Staff merged the three threads about this into one so if the replies below look like people talking past each other for the first two pages, that's why. Also, yes, the poll is gone, take it up with the mods.
I watched the introductory press conference twice. Once live while I was making dinner, once at eleven o'clock with the volume up because my wife said I was muttering. I'm going to try to write this post without doing the obvious joke, because it's post one and somebody should set a tone.
Michigan State hired a 28-year-old with one season as a high school head coach. He calls the offense and the defense. He has final say on the roster, the portal, the NIL money and the staff. The athletic department gave a person born in the late nineties the entire football operation, and the person they gave it to made his name explaining draft prospects on the internet.
I don't know what to do with that. My honest first reaction was that it's a stunt. My second reaction, watching him take questions, was that he's the most articulate person any Big Ten school has put behind a podium in five years, and I don't know if that means anything at all. Probably it doesn't. Talking is the easy part of that job.
Anyway. 14 pages of you people. Go.
They hired the guy who explains football to people who don't watch football. Correctly identified their audience, at least.
Wait. Hold on. Somebody in the other thread said he was in the marching band and I assumed that was a bit. That's real? He played trombone in the actual Spartan Marching Band?
I need everyone to understand I did not make this up. This is a documented fact about the head football coach of Michigan State University. He has a section. He had a section leader.
Let me put the two programs side by side for a second, purely as a public service.
Us: Bryce Underwood. Actual generational quarterback, in-state, everybody in the country wanted him, he's here. Them: a man who owns a trombone.
I've been a Michigan fan long enough to know that saying a sentence like that out loud is how you get punished by God. I'm saying it anyway. It felt good.
He has a section. He had a section leader.
He also played bass guitar in the basketball band, which I learned last night and have not recovered from. The head football coach of a Big Ten program was in the pep band at a Final Four. Not at the Final Four. In the pep band at the Final Four.
Every dumb thing I have ever said about that school was, it turns out, insufficiently ambitious.
The band stuff is noise. What actually happened here is an organizational decision, and it's a legible one if you've ever watched an institution run out of road.
Michigan State has cycled through the entire menu of safe hires. Established coordinator, sitting head coach with a record, the retread with the pedigree. All three failed at different speeds and for different reasons, and each failure cost them roughly the same four years. When your expected value on the safe option keeps coming back negative, variance stops being a risk and starts being the strategy. You take the guy with the widest distribution of outcomes, because the middle of the distribution is where you've been dying.
That's not an endorsement. Wide distributions include the bad tail. I'm saying the decision has an internal logic that people here are refusing to look at because the punchline is funnier.
When your expected value on the safe option keeps coming back negative, variance stops being a risk and starts being the strategy.
Eleven minutes. Eleven minutes into a thread about a rival's head coach and you've got expected value and distributions going. Does your family know you talk like this at home, or do you save it for us.
For the record — and I want the newer posters to understand the history here — this is the same guy who spent the entire 2017 offseason explaining to this board why a coordinator hire we all disliked was "a defensible allocation of institutional risk." It was not defensible. It allocated us into a ditch. He has never once acknowledged it.
Genuine question for the room and I'm not being a scold about it: are we going to do the band jokes for fourteen pages?
They're not good jokes. That's my objection. It's not that they're mean. It's that there are maybe two of them and we're going to run them into the dirt by Thursday, and then in November when the game actually gets here, the only material anybody has left is a trombone. I've seen this board make a genuinely funny four-year running gag out of a Nebraska punter. We're better than "he plays a horn."
Also, and I say this as somebody who married into a band family: those people work harder than you do. Different argument. Save it.
Noted. Reworking my material now. Give me until page four.
I'm going to be the annoying poster in this thread and I've made my peace with that.
I have watched this guy's work for about four years. Not casually. I used to put his quarterback breakdowns on while I graded papers, and at some point I stopped grading papers and started actually watching them, which is not a thing that happens to me with football content.
