Thanks for coming. I know a lot of you rearranged real schedules to be here, and I know why. So let me not waste the first two minutes pretending this is a normal Tuesday.
I'm twenty-eight. My coaching résumé fits on a Post-it. I marched in the band that plays in the stadium I now work in. If you're sitting there doing the math and it isn't adding up, I want to be clear about something before we go any further: that's a reasonable place to start. I'm not going to stand up here and act like the skepticism is unfair or that you all just don't get it. You get it fine. The hire is unusual. Calling it anything else would be the first lie, and I'd like to not start with one.
Here's what I'd ask instead. Judge the plan on the plan. Judge me on how the players are treated, on whether this building runs like it knows what it's doing, on whether what we say in July matches what you see in October. I don't get to walk in here and ask for trust. Michigan State has asked this fan base for a lot of trust over the last few years and hasn't always held up its end. I know that. The players in our locker room know it better than anybody, because a bunch of them signed up for a version of this place that changed under their feet more than once. My first job isn't to win a press conference. It's to make sure those kids don't get used as props in somebody's story about whether the young guy can hack it — mine included.
I believe in what we're building. I wouldn't have taken it if I didn't, and the people who hired me didn't do it on a whim, whatever it looks like from the outside. But belief isn't something I can hand you today like a pamphlet. Clarity, I can give you. So my promise this morning is clarity before slogans — I'll tell you what we're actually doing, and why, and I'll try to do it in plain sentences. What we are, you'll see on Saturdays. That part earns itself or it doesn't.
Nobody has to believe this today. I'd think less of you if you did. Ask me anything.
Coach, you brought it up yourself, so let's start there. You were a trombone player in the marching band, in this building's shadow, a decade ago. There is a Michigan quarterback whose recruitment got compared to yours as a punchline this week. How do you answer people — and there are a lot of them — who hear "band kid running a Big Ten program" and simply stop listening?
I don't try to talk them out of it. If "band kid" is where somebody wants to file me, they can, and honestly the band part I'll defend all day. You want to know what learning a halftime show teaches you? Twelve minutes of formations where two hundred people have to be in an exact spot on an exact count or the whole picture breaks. Complex to watch, drilled until it's simple to run. People hear that and file it under cute origin story. It's closer to what I actually do now than most of you would guess.
But I'm not going to sit here and pretend a trombone is a coaching credential. It isn't. The band is where I fell in love with this place, not where I learned football. Those are two different rooms in my life, and I'd never insult the people who've spent thirty years on a sideline by suggesting otherwise. If someone stops listening at "band kid," that's their right. I just hope they check back in around Week 6, because the film's going to say more than I can this morning.
To stay on that — twenty-eight. There are graduate assistants in this league older than you. Position coaches with kids your age. When you walk into a defensive line meeting full of grown men who've been coached by NFL guys, what actually happens in that room? Do they buy it?
Some days more than others. I'd be lying if I said I walked in and the age thing evaporated. It doesn't. What I've found is that players don't test how old you are. They test whether you know what you're talking about and whether you'll be straight with them. A twenty-year-old edge rusher does not care about my birth certificate. He cares whether the thing I'm asking him to do on third down actually gets him to the quarterback, and whether I noticed when it worked.
The only way I know to close an age gap is to be right about things, over and over, and then keep doing it, because the gap reopens the second you stop. I'm not going to out-tenure anybody. I'm not trying to. But I've spent my whole adult life around evaluation and teaching football, just not on the path you'd draw up. The room gives you about a week of benefit of the doubt. After that you earn it in the details or you don't get it back.
Michigan State gave you a level of control people around the sport are calling unprecedented for someone at your stage — roster, portal, NIL, staffing, both coordinators' worth of scheme. The phrase going around is "football czar." Is that accurate, and doesn't concentrating all of that in one first-time head coach terrify you a little?
"Czar" is a word people use when they want a hire to sound scary. I'd retire the word. What's true is that the football decisions run through one football operation instead of getting split across people who don't have to agree. I've watched programs — good ones — lose because the guy recruiting the player, the guy developing the player, and the guy scheming for the player were three different fiefdoms that met twice a year. I wanted those things stitched together. That's the actual point of the structure.
