Before the Whole Thing

He was the funniest kid in whatever room he was standing in, and I don’t mean that the way you say it about somebody at a funeral. He had a bit for everything. Teachers liked him, which normally gets you buried at that age, and it didn’t, because he was decent to everybody — the kids at the bottom of it too, not just the ones it was useful to be decent to. That’s the part nobody’s writing this week and it’s the only part I’d put money on.

Andre DeLeon · grew up two streets over from Mansour in Flint

He never played. I need to say that plain because I’ve read four things this week that got it wrong. Not JV, not a year and quit, not anything. He was in the band. What happened was around fourteen football stopped being a thing he watched and turned into a thing he was studying, and it skipped hobby entirely. It went straight to whatever is past hobby. He’s at my house on a Saturday explaining a coverage to me with the salt and pepper shakers and I’m like, my guy, we are not on a team.

Andre DeLeon

You’d ask him a normal question, like who’s good this year, and he’d send you back a paragraph. Then a second paragraph. My mom used to call him The Professor. She meant it as an insult. He said thank you.

Andre DeLeon

I never coached him. Let’s start there, because I’ve had five people this week ask me what he was like on my team and he was never on my team. He was in the band. Same field as us at seven in the morning, and then Friday night he’s forty yards down that sideline with a trombone. By the letter of it, that was our entire relationship.

Ron Wachowiak · coached football at Mansour’s high school in the Flint area

Except he started finding me after games. Not to complain about anything — he didn’t have a brother on the team, he didn’t have an angle, there was nothing in it for him. He wanted to know why we ran what we ran on second-and-seven. Sixteen years old, standing in the lot in the band uniform with the hat under his arm. First time, I gave him about nine words. Third or fourth time I stood out there with him for forty minutes and my wife was in the car.

Ron Wachowiak

Did I ever ask him if he wanted to play? No. Not one time. And I’ve been chewing on that for about eight days now, because it never entered my head — he was a band kid, band kids are band kids, that was the whole of my thinking. He never asked either, and I don’t believe he wanted to. I think he wanted to know. But I’m the man who stood in a parking lot with that kid for forty minutes and never once thought, this one should be in my building. That’s mine to carry. It isn’t his.

Ron Wachowiak

He applied to work for me when he was twenty-four. Entry level, and I use that generously — it was drive to a small-college game in Ohio on a Tuesday, write four reports by Thursday, get paid almost nothing. I passed on him. I want to be straight about why, because I’ve had a week to construct a better reason and I’m not going to. He hadn’t played. That was it. That was the entire reason. There was no second reason.

Marisa Petrosino · ran a regional scouting service; declined to hire Mansour in his twenties

And the sample he sent with the application was the best one anybody sent that year. I know that because I kept it. Not for any noble purpose — I kept it because I used to show it to the guys I did hire as an example of how to write one. I never told him that. I sent him a form email. He wrote back in about an hour and thanked me and asked if I’d tell him what would have made it a yes, and I never answered, because I was busy, and because the honest answer was “be somebody else.”

Marisa Petrosino

Do I feel bad? Not the way you want me to. He’s a head coach in the Big Ten, he doesn’t need my apology, that would be ridiculous. What I feel bad about is the other ones. I’ve been doing this nineteen years and I said no to a lot of people for the same non-reason and none of the rest of them ended up on television.

Marisa Petrosino

I was his section leader his first year. Trombones. And he was good — I want that on the record, because I’ve read two things this week that had him in there as some mascot. Good ear, picked up drill faster than anybody in my section, never once a guy I had to go fix. What he wasn’t was consumed by it. Half that band was going to teach music, it was the whole plan of their life, and he was never that. He was good at it, he enjoyed the hell out of it, and then he went and did his actual thing. What he was to us was the reason a hundred and fifty people didn’t quit in November. Seven in the morning, sleeting, ninth time through the same eight counts, and he’s got a bit running. He knew everybody’s name. He knew everybody’s major. He knew who was having a bad week, and I still don’t know how, because I was the one in charge and I didn’t.

