get carved up by Oregon. Being humble doesn’t block anybody either. But — I don’t know, man. Everybody in this sport promises you something. He won’t. That sticks with me a little and I wish it didn’t.
So where does that leave us. Like, actually. Bottom line it. Because I still don’t know how I feel and we’ve been talking for forty-five minutes.
It leaves us — I don’t think we’re supposed to have a verdict tonight. I think that’s the honest place to end. I can tell you how it happened. Desperation, exhaustion, a school that ran out of safe moves it believed in, a guy who walked in and out-prepared everybody in the room. I can walk you through the plan and tell you which parts of it aren’t crazy. And I still cannot tell you if it’s gonna work, and neither can anybody who’s telling you they can. Anybody who’s certain tonight — certain it’s genius, certain it’s a disaster — they’re selling you something. I don’t have it. I’ve got a shrug and a season pass.
And that’s the cruel part, right, that’s the whole thing about this stupid sport — I don’t get to opt out. I could sit here and be furious and swear I’m done, I’m not watching, I’ve had enough, they’ve embarrassed me for the last time — and then week one’s gonna roll around and it’s gonna be a Saturday and there’s gonna be a Michigan State game on, and I’m gonna watch every single snap. Because I have to know. That’s the — they’ve got me. They’ve had me since I was a kid. I don’t get a choice. None of us do. That’s the deal.
That’s the deal. You don’t get to not find out. So we’ll be here for it. Whatever it turns out to be.
The band has the football team now, Will.
The band has the football team now. Goodnight, Shane.
I don’t know, man.