Here is what I want to say before this board locks in a position it can't back out of. The man is not a mascot. His evaluation stuff was better than what most people with a job in the industry produce publicly. He was early on two quarterbacks the entire draft world got wrong in opposite directions, and — this is the part that got me — when he was wrong, he'd go back and post the wrong one again with what he missed. Nobody does that. There's no upside in it. He did it because he was more interested in being right eventually than in looking right immediately.
Does any of that mean he can run a hundred-plus-man roster, manage a staff of adults who've been doing this longer than he's been alive, and survive a bad October in a league where they eat coaches like him? No. Genuinely, no. Those are unrelated skills and I'd bet against him if you made me bet.
But the thing this board is about to do — decide he's a clown and then get stuck defending that position for two years — is the exact thing we did with Cignetti, and I'd like us to skip it this time. That's my whole post. I'll take my beating.
I used to put his quarterback breakdowns on while I graded papers
Buddy. You watched a man's YouTube channel. That's the credential you brought to the thread. You watched a YouTube channel and now you're telling a room full of grown adults to withhold judgment about a high school coach running a Big Ten program.
I could go watch forty hours of somebody explaining knee surgery and I'd still not want him near my knee.
Feldspar, I actually agree with your first four paragraphs and I want you to notice that you undercut yourself in the fifth. If you'd bet against him, say that first and the rest lands. Lead with the conclusion. This is why nobody reads your effortposts.
Two guys arguing about presentation structure regarding a football team that has not played a game. This board is in midseason form.
Fine, I'll be specific instead of vague, since vague is what got me dogpiled.
Two things he's already done that a normal 28-year-old hire would not have done.
One: he benched the quarterback who steadied that offense last season in favor of a redshirt freshman, and then he went to a podium and refused to make the older kid sound like a loser. Not once. Every question was a trap and he took the version of the answer that protects the player instead of the version that justifies himself. That's not a football skill, that's a locker-room skill, and it's the one young coaches fail at first.
Two: his defensive language is nickel-first. Five defensive backs as the starting point, not the adjustment. Everybody says they want that. Very few programs actually build the two-deep for it, because it means telling a 250-pound linebacker he's a situational player, and that conversation is miserable. If he actually holds that line when it's third and short in November, that tells you something about whether the plan survives contact.
I'm not saying he wins. I'm saying watch those two things instead of the horn.
I've had the same four seats since 1978 and I want to say something that's going to be unpopular with the younger crowd.
I miss when that game meant something. I don't mean the trophy, we always keep the trophy, that's not the point. I mean the week. I mean my neighbor not talking to me on Thursday. I mean my wife's cousin from Okemos calling the house at seven in the morning to say one sentence and hang up. That happened. That was a real thing that happened in my house.
The last stretch, it's been like beating a guy at cards who fell asleep. You take the money, sure. It's not the same as playing him. I've got no interest in a rivalry where the other side has given up before the coin toss, and for about eight years now the other side has been mostly making excuses in advance.
So a lunatic hire? Good. Genuinely, good. Do something. Be alive over there.
Slightly off topic but since the East Lansing trip is on everybody's mind — wait, no, we're the road team this year, we go there in November. Never mind, that's worse.
Has anybody done the lot situation over there recently? Last time I went we ended up in a grass lot that turned into a swamp by the third quarter and I pushed a Buick for twenty minutes with a man in a Spartan poncho who was extremely nice about it. I'd like to not repeat that. Is the ramp on the south side worth it or is it a trap.
The ramp is fine, the getting out of the ramp is not fine, budget an hour of your life you don't get back.
More useful: the secondary market for that November game is going to be strange this year and I'd wait. Their people are either going to be all the way in on the new guy or completely checked out by then, and those two scenarios produce wildly different prices. If the season goes badly over there, you'll be able to walk up. If it doesn't, you'll be paying Ohio State prices to sit in a corner. I'm holding.
Carry on.