Does the scope scare me? It'd be arrogant if it didn't. That's exactly why I hired the people I hired. Final say isn't the same as doing it alone. I want to be argued with before a decision, hard, by people who've earned the standing to argue. What I don't want is a building where nobody's actually accountable because everybody's a little bit accountable. So: one operation, real adults inside it with real authority, and my name on the outcome. Nobody handed me that control so I could be a genius alone in a room. They handed it to me so that when this goes badly there's exactly one place for it to go, and everybody in here already has the address.
And you're calling both offense and defense. Nobody at this level does that. Why take that on in Year One of your first head coaching job, when the safer thing is to delegate one side?
Because I think the edge in modern football is in how the two sides talk to each other, and I didn't want that conversation to have a middleman. When I'm calling both, the answer to "what's the offense afraid of" is the same brain that's building the defense to scare people. I know how that looks from outside. It's also the whole reason I think we can be better than the sum of this roster.
I'll also say — I'm not doing it alone on game day and I'll never pretend I am. Nick Sheridan structures how the quarterbacks are taught and keeps the offensive process from turning into me improvising. Joe Rossi runs the defensive room with an authority I'm not going to undercut. I make the calls; I don't make them in a vacuum. And if it turns out I can't hold both, I'll be the first one to say the math doesn't work and fix it. I don't need to be the smartest guy in every meeting. I need us to be miserable to play against.
Let's talk quarterback, because the fan base is already at war about it. You've named Leo Hannan, a redshirt freshman, your starter over Alessio Milivojevic — who, by most conventional measures, steadied this offense last season and, a lot of people would argue, earned the job. How do you make that decision without telling Alessio he wasn't good enough?
Careful, first of all. Because you're right that it's a room with two real people in it, and I'm not going to reduce either one of them to make a headline easier to write.
Let me say the part about Alessio clearly, because it matters and because he's going to read this. Alessio did something last year that is genuinely hard: he took an offense that had every reason to come apart and he held it together. That's not a small thing and it is not a consolation prize when I say it. Everything good that happens for us this fall runs partly through the fact that he stabilized this position when it needed stabilizing. He is a real quarterback. He didn't lose this job by being bad at it.
The decision isn't a verdict on him. It's a bet on a ceiling. When I watch Leo, I see a version of this offense a year or two from now that I want to start building toward now, because the way we play asks a lot of the quarterback and I'd rather grow into that with the player whose top end is highest. That's an upside call, made with a long lens, and reasonable people can hate it. What I won't do is dress it up as "the better player won." They're different players. I picked a direction. Alessio is one snap from being enormously important to this team, and both of them know that room isn't closed. If I ever start talking about one of my quarterbacks like he's a placeholder, somebody in here should call me on it.
Have you told Alessio all of that — the part about it not being a verdict?
To his face, before any of you heard a depth chart. He deserved to hear it from me in a room, not to find out how he stacked up by refreshing a website. That's the floor of how you treat somebody who gave this place what he gave it. Whatever he decides to do with his career, he'll have earned every ounce of respect I've got, and I told him that too.
On the recruiting side — and I know it's early in the calendar, so philosophy only — what is the pitch? What kind of player are you actually hunting for, given the evaluation background you come from?
Philosophy, since you're being fair about the calendar: we're going to recruit for a role, not for a ranking. That sounds like a slogan so let me make it concrete. Before we love a kid, Marcus Whitman and I want to be able to say the exact thing he does that makes an opponent's week harder — the job on our team that he's going to be great at. If we can't name the job, we don't actually know why we like him; we just like the stars next to his name, and that's how you end up with a roster full of good athletes who don't fit together.
I come out of a world where the whole game was finding the guy the market underrated and knowing precisely why. I'm not walking away from that because I've got a nicer office now. We'll take the blue-chip when the blue-chip fits the job — I'm not romanticizing being underdogs — but we're going to be the program that can tell a seventeen-year-old, specifically and honestly, how he wins here. In my experience kids can smell the difference between a real plan for them and a highlight package with their name on it.
You keep coming back to how the players are treated. This is a locker room that has been through Mel Tucker, through a coaching change, through a lot of instability that wasn't their fault. What have you actually said to them? Why should they trust the newest voice in a building that's changed voices on them over and over?
