one season. of high school. head coaching.

I need everybody to sit with that sentence for a full minute before we start doing the "well ACTUALLY the sport is changing" thing.

Rule 1 applies to coaching hires, including hires you find funny. We have removed about 200 comments in here already and issued 14 bans. Nothing about the coach's family. Nothing about the previous administration's legal matters. Do not go into r/MSUSpartans to celebrate — we can see you do it and you will get banned here for it.

Yes, we know how the flairs look. Behave anyway.

Genuinely not a shot: how does a coaching search physically arrive here? There are steps. You hire a firm, the firm gives you a list, the list has names, the names have jobs. Somewhere in that process a human being had to say "what about the draft guy" out loud, in a room, to other adults, and not get laughed out of the building.

That's the reporting I want. Not the guy. The room.

Everyone's stuck on the age. The line that actually stopped me: he is calling offense AND defense. In the Big Ten. Year one. Having never coached a college snap.

I can't think of a single Power Four head coach doing both right now.

Name ONE successful college head coach who never played college football. I'll wait.

We have a five star quarterback. You have a trombone player.

Grambling fan checking in. We open at their place Week 1.

Y'all are going to spend two weeks calling us a scrimmage and then you're going to watch our band at halftime and quietly reconsider some things about your life. That's all I want out of this. We'll take the check and the moment.

Good luck to the young man. Hard first job, and East Lansing is not a soft place to have one.

see you week 3

Small thing in the release that will matter more than the age: the personnel department is being built under Marcus Whitman, who came out of the same public scouting world Mansour did. Board-driven, role-first evaluation, all of that vocabulary.

You can think the head coach is unqualified and still notice that's a real structural decision. Other schools are watching that piece, not the trombone.

wait til you all find out what MSU's buyout situation looked like going into this search. they were not shopping in the same store as the rest of you

the only thing that decides this is whether 22 year olds still respect him in week 6 when they're 2-4. that's the entire evaluation. everything else is content.

everybody's making Grambling jokes and forgetting we're week 2 and we have had that date circled since it was released

3,000 comments and nobody has mentioned that they return a legitimately good running back. Cam Edwards is real. You'd think one person would care.

Making this the megathread. All hire reaction posts get merged in here for the next 48 hours. Twelve other posts have already been removed and pointed at this one.

We have also turned on flair-only mode. r/CFB is sending traffic and about 40% of it is not here in good faith.

The thing I keep coming back to isn't the age. It's that they gave him everything. Roster, NIL, personnel, staff, both coordinators' jobs.

If you're going to make a wild hire, wild hires normally come with guardrails. A veteran GM over him. A strong AD saying no sometimes. This one came with a title that reads like "do whatever you want."

Either they believe in him completely or nobody left in that building wanted to be responsible for anything.

my dad called me. my DAD called me. he does not call me. he called me to say "who is this person" and then hung up before I could answer

Unpopular here but I've been done being embarrassed for a while. We've had "credible" hires. We hired the guy everyone said was the safe answer and it was a disaster in a different font. We hired the exciting rising star and that ended in a way I don't want to type out.

Nothing about being sensible has protected us from anything. So I don't know. Do the weird thing. I've already paid for the tickets.

bro

Look at the schedule before you decide how you feel. Grambling, Eastern Michigan, then AT Notre Dame in week 3. We're going to be 2-0 and everybody will have talked themselves into something, and then South Bend is going to happen on national television.

Save some of the emotion. You're going to need it in September.

Can we talk about the fact that Rossi took this job? That's the part that keeps me from full doom. Joe Rossi did not need this. He had options. He looked at a 28 year old with a high school résumé and said yes anyway.

Either he saw something in that interview or somebody paid him a genuinely stupid amount of money. Both are informative.

somebody in my section already made a shirt. it's been NINE HOURS. it says CZAR SZN and I hate that I'm considering it

My grandfather graduated in 1961 and he's the only person I've talked to today who wasn't upset. He said "well, I've seen them hire smart old men and lose, might as well watch them lose a new way." Then he asked if the band was still good.