Sorry mods, genuinely last one on this — the grass lot M14 is describing got paved two seasons ago. You're fine now. Wear boots anyway.
On topic: my brother-in-law is a State season ticket holder and he has not said a single word about this hire in the group chat. Not one. Six days. He's normally the first person to type. I've never seen the man silent about anything, including a hockey game he wasn't watching. That silence is the most interesting piece of information I have about how it's landing over there.
The thing nobody in here wants to sit with, so I'll be the one to do it and everyone can tell me I'm catastrophizing.
Every athletic department in this country is currently sitting in a room asking the same question, which is roughly: what is a head coach now? The revenue rules changed, the roster is a payroll, the portal is free agency with worse paperwork, and the actual job has slid sideways into something closer to a general manager who also happens to run practice. Everybody knows this. Everybody's been saying it at conferences for three years. Nobody wants to be the first school to hire for the new job description instead of the old one, because if you're first and you're wrong, you look insane on national television.
Michigan State just went first. Not because they're brave. Because they'd already burned every safe option and had nothing left to protect. That's the part that should make you nervous. Desperation is a perfectly good delivery mechanism for a correct idea.
If that job description turns out to be right — if the thing that actually matters in 2029 is roster construction, valuation, retention, and a guy who can sell a plan to a seventeen-year-old and his mother in the same sentence — then the school that got there first by accident still got there first. And we will spend a decade explaining that it was luck. It might be. That won't make it feel better.
Desperation is a perfectly good delivery mechanism for a correct idea.
This is the best post in the thread and it's still wrong in one place. First movers in a structural shift usually get eaten. The advantage goes to the second or third org that watches the first one fail and copies the parts that worked without the parts that killed it. That's true in basically every industry that's ever reorganized itself, and I don't see why football would be the exception.
Which, if you're us, is the actual good news. Let them run the experiment. We can afford to read the results.
Reading this thread and the one thing I keep coming back to is that he's 28 and he's calling both sides of the ball. Not "has input." Calling them. Offense and defense, same headset, same Saturday.
I can't decide if that's the most arrogant thing I've ever heard or if it's the only honest version of what he's actually good at. If your whole value is that you see the game a certain way, hiring two other people to translate that for you is how it dies in the first month. So he cut out the translation. It's insane and I understand it.
Also worth saying: they put real adults around him. The coordinators over there aren't kids he met online. One of them has been a defensive coordinator in this league and is not, from everything I've read, especially thrilled about any of this. That's a healthier structure than the version everyone in this thread is imagining, where a YouTuber is alone in a building with a whiteboard.
Hang on. Kalamazoo. Two thousand posts. Suddenly extremely well briefed on Michigan State's coordinator hierarchy and the internal mood of their defensive staff.
Who are you actually. I'm not being cute, I'd like an answer. We get four of these every time something happens over there and they all show up with the same "I'm just being fair" opener and a working knowledge of their two-deep.
Who are you actually.
Fifteen years on this board and this is where we are.
Go read my post history. I complained about our own interior line for three straight autumns. I wrote nine hundred words about a punt formation in 2019 that six people read and one of them was you, because you quoted it to call me a nerd. My father-in-law went to State, which is how I know what their message boards sound like, and I promise you it does not sound like this.
The reason I know about their staff is that I read. That used to be normal here.
Every board has one guy who thinks he's counterintelligence. Ours has nine.
Slept on it and here's my sober morning version of the Underwood comparison, because last night's version was just gloating.
We have the best young quarterback in the country and a coach who has to figure out how to not waste him. They have a coach who's apparently very good at explaining quarterbacks and a redshirt freshman he picked over a guy who'd already earned it. Those are two completely different kinds of pressure, and I'd take ours every day. Ours is the pressure of having something.
But I'd stop pretending theirs is a joke, because "young coach with a real idea about quarterback development gets an unformed kid to develop" is a sentence that has ended badly for people like us before. Not often. It's happened.