Angela Prieto · Spartan Marching Band, 2015–2018

Band was the fun half of his life. It was not the serious half. I worked that out at a bowl trip when I came down the aisle of the bus at two in the morning and he’s got a laptop open, and I assumed — girlfriend, or a paper. It was film. Of the game we had all just sat and watched. He shut it fast and apologized, like I’d caught him at something. Four years, that’s the only time I ever saw him embarrassed about anything.

Angela Prieto

Basketball band is a different animal, it’s down on the floor, it’s loud, it’s bass guitar for him, and in ’19 we’re at the Final Four and I remember him between media timeouts not watching the game like a fan. He’s watching it like he’s grading it. During the Final Four. I said something and he goes, “I’m just looking at spacing,” and I go, “Nick, it’s a basketball game,” and he goes, “I know,” like that answered it.

Devon Amoako · played in the basketball band alongside Mansour

Do I think a trombone player should be running Michigan State football? No. Obviously not. That’s a crazy sentence. But if you’re asking me was he a serious person, was he a worker, did he take the standard seriously — yeah. I hate that I have to say yeah. It would be easier if he was a clown.

Angela Prieto

I knew him as a guy in my mentions, honestly. Draft season. We’d go back and forth on prospects and he was one of maybe three people online who’d actually change his mind if you had the better argument. Everybody else just wanted to win. He wanted to be right, which is a different thing entirely, and much more annoying to argue with.

Ray Sandoval · draft analyst, met Mansour on football X/Twitter

His stuff was clean. That’s the word. He’d take some concept that a scout would spend a paragraph fumbling and he’d make you get it in a ten-second clip. That’s a communications skill, not a football skill, and I used to tell him he was wasting it. I did not, for the record, tell him to go become a head coach. I told him to go work for a network.

Ray Sandoval

People keep calling him a YouTuber like it’s a slur. Fine. He was a good one. You know how many people can explain a Cover 2 hole to a stranger and make them feel smart instead of stupid? That’s the entire job of a head coach at a podium and half of them can’t do it. He could do that at twenty-four to an audience of nobody.

Ray Sandoval

He sat one desk over from me for almost three years. Nonprofit comms. Grant language, donor decks, the least glamorous writing on Earth, and he was the best in the building at it, because he could take something complicated and boring and make a person who didn’t care suddenly care. I found out he did football on the side like a year in. He never brought it up. He’d just leave at six and go home and grade quarterbacks.

Hannah Reyes-Cole · former colleague, Manhattan nonprofit

When the news broke a bunch of us from the old office had a group text going within about ninety seconds. And it was not “oh my god, good for him.” It was “wait, THAT job? The whole thing? Are they okay?” We know he’s brilliant. We also watched him panic about a printer. Running a football program is not a printer.

Hannah Reyes-Cole

He cold-emailed me to volunteer as a scout. A grown man with a real job in Manhattan, offering to break down film for a Brooklyn high school for free. I thought it was a prank. Then he showed up, and within a season he was coordinating our offense, and within another he had a head job somewhere, and I remember thinking, this is either going to be an incredible story or a cautionary tale, and I still don’t know which, and now neither do you.

Coach Bill Tannous · athletic director, Brooklyn high school

I never saw that man angry. Four years. And I want to be careful here, because everybody hears that and thinks I’m describing somebody soft, or somebody keeping a lid on. I don’t think it’s in there. Kid throws it to the other team and comes off, and Nick is the calmest human being on that sideline, every single time, and then thirty seconds later he tells the kid the exact truth about it — and I watched more than one of them find that harder to take than being screamed at.

Coach Bill Tannous

He benched me. First game I was mad about it for like a month. But he told me exactly why, to my face, no speech, just “here’s the three things, fix them and it’s yours back,” and I fixed them and it was mine back. I’ve had coaches my whole life who never once told me the truth like that. He was twenty-six. I was seventeen. It didn’t feel weird until later.

Jalen Ford · played quarterback for Mansour in high school

Would I run through a wall for the guy? Yeah. Do I think Michigan State knows what it’s doing? Man, I don’t know. That’s a big wall.

Jalen Ford

He called me on a Sunday and did the whole thing first — how’s your mom, did you end up moving, congratulations on the show — for a solid four minutes, which is the part people won’t believe about him. And then, same voice, no gear change, no throat clear: “I need you to argue with me every night this week. Not help me. Argue.” I said, argue about what. He said, “Everything I’m about to tell you, assume I’m wrong.” Then he asked about my mom again, because he’d forgotten he’d asked.