I told him the band is still good.

if he loses to Grambling he should be fired that night. I'm serious. Don't let it fester. Eat the buyout and start over in November.

this is bleak

genuine question does anybody know if the tailgate lots policy changed. I keep seeing something about lot passes and I can't tell if it's related to the hire or if it's just August

You know what actually knocked the wind out of me? Not the age. Not the résumé. It was finding out he'd already made the call at quarterback and I hadn't even processed that we were having a quarterback conversation.

Alessio dragged that offense through last November. I watched him do it. And the new guy has been here five minutes and the kid is on the bench.

genuinely can we have one thread that isn't about the quarterbacks. one. this is the meltdown thread, I came here to melt down about the general situation and it's turned into QB radio

Okay. I'll do it, because I've been building this post in my head all day and I'm not going to sleep anyway.

Start with what actually broke here. It wasn't that we hired bad men. We hired people with normal résumés who were behind on how the sport now works, and then we asked them to fix a roster problem with recruiting tools from 2015. Tucker's fall was its own catastrophe. The Smith stretch was slower and quieter and honestly more depressing, because there was nothing scandalous to point at. We just weren't good and there was no visible mechanism for becoming good. The portal moves didn't hit. Development didn't happen. Guys we signed at three stars stayed three star players for four years.

That's the failure. Not vibes. Acquisition and development. Two things.

Now look at what this hire is actually betting, because it isn't "young guy = energy":

1. The evaluator part is real. Whatever you think of draft content as a job, he did the work publicly for years and it's on record. You can go check the hit rate. That's more transparency than we've ever had on a coordinator hire. And the personnel guy, Whitman, comes from that same world — the whole department is being built around a board instead of around whoever's phone rings.
2. The roster problem is a matching problem. We don't lose because our guys are worse athletes than Illinois'. We lose because our guys are asked to do things they're not built for. Tre Bell has been a mediocre boundary corner for two years. Put him at nickel where he can cover, blitz, and hit the run fits and he's a completely different evaluation. Same player. Different job. If you can do that four or five times across a roster you've found a whole recruiting class for free.
3. "Complex for opponents, simple for us." That's the actual stated identity and it's not a slogan, it's a design constraint. Formation, motion, personnel, spacing, sequencing — you make the picture hard on the other side and easy on your own quarterback. That is the single best thing you can do for a young QB, and we happen to have a young QB whose ceiling is the whole season.
4. The defense is a 4-2-5 with simulated pressure and DB versatility. Meaning: you don't need four future pros on the D-line to be functional, which is good, because we don't have them. You need speed, tackling, and gap discipline. Our linebacker room — Hall, Crawford, White, Pretzlaff, Stodghill — is the deepest, most athletic group on the team by a wide margin. That's the one place the roster and the scheme already agree.

Here's what I'm NOT saying. I'm not saying he's a genius. I'm not saying the interior offensive line is fixable this year, because I don't think it is, and it may end up deciding what the offense is even allowed to be. I'm not saying a 28 year old can run a Tuesday, discipline a senior, hold a locker room in November, work a living room in Detroit, and call two play sheets. That's five jobs and nobody knows if he can do any of them, including him. He basically said so.

What I'm saying is the plan is coherent. It's the first coherent plan I've heard articulated by this program in a decade. It might be a coherent plan executed by somebody incapable of executing it — that's a real outcome and probably the most likely one.

But you asked for the case, and the case is: for the first time since I was in school, I can describe what we're trying to do in one paragraph without lying.

Smaller case than the big post above but here's mine: he can talk. That sounds shallow and it isn't.

The last two guys could not explain this program to a booster, a recruit's mother, a student, or a camera. Every message we got for four years came out sounding like a legal statement. This school has a trust problem that has nothing to do with football, and the job requires somebody who can stand in front of angry people and not make it worse.

Communication is not the whole job. But it's the part of the job we have failed at most publicly, for the longest time, and it's the part we now definitely have.