You watched a man's YouTube channel. That's the credential you brought to the thread.
So I did the annoying thing last night, which was go watch four of the breakdowns Feldspar was talking about specifically so I could come back in here and dunk on him with evidence.
I can't do it. I went in hostile and I came out annoyed, which is worse.
The stuff is not hype content. There's one on protection identification where he shows the same look three times, changes one defender's alignment each time, and walks through what the quarterback is allowed to see versus what he's actually seeing. Eleven minutes. I have watched position coaches at this level be less clear than that in a coaching clinic somebody paid to attend.
Now. He also has never had to tell a 22-year-old that his mother's phone calls have to stop, or handle a staff member who wants his job, or lose four in a row in this league, and those are the things that actually remove coaches. I'm not converted. I'm just done saying he's a fraud, because he isn't, and saying it makes us look like we didn't check.
I watched the protection one. It's good. I'd like it noted that I'm saying so at seven in the morning with nobody forcing me.
It changes nothing about my position, which is that being good at explaining a thing and being good at doing the thing are separated by about forty years of other people's failures. But Feldspar wasn't lying about the work and I shouldn't have gone at him the way I did.
You kids enjoy this more than I do and I've been trying to work out why.
I think it's that you came up when we were the sure thing. Beating them is administrative for you. For me it was never administrative. There were Novembers where I sat in that stadium genuinely afraid, and afraid is the whole point, that's the product, that's what the ticket is for.
My cousin-in-law is 81 and hasn't missed one of these since Eisenhower. He called me Tuesday and he was excited. Not optimistic — he made very clear he thinks the young man is being set up to fail — but excited, because for the first time in years there's a reason to have the conversation. I'd like everybody to think about how bad it has to have gotten over there for a hire nobody understands to feel like a mercy.
Everybody in here is analyzing the hire. The hire is downstream.
That university has spent the better part of a decade demonstrating that its governance is a hazard to itself. Trustees who leak on each other, presidents who arrive and leave, an institutional reflex to handle every hard thing by handling it badly and then explaining it worse. You cannot separate the football decision from that, because the same building signs off on both.
Which is why I don't think this is about football philosophy at all. They hired a communicator. Of course they did. Their actual crisis is that nobody in that state believes anything they say anymore, and they went and got the most persuasive person they could find and pointed him at the podium. Whether he can coach is almost a secondary question for the people who signed the contract, and if that sounds cynical to you, go read six years of their news coverage and come back.
"Best post in the thread and it's still wrong" — grading other people's posts, in public, for free, for seventeen years. Somebody in Chicago is going to read your quarterly memos someday and finally understand what the rest of us have been dealing with.
You want the honest ledger? I've been in threads with this man since the second Bush administration. He has been confidently wrong about a coordinator, a bowl game, a graduate transfer, and — my personal favorite — an entire recruiting cycle he declared "structurally uncompetitive" nine months before it went fine. Every single time, the next post is a framework. Never an apology. Just a new framework.
You've been running that same list since 2019 and you've never once updated it, which is a funny thing for a man who wants an apology about accuracy.
The graduate transfer was Ferris, not Findlay, and I said he wouldn't start, and he didn't. You've been misquoting a post you could go read in ninety seconds because the wrong version is better for you. Fourteen years of this. Your wife is a lovely person and I have no idea how she does it.
Thread stays open. Behave in it.
Somebody made an account this week to go bother strangers about a football coach who has never coached a game. We're all fine. Everything is fine here.
I went in hostile and I came out annoyed, which is worse.
Thank you for actually going and looking. That's the entire thing I was asking for and I got called a fan of a rival program for asking it.
To be clear about where I actually stand, since twelve people have now decided I'm his campaign manager: I think the most likely outcome is that this doesn't work, and it doesn't work for boring reasons. Recruiting is a grind that has nothing to do with how well you see the game. Player development takes staff infrastructure he's never built. Losing does things to a young coach's decision-making that nobody predicts from the outside, and the schedule is going to test that early enough to matter.