I didn't ask them to trust me. I think that's the mistake the last few versions of this made — walking in and requesting trust like it comes with the parking pass. These guys have had people stand at a podium like this and promise them things, and then those people were gone. Why would my speech land any differently? It shouldn't, on day one.
So what I told them was small on purpose. I told them what the next two weeks would actually look like, hour by hour, and then I did exactly that, so the first thing they learned about me was that my Tuesday matched my Monday. You don't get a group like that back with one great meeting. You get them back with about forty boring days in a row where the thing you said would happen actually happens. We're on day whatever of that. I'm not going to stand here and tell you they've bought in — that'd be disrespecting how much they've earned the right to wait and see. I just want to be the first coach in a while who keeps his small promises before he asks them to believe a big one.
This hire didn't happen in a vacuum. Michigan State's problems in recent years haven't only been on the field — there's been dysfunction at the Board of Trustees level, leadership turnover, a broader erosion of public trust in the institution itself. You've talked about earning the fan base's trust. Do you feel like you also inherited the university's trust problem, whether you asked for it or not?
I did, and I'm not going to pretend that's someone else's department. People here are tired in a way that isn't only about wins and losses. This place has found ways to hurt itself and hurt people, and a fan who's exhausted by all of it isn't going to get un-exhausted because the football team hired an interesting twenty-eight-year-old. I'd be a fool to think a good season launders any of that. It doesn't.
What I can control is one department inside a big institution. So I'm going to try to run the football program like a place that does what it says, treats its people right, and doesn't create its own scandals — not as a slogan, as a daily practice. If a corner of Michigan State can just be steady and honest for a while, maybe that earns back a little of something bigger than football. That's not my promise to make for the whole university. It's the piece I've got, and I take it seriously. I understand people are watching this program as a test of whether the school can be trusted at all. I didn't pick that weight. I'm not going to whine about carrying it.
Your staff is interesting because it's not all young disciples of whatever this is. You hired Nick Sheridan, Joe Rossi, veteran guys with their own reputations and their own credibility. Do they actually believe in the experiment, or did they take a job? Is there tension there?
I hope there's tension. I'd be worried if there weren't. I did not hire a staff to nod at me. If I wanted a room full of people who think I'm right, I'd have hired thirty-year-olds who grew up on my stuff, and that program would be a mile wide and an inch deep the first time we got punched.
Joe Rossi has forgotten more situational defense than I'll ever teach, and he did not come here to be anybody's disciple. He came here to coach a great defense and to tell me the truth, and he does both, including when the truth is that he thinks I'm wrong about something. I want that. Nick Sheridan is the same — he's got his own standing, his own way of teaching the quarterback position, and he uses it. These are grown men with real authority in their rooms, not extensions of me. If you're asking whether they signed up because they think I'm some prophet, no. They signed up to do excellent work and to hold this thing to a professional standard. The day they stop pushing back is the day I should worry. We're a long way from that day.
Coach, I'll just say what a lot of my listeners are yelling at their radios. Isn't this whole thing a gimmick? A content guy, a draft-Twitter personality, handed a Big Ten program because the athletic department got desperate and wanted attention? Aren't you a little embarrassed that Michigan State — Michigan State — got itself to a place where this is the answer?
Fair question, and I'm not going to get prickly about it, because half your listeners are people who've bled for this program longer than I've been alive and they're allowed to be angry.
Here's the honest answer. If I turn out to be a gimmick, this will have been a disaster and it'll be on the people who hired me and on me, and no press conference answer is going to save any of us from that. I can't argue you out of "gimmick" this morning. The word only gets disproven one way, and it isn't with a good soundbite. But I'd push on one thing you said — the "content guy" part. Underneath the content was ten years of doing the actual work of evaluating football and communicating it to people who do this for a living, and some of those people ended up hiring, drafting, and betting on what I said. That's not the same as being loud online, even if it looked like it from the outside. As for embarrassed — no. I'd be embarrassed to take this job and play it safe with it. I'm not embarrassed to be the swing a place takes when the safe swings stopped working. Whether it connects, you'll get to watch. In public. Twelve Saturdays a year.