Nobody's mentioned Savoury. Redshirt freshman tight end starting week 1. If you want a single early read on whether the offensive ideas are real, watch how they use him in the first two games. If he's a mismatch piece who moves around, they mean it. If he's blocking on 80% of snaps, we're running the same offense with a new voice.

the case for me is very stupid and very short: Cam Edwards is a legitimately good running back and I am going to enjoy watching him regardless of who is holding the headset. that's it. that's all I've got and it's carrying me into September

my roommate is in the band and says everyone over there is losing their minds in a good way, for whatever that's worth, which is nothing, which is why I'm posting it at 2am

Here's the actual talk-you-into-it, and it isn't about him, it's about the quarterback call.

Every coach we've had in fifteen years would have started Alessio. Not because they studied it. Because starting the older guy is what you do when your real priority is not being blamed. This is the first decision I've seen out of that building in a long time where somebody accepted the blame in advance.

Might be wrong! Probably feels awful in October! But it's a different kind of wrong than the wrong we've been doing.

This is the QB thread. We are merging the other six into it, including yours, yes, the one you're about to message us about.

Two things. Neither of these kids is a public figure who signed up for message board discourse, so keep it on the football. And if you post the phrase "he should transfer" you are going to find out how we feel about that phrase.

Alessio held that thing together when it had absolutely no business being held together. Bad line, no run game, nobody open, and the guy kept getting them to the next play. Every week. He was the reason a couple of those games stayed watchable into the fourth quarter.

You don't take the job from that guy in August because somebody's arm looks better in a t-shirt. That's not player development, that's shopping.

And I'll say the quiet part: this is a guy who spent five years making content about which quarterback looks coolest picking the one who looks coolest. I would love to be wrong. I have been wrong before. I don't think I'm wrong here.

I like the decision. I hate how sure everybody in here is about it, on both sides.

Nobody posting today knows how either of them handles third and eight at Notre Dame with a crowd on top of them, because neither of them has done it. That's the whole thing. That's the actual content of the disagreement. We are all arguing about a fact that doesn't exist yet.

Half of you have decided the freshman is a franchise guy off clips. The other half have decided the older kid is a leader of men off vibes and one decent stretch. You're all doing the same thing with different favorites.

Long one, sorry. I've been chewing on this since Tuesday and I want to put the actual logic on the table instead of everybody yelling "ceiling" and "earned it" at each other.

When you take over a program in this condition you are not choosing between winning and losing this year. You're choosing what you own in eighteen months. Every rep you spend is either buying information or buying comfort.

Playing the older guy buys comfort. You know roughly what the offense looks like, you know the huddle is calm, you probably keep a couple of games from getting embarrassing, and the fanbase doesn't riot in September. All real. All worth something. The problem is that at the end of it you know exactly as much as you know today, and the thing you know is not good enough to win the division in any year.

Playing the freshman buys information, and information in a rebuild is the only asset that appreciates. Either the answer is on the roster, in which case you found it a year early and you build the next two recruiting classes around a known quantity, or the answer isn't on the roster, in which case you know that in October and you go get one instead of discovering it in 2028.

The other thing nobody's saying: the cost of being wrong is asymmetric here. If the freshman isn't ready, the downside is a season that was already going to be hard being slightly harder, plus a young player having a rough public autumn, which is bad but survivable. If you sit him and he was the guy, you burned a year of the only genuinely scarce thing this program has.

Coaches who inherit wreckage and play for floor almost always get fired by the guy who eventually plays for ceiling. That pattern is old and it is boring and it is still true.

I'm not telling you it works. I'm telling you it's a real framework and not a content creator picking a toy.

I was at the spring game. Sat low, behind the bench side, mostly because my nephew wanted to see the tunnel. So this is not film study, it's just what I saw with my eyes for three hours.

Alessio talks the entire time. To everybody. Between reps he's got a receiver by the shoulder pad walking him through something, he's in the ear of the young linemen, he claps for the defense when the defense does something good, which is a weird thing to notice but I noticed it. Guys look at him when he talks. That's not a nothing quality.