What I'm not going to do is pretend the guy is stupid, because he isn't, and because in four years I'd like my posts to have been about football instead of about a horn.
Told you at post eight. The band material had a shelf life of about ninety minutes and the thread got better the second people stopped reaching for it.
And I'll add the part I didn't say last night, since Feldspar took the beating for it: the reason the joke bothers me isn't manners. It's that it's a way of not thinking. If you decide the interesting fact about him is the instrument, you never have to work out why a Big Ten athletic director with a job to protect handed him everything. That's the actual question and it's a much less comfortable one.
Okay, the thing that actually keeps nagging at me, and I made the trombone joke at post four so I've earned the right to say it.
Recruiting is a living room. It's a mother, a couch, a coach, and forty-five minutes. That's it. That's the whole job in the moment that decides it. And they just hired somebody whose one demonstrated elite skill is making a stranger understand a complicated thing and feel smart about it.
I don't think he out-recruits us. Not with what we have and not with who we are. But he doesn't have to. He has to take four or five kids a year in this state that we were going to get by default, and by the time we notice the pattern it's already three cycles old. That's how it happens. It never announces itself.
Nobody's going to like this and I'm posting it anyway.
We've spent fifteen years being the responsible ones. Process, culture, the right way, the adults in the room. It won us a lot and I wouldn't trade it. It also made us the program that reads about interesting things happening somewhere else.
Indiana. Say it out loud. Indiana did what they did and every athletic director in America watched it happen and understood the actual lesson, which was that the ceiling is not fixed and the people who told you it was fixed were protecting themselves. Michigan State clearly watched that too. Their version is dumber and riskier and I'd never sign off on it here.
Some small part of me is jealous anyway, and I'd appreciate it if nobody quoted that back at me in November.
Practical note since this thread has gotten very philosophical: they're off this week. Nobody plays. So all of this — every one of the 412 replies — is about a man who has not yet coached a snap of college football, and the first evidence anybody gets is Grambling State.
Which is the worst possible first data point, by the way. Win comfortably and it proves nothing. Look sloppy and the entire state loses its mind for a week. There is no version of that Saturday that tells you anything, and we're all going to watch it like it does.
Following up on the November trip because two people PM'd me and the mods can move this if they want, I'll take the infraction.
Group of six, we've done this trip four times, here's the version that works: park north, walk in, do not attempt anything clever with the neighborhoods because they've gotten serious about the permits. Eat before. Their student section will be loud early and that's genuinely fine, be a normal person about it. And whatever the mood is over there by then — and it could be anything this year, that's kind of the point of this whole thread — the one thing that never changes is that somebody's uncle is going to want to argue with you in a parking lot at eight in the morning. Let him. He's had a hard decade.
Forty pages of this by the weekend and the young man has not coached a game. My father would have found that hilarious. He'd have also read every page.
I want them good. I want them good and then I want us to beat them anyway, in a stadium where their people believed it was possible right up until it wasn't. That's the version of November I've been missing and none of you have ever had.
Page four and I've got nothing new. Barton was right, it was a two-joke bit. See everyone on page five.
Alert just came through and I need somebody to confirm I read it correctly, because I am at work and I laughed in a way that people noticed.
They named the freshman. Not "we'll let it play out," not "both guys have earned reps." Leo Hannan, redshirt freshman, QB1 for the opener. Milivojevic is the backup.
Milivojevic. The one guy on that entire roster who did his job every single week last year and never once made anybody talk about him. That is the piece they took out. Voluntarily. In August. By choice.
I have been burned by joy in this rivalry before and I am trying to be careful. I do not think I have ever watched a program find its single most stable part and remove it on purpose before the first game of a new regime.
Kept the trombone. Benched the quarterback.
Updating the side-by-side from page one since the ledger has changed.
Us: Bryce Underwood. The most wanted high school player in the country, in-state, chose us on purpose, and every week he is here the rest of the league has to build a plan around him.