Hi — student paper, so a little different. We open with a bye, then Grambling, then Eastern Michigan, and then it's at Notre Dame in Week 3. And Notre Dame's on national TV this weekend looking like a playoff team. Students are already making, honestly kind of unhinged, plans around that game. Is Notre Dame a measuring stick for you, or is that too early to even think about?
First — I love that the student section is already unhinged in July. Don't lose that. That's the best thing about being here.
Notre Dame is a great program that is, right now, a long way ahead of where we are. I'm not going to insult anybody by pretending Week 3 is some line in the sand where we announce ourselves. If I spend August game-planning a team we play in September, I've cheated Grambling and Eastern Michigan, and those two Saturdays are where this team actually learns who it is. Notre Dame will tell us something real about the gap. It won't be the story of our season, and I'd ask people around here not to turn it into one. It's a road game in September. We'll be ready to compete and I'll want to win it like I want to win all of them — but I'm not going to let a date on the schedule become a referendum on twenty-year-olds in Week 3. Ask me again the Saturday before. I'll have more for you then, and less of it printable.
You're from Flint. This is a Michigan kid coming home to run the state's other program. What does that part mean to you, and is there anything about being from here that you think actually matters to how you do this job?
It means a lot, and I want to be careful not to turn it into a country song, because Flint deserves better than to be my inspirational backdrop.
What being from here does is it takes away my excuses. I know exactly what this program means to people in Flint and Saginaw and Detroit and the U.P., because I was one of those kids watching, and I know how it feels when the team lets that down. I can't hide behind "I'm new, I didn't know it mattered so much." I did know. I've always known. So the pressure of it isn't a burden somebody handed me — I signed up for it on purpose, because I'd rather owe something to a place I'm actually from than chase a job I don't care about somewhere else. Practically? It means I'll recruit this state like it's personal, because it is. It means the kids in this locker room from this state are playing for somebody who understands what their grandmother is going to say at church about this team. It doesn't draw up a single play. It's still not nothing.
Last one from me. You come from evaluation, so you know how recruiting really works — the living rooms, the mothers. A mom of a four-star kid is sitting across from you. She's read every skeptical thing written about you this month. She wants to know her son is safe handing four years to a first-time, twenty-eight-year-old head coach. What do you tell her?
I don't tell her anything first. I let her ask me everything, and I let it be uncomfortable, because if I'm doing the talking in that room I've already lost her.
When it's my turn, I don't sell her a season. I'm not going to look a mother in the eye and promise her son a bowl game or the NFL, because I can't promise either and she'll know I'm lying, and mothers always know. What I can promise is the stuff that's actually in my control. I'll tell her the truth about where her son fits, even when the truth is that another school is a better fit for him — and I'll mean it. I'll tell her he'll be developed on a real plan, not left to figure it out. I'll tell her that if things go sideways, for him or for me, she'll hear it from me directly and early, not from a rumor. And I'll tell her the one thing that's genuinely true about my age: I have no interest in using her son as a stepping stone, because I'm not trying to get somewhere else. This is the somewhere.
Then I'd tell her not to trust a word of it yet. Watch how we treat the players who are already here, the ones with no leverage, the walk-ons and the guys buried on the depth chart. That's the only honest preview she's going to get of how her son gets treated when he's not the recruit anymore. If we're good to them when nobody's making us be, she can believe the rest. If we're not, she should run. I'd tell her that, too.
To close — if none of this works, if it goes the way the skeptics think it will, what do you want people to be able to say about how it went?
That the players were told the truth and treated like people, and that you could tell what we were trying to do even on the days we couldn't do it. If it fails, I'd want it to fail as an honest thing that had a real idea in it, not as a stunt that fell apart. I can live with being wrong. I'd have a much harder time living with having been a gimmick.
But I don't plan on finding out. I just also don't need any of you to take my word for that. Thanks for coming, all of you. We've got a lot of quiet work to do before there's anything worth cheering, and I'd rather go do it than keep talking about it.
Mansour took a final two questions off-mic near the tunnel, then walked back into the building; the presser ran forty-one minutes, roughly triple the schedule.