Hannan barely says anything. He stands slightly apart, does this thing where he rolls the ball around in his right hand while he's waiting. When he got something wrong he didn't do the head-down thing, he went and stood by the coach and asked. Twice I saw him ask before anyone came to him.

The other thing, and I don't know what it means: he threw one to the far sideline in the second half and the sound the crowd made was not a normal spring game sound. It was like eight thousand people going "oh" at the same time and then kind of laughing at themselves for it. I've been going to these since I was a kid. I've heard that noise maybe three times.

Neither of those is an argument. That's just the two guys as I saw them.

Something I haven't seen anybody give him credit for in four days of this: he has not let anybody turn Alessio into a loser. Not once.

Every reporter in that room tried to get him to say the kid was a placeholder. That's the easy sound bite, it writes itself, and coaches take it every single time because it makes the new guy sound like a savior. He wouldn't do it. He said neither of them has to lose for the other one to play and then he named something the older kid actually does well, on camera, in front of everybody.

My son played high school ball for a man who would have thrown him under a bus for a laugh from a local radio guy. So maybe I'm soft on this. It registered with me.

half the ceiling guys in here have never watched a football game where the quarterback wasn't in a highlight package

My wife's been cutting hair for the same two guys on the support side of that building for nine years. Not coaches. Take it for exactly what it's worth, which might be nothing.

What she came home with in June: it was not close, it hasn't been close since about the second week of spring, and the older kid was told before anybody outside the room had any idea. Told first, face to face, not last. Apparently that mattered to some people in there.

Genuine question, not trying to start anything. What's the plan if Alessio decides at some point that he'd rather go be a starter somewhere

hot take but the whole thing is bc he wants a highlight for the youtube channel. he built a brand on qb evaluation and now he needs the qb he picked to hit or the brand dies. thats not coaching thats a busines decsion

EMU here, we're on your schedule in week 2. Please argue about this for the entire month and post nothing about your interior line. Thanks.

Thing nobody in 2,000 comments has said: both of these guys are going to play this year. That's just how seasons go. The argument is about who takes the first snap in a game we should win, and we have burned four days of our lives on it.

Edit since this got away from me. Two things after reading all of it.

One, I still think Alessio got treated better by the coach than he's getting treated by us, which is embarrassing for us.

Two, I've moved about ten percent. Not on the decision. On how sure I am that it's wrong. Ten percent in one day is a lot for a man my age.

Category error, and here's the specific reason: NFL GMs don't coach because the two jobs have opposite time horizons. A GM's job is patient and the payoff is in two years. A head coach's job is Saturday. When those collide inside one skull, Saturday wins every single time, because Saturday is the thing that gets you fired.

You can't be the guy who says "we're developing this freshman" and also the guy who has to beat Nebraska in October to keep your building calm.

The honest answer is that the Big Ten is now 18 teams across four time zones, every roster is rebuilt annually, half the league has a coach in year one or two, and nobody knows what the job is anymore. In that environment "insane" and "ahead of the curve" are the same sentence with different lighting.

As someone whose program just blew up its entire identity: the "ahead of the curve" framing only works if the institution behind it is stable. Ideas need a building that will still be standing in year three.

MSU has had how many ADs and presidents in the last decade? That's the actual risk. Not his age. The people above him.

this is what happens when analytics people take over a sport. they did it to baseball and now they're doing it to football. in five years every coach will be a 27 year old with a laptop and nobody will know how to teach a kid to tackle

Nobody in this thread is going to like this, but the reason this is interesting to people inside the sport isn't the model. It's the salary structure.

He costs a fraction of a normal P4 head coach. That money didn't evaporate — it goes to staff and roster. If MSU is paying a mid-tier head coach's salary and spending the difference on personnel and player retention, that's the actual experiment, and it has nothing to do with whether he's a genius.

ahead of the curve is when you win. behind the curve is when you lose. everyone in this thread is writing a book report about a team that has played zero football games

y'all have been arguing about org charts for 1,900 comments and we're the ones who actually have to play them in twelve days

Grambling isn't good.

We are not going to beat you. I want to be a good neighbor and say that plainly.