Them: a redshirt freshman, picked over a functioning college quarterback, by a man whose head coaching career fits inside one high school season.
Yesterday I said that typing sentences like that is how you get punished by God. I have thought about it overnight and I would now like to formally request the punishment be scheduled at my convenience.
Everyone is going to hate this and I am going to say it anyway, which at this point is less a habit than a medical condition.
This is the first thing that man has done that actually matches what he was hired to do. Not the press conference, not the staff sheet. This.
Milivojevic is the floor. Everybody agrees on that, including the people furious about it. The floor is not what is wrong with Michigan State. They have had a floor for years and the floor is precisely where they have been living. If your position is that the stable option should start, you are arguing for another season of exactly the thing that got the last two guys fired, and you are calling it respect.
The version of this that would actually be damning is not playing the freshman in August. It is playing the freshman in August and then pulling him in week four because a radio host got loud. If he does that, everything anybody said about him being a content guy turns out to be right. Today is not that day. Today is a guy doing an unpopular thing on purpose while everybody watches, which is genuinely harder than most of you think.
Today is a guy doing an unpopular thing on purpose while everybody watches, which is genuinely harder than most of you think.
Six minutes. Six minutes after a rival benches a quarterback and you have arrived with a framework and a moral.
Newer posters, some history, because he will never volunteer it. This is the man who spent an autumn explaining to this board that a two-quarterback rotation was "a portfolio approach." I want you to sit with that phrase. Portfolio approach. That season took four years off my life and he has never once come back into a thread and said the words "I was wrong."
He is not defending Michigan State. He does not care about Michigan State. He cares about being the only person in the room who saw it early, and if it works out he will be back in November with a link to this post.
The part that gets me is that it is not even our depth chart. It is not our quarterback, it is not our program, we play them once and it is ten weeks away, and the man still showed up with a distribution curve.
Ross, genuine question and I mean it kindly: is there any football event anywhere on earth that you would simply enjoy.
Exercise for the room and I would like people to actually do it before replying.
Tomorrow morning Sherrone announces that Underwood is sitting week one and a redshirt freshman none of us have heard of is taking the first snap. The stated reason is word for word what Mansour said: ceiling over floor, long lens, the offense we want to run in two years.
This board gets to nineteen pages before dinner. There is a petition by Thursday. Somebody who works at the airport posts a tail number. Three people here who are currently laughing would be on the radio, by name, with their voices shaking.
I am not saying their decision is correct. I am saying we would not be handling it with the calm and perspective currently on display in this thread, and I think everybody knows that.
Barton is right and it is irritating.
Here is what has actually been bothering me since the alert. He did not have to do this now. Nobody was making him. He could have run an open competition through September, said the honest useless things about both guys every Tuesday, and then handed the job to the freshman in October when the year was already gone. Not one person would have written a word about it. That is the safe version and it was sitting right there.
Instead he put his name on it in August, in public, where it can be held against him for four months. That is either the most confident thing I have watched a first-year coach do or the most naive, and I have gone back and forth on it three times while typing this post.
Nobody here is going to say this so I will and then I will go back to lurking.
The kid they just benched did a thankless job at a place that was on fire, for a coaching staff that was already gone in every way that mattered, and he did it well enough that a board full of Michigan fans learned his name today for the worst possible reason.
I hope he ends up playing against us in November and I hope it goes badly for us, purely so this thread ages like milk.
Practical note again since I am apparently the guy who does those now.
We play them week ten. Ten weeks from now. There is a real chance the quarterback they named this morning is not the quarterback who takes a snap against us, and an equally real chance that he is and that he is an entirely different player by then, because that is what happens to nineteen-year-olds between August and November.
Every single thing typed in this thread today has a shelf life of about six Saturdays. Including this.
Page five and I have material again. I would like to thank Michigan State University, sincerely, from the bottom of a bit that was dying on the table.