Ray Sandoval · draft analyst, met Mansour on football X/Twitter

Everybody keeps saying he walked in with a slideshow, and that’s the joke now, the deck, the PowerPoint, whatever. It wasn’t a deck. It was a document, and it was long, and I’d guess a third of it wasn’t about football at all. It was about who he’d have to hire and what those people cost and what he’d do when he could only afford one of the two he wanted. There was a section on what to say to a fifth-year player whose job you just gave to a nineteen-year-old. There was a section on what the first bad October does to a building and how you keep people from lying to you in it.

Ray Sandoval

I asked him how many drafts. He said nine. Nine drafts in six days. I told him that’s not preparation, that’s a symptom, and he laughed at me and sent me the tenth one at some point that night.

Ray Sandoval

I got recruited for the media half. He wanted the mean version of the questions, and I told him I’m not a mean person, and he said “then be a tired person,” which, fine, I can do tired. Reporters aren’t mean. Reporters are tired and they’ve heard your answer before.

Hannah Reyes-Cole · former colleague, Manhattan nonprofit

The football questions didn’t frighten him even slightly, which frankly irritated me. He was bored by them. There was exactly one question that got him, and he came back to it every single night. “What do you say to a forty-seven-year-old strength coach who has to take instruction from you?” He asked me to ask him that maybe nine different ways. He never liked his own answer once. The last night he said, “I think the answer is that I have to be right early,” and then he sat there for a second and said, “That’s a terrible answer,” and we quit for the night.

Hannah Reyes-Cole

He was sleeping four hours. I know the number because the revisions had timestamps on them. I’d write back “go to bed,” he’d write back “yes,” and then there’d be another one at 4:12 in the morning. Same as the printer, honestly. He’s never in his life been able to leave a thing alone that he thinks isn’t finished.

Hannah Reyes-Cole

Three of us did a mock panel on video the Thursday before. I got assigned the trustee who doesn’t want him, which was not hard casting, because I didn’t want him. And I asked him the cruelest thing I had, which was: why should a twenty-eight-year-old get this instead of me. I’m fifty-one. I’ve done a version of that job. He didn’t flinch and he didn’t flatter me either — he said, “You might be right. Here’s the case anyway,” and then he made the case, and it took four minutes, and it was better than mine.

Tomás Ferreira · sat on Mansour’s mock interview panel

Here’s the thing that broke my brain. My little brother is on the team. On the actual roster. Walk-on. And the new head coach was in my graduating class — like, we have mutual friends, I could’ve been at a party with this man. He is six grades older than my brother, who plays for him. I don’t have a joke for that. I’ve been trying to come up with one for a week. There isn’t one. It’s just true and it’s insane.

a member of the Piwowarczyk family · asked that we not use her first name

My phone lit up and I assumed somebody died. Then I read it and I laughed, and then I didn’t laugh, and I’ve been in that cycle ever since. Proud. Terrified. A little bit like watching your weird friend get on a rollercoaster you personally would never get on.

Angela Prieto

I texted him one word. “Really?” He texted back one word. “Really.” That’s the most Nick exchange we’ve ever had and we’ve known each other since we were kids.

Andre DeLeon

I’ll give you exactly as long as it takes me to explain why I’m not doing this. Then I’m hanging up and I’m going to be nice about it, but I am hanging up.

Andre Sowinski · coached alongside Mansour in Brooklyn

You want the version where I tell you a warm story and say he was different. I have that story. I’m not giving it to you. Here’s my reason, and it’s not that I dislike the guy, I love the guy. It’s that everything anybody says about him right now turns into evidence. You put my nice little story in your article, and if it goes badly out there — and you and I both know what the odds look like — my story becomes the setup for somebody’s joke. It gets clipped. It gets read out loud in a stupid voice on a podcast. And it stops being about a friend of mine and starts being about how dumb everyone was.

Andre Sowinski

Ask me in three years. I’ll talk your ear off in three years. I’ll tell you about the bus. There’s a bus story and it’s the best one anybody has and you’re not getting it today.

Andre Sowinski