What we are going to do is play hard for a half, hit your running back in a way he hasn't been hit since November, and then get worn down in the third quarter because you have 40 more scholarship players than we do. If your new guy is disorganized you might be tied at the break and 60,000 people will lose their minds. That's the whole scenario and it happens to somebody every single Week 1.

The bye first is actually useful for a staff that has never worked a game week together. They get a full dress rehearsal with no scoreboard. Every new staff botches something operational in game one — headsets, substitutions, the sideline getting a call in on time. This one gets a practice run at it.

Doesn't help my blood pressure but it's a real thing.

reminder to everyone that this is a real football program with real players who deserve to be treated like opponents and not like a punchline. we booked them. they didn't ask us for anything.

halftime is going to be the best part of the day and it's going to be by a mile and I've made my peace with it

does anyone actually know what time kickoff is. I've seen noon and I've seen 3:30 and the ticket app says TBD which cannot still be true

the part of the bye that's actually going to kill me is that we now get fourteen more days of arguing about who takes the first snap before anybody can be proven right. two weeks. of this. in a subreddit.

the thing I'm scared of isn't Grambling, it's a redshirt freshman's first ever start being the game everybody has decided is the referendum on the entire hire. that's a lot to hand a kid in week one for no reason

If we win in South Bend on Sunday night the entire national conversation for two weeks belongs to us and I am not emotionally prepared for what that does to this fanbase

Underwood year two. That's it. That's the post. Everything about our season lives or dies on how much he grew and I've been unbearable about it since January and I'm not stopping now.

The strangest part of being an Indiana fan now is that nobody puts us in the "can they do it again" bucket. They put us in the "who beats them" bucket. I have no idea how to hold that. My whole life this program was a punchline and now people scout us.

First season in twelve years where I genuinely don't know what our team is. Not "cautiously optimistic" don't know. Actually don't know. Could be 10-2, could be 6-6, and the strangest part is I don't have a feeling about which.

Nobody wants to hear it in August but the travel is going to decide at least three games in this league and everybody's going to call it "coaching" when it happens.

We play at Michigan State in November. Nine time zones of accumulated body clock damage by then. There's a reason West Coast teams in this conference lose weird games in the second half of the year and it isn't scheme.

Media poll has us and Ohio State 1-2 which means the actual season is just us and them circling each other until whenever we play and everything else is content. Every year. I'm tired.

am I insane or is half of Week 0 discourse this year just about coaches nobody has seen coach yet. Michigan State, Penn State, three others. we're watching org charts instead of football

He is a communications professional. Communicating well is his literal profession. Everyone in this thread is watching a PR guy do PR and calling it authenticity.

Show me him at 3-5 explaining why the offense can't run the ball. That press conference is the one that tells you anything.

I have spent 24 hours making fun of this hire and I'm going to be honest with you people: the 4:35 answer was good. He didn't get defensive, he didn't do the fake humble thing, and he didn't pretend the question was unfair. He said "yeah, that's a reasonable thing to be skeptical about, here's what I actually do all day."

I still think it's a disaster. But that was a grown man answering a hard question, which is more than I can say for the last four coaches my school hired.

Saban couldn't string a sentence together at a podium and won 6 nattys. press conference ability is the single most useless coaching trait there is

The 6:02 answer is the one that got me and nobody's talking about it. Reporter absolutely teed him up to make the older quarterback sound like a placeholder — easy sound bite, everybody does it — and he refused. Twice. Then he named something specific the guy does well.

That's a small thing that a 28 year old with no experience had zero reason to get right, and he got it right in real time under lights.

every hire in America gives a great intro presser. every single one. we have all been here for this exact movie a hundred times and we all know how the second act goes

the thing that struck me is he never once said the word "culture." not one time in 7 minutes. I didn't know that was still legal

Brave is what we call it when a program with nothing to lose does something. If Ohio State did this you'd call it a red flag by Tuesday.

Every fanbase on this subreddit has a backup quarterback they are personally convinced is a franchise guy being held down by a coward. It is the single most universal delusion in the sport.

The difference at Michigan State is the head coach agrees with the message board. Which is either the funniest thing I've ever heard or a five alarm fire, and honestly it might be both.

We have started the older steadier guy roughly nine years running. Ask me how the ceiling's been.

Everybody wants the lesson from our run to be "be bold," and that's the wrong lesson. Cignetti was right about a lot of small things in a row, and being right looks like boldness to everybody who wasn't in the room for it.

Nobody calls a decision brave until they know how it turned out. If the freshman plays well this is conviction. If he doesn't it's a 28 year old who fell for an arm. Nothing about the decision itself changes in between.

The timing is the defensible part and nobody's mentioned it. Their September is Grambling, Eastern Michigan, then Notre Dame on the road. You start the freshman now, he gets two games to be a college quarterback before anything real happens to him. Wait until October and his first live snaps come in a stadium that wants him dead.

If you've decided the kid is your future, the calendar is telling you to do it in week one. That's a coaching reason, not a content reason.

This is textbook first-time head coach. Not because he's stupid — because he doesn't have a year three yet. A guy on his third job protects the floor because he's been fired before and knows what November feels like when the building stops believing you. A guy who's never been fired has no idea what he's protecting himself from.

Sometimes that's exactly why the new guy sees something the old guys wouldn't touch. Usually it's why he's the new guy again in 30 months.

Illinois fan. This sub has produced more content about a 28 year old and his backup quarterback in five days than it produced about our entire last season. I'm not even mad, I'm taking notes.

stupid. you kill the locker room doing this. the older guy took every hit for that offense last year and the message you just sent every senior in that building is that none of it counted. they'll lose the room by October and then everybody will act shocked

whichever one of them takes that first snap, it's happening against us, and we are not going to be polite about it. y'all keep arguing though, it's great content

Reminder that both players in this thread are 19 and 21 years old. Discuss the decision all you want. The next person who posts a nickname for either of them catches a permanent one.

we have a top five team playing Notre Dame on Sunday night and I've spent two hours reading about Michigan State's quarterback room. this website is broken and so am I

Same lot change here. Twenty-two years in the same row. My theory is they resequenced the whole donor tier map this summer and just didn't tell anybody because nobody wanted to send that email in the same week as everything else.

Confirming on the poster, picked one up yesterday. It's genuinely nice. Matte, thick stock, the road games are in a lighter green so you can read the home slate at a glance. Someone in that design office is having a good year.

has anybody heard anything about the uniforms. normally we'd have gotten a teaser by now and it's been silent, which either means nothing is changing or something is changing a lot

Tailgate question since we're doing housekeeping: is the Munn side lot still doing the 8am open or did they push it back to 9? Half my group is planning around one answer and half around the other and it's going to end a friendship.

My daughter is a sophomore and she says the student section allotment went up this year. Apparently the demand data from last season was bad enough that they released more student seats.

Which is either sad or good depending on how you hold it.

this is the only thread on this sub in three days where nobody is yelling and I'd like to thank everyone involved

"so you don't have to" is doing a lot of work here considering you linked it, timestamped it, and made me want to watch it. this is an ad. you're an ad now.

Everything in this post is true and none of it is the job.

Evaluating other people's finished players is a completely separate skill from making your own players finished. Scouting is a verdict. Coaching is a process. He has spent his entire adult life on the verdict side of that line and he has never once had to stand in front of a 19 year old on a Wednesday and fix something by Saturday.

That's not a shot at his tape work. His tape work is fine. It's just answering a question nobody at Michigan State needs answered.

timestamps for the people who want the good parts without the parasocial guilt

6:40 — the motion/safety section OP is talking about
19:05 — he gets visibly annoyed at the phrase "he just needs to be more consistent"
28:30 — the five minutes where he argues himself out of his own ranking
36:15 — one (1) joke, it isn't good

went and found the 2022 version of this same video out of pure spite. he has a whole segment on a quarterback who is currently selling insurance. he was extremely confident. he was extremely wrong.

everybody posting these clips like they're a résumé should watch that one too

Watching YouTube videos is not "doing your homework." You watched a man edit himself. Of course he looks smart, he had eleven takes and a delete key. Nobody gets to edit a Tuesday practice.

The detail that actually moved me a little: he never says the player's ceiling. He says what the player would need around him. That's a role-design brain, not a highlight brain. It's also, notably, how you build a roster when you cannot outrecruit anybody.

Whether he can do that with 105 humans and a compliance office instead of a laptop is the entire question and I don't know the answer.

y'all watched 41 minutes of a man talking about someone else's quarterbacks and wrote 1,100 comments about it. we open at their place in two weeks. anyway.

Your Northwestern number is insane. 57% for a team that has no idea who its quarterback is playing a team that always knows exactly what it is. That game is a coin flip at best and probably worse.

Everything else is defensible. The Rutgers road game at 44 is the one that'll actually decide whether this season feels survivable, and nobody in this thread is going to talk about it because it's Rutgers.

6% at Notre Dame feels generous and I say that as someone who will be watching every second of it

Your model has no variable for the thing that actually decides first-year programs, which is how many games get away in the fourth quarter.

Bad teams with good rosters lose four games by a possession. Bad teams with bad culture lose those same four by three scores because the game breaks in the third quarter and nobody stops it. Every number you wrote is downstream of whether a 28 year old can hold a locker room at 2-4.

You can't put that in a spreadsheet, which is exactly why the spreadsheet isn't going to be right this year.

33% for us at home is disrespectful and I'd like it lowered

Effortpost incoming, sorry.

The reason I think the floor is lower than 2-10 and the ceiling is higher than 7-5 — meaning the variance is enormous, not that the projection is wrong — is the interior offensive line. It is the single least-solved thing on this roster and it touches every other number in that table.

If the interior holds up, you can run Cam Edwards 22 times, you can play-action a redshirt freshman into comfortable throws, you can shorten games and hide a defense that's replacing pieces. That's the 7-5 world and honestly a 8-4 world if two coin flips land.

If it doesn't hold up, you cannot run, so you cannot play-action, so the freshman is throwing on third-and-8 in Madison in October with the crowd doing that thing they do. And then you're not 2-10, you're 1-11 and the fourth quarters are ugly enough that everybody starts writing columns about the experiment failing before Halloween.

Five interior linemen. That's the season. Everybody's arguing about a 28 year old and the answer is going to come from three guys nobody outside East Lansing can name.

41 for us in week 4 is too low. we have been many bad things in this decade but we have not been 41% bad in East Lansing. it's not a fortress, it's a stadium where it rains.

4.83 wins. so 4-8. congratulations on inventing a very long way to say 4-8

nobody has said Cam Edwards' name in 900 comments except OP and one guy. he's the best player in this whole conversation. he'll go for 180 week 2 and you'll all pretend you knew

Every projection in this thread is really a projection of one thing: whether a redshirt freshman quarterback is closer to ready or closer to hopeless. The floor and the ceiling are the same guy. That's why the range on this team is enormous and everybody's number is basically a mood.

The second quote is the entire article and everybody's going to skip past it to dunk on the first one.

They're not afraid he's bad. They're afraid he's fine. A guy who's fine at 28 with no résumé is an existential problem for every 44 year old assistant who's been told to wait his turn since 2009.

Adding one I couldn't fit in the post because of the character limit:

"Ask me again in November. If they're 2-7 nobody will remember I said anything. If they're 6-3 I'll say I always liked the aggressiveness."

At least that one's honest.

I've been around him a little. Combine week stuff, some scouting-adjacent events, mutual people. Not a friend, but I've been in rooms.

Two things are true. He is genuinely, unusually good at getting grown men to argue with him and then change their minds without anybody losing face. I have watched him do it to people twenty years older. It's not charm exactly, it's that he asks the second question instead of the first one.

The other thing is he has never been yelled at by a booster. Nothing in his life has prepared him for what an angry 63 year old with a nine-figure net worth sounds like on a Sunday morning after a home loss. That is a real job requirement and no amount of being smart in a room fixes it.