The first thing my roommate said when the hire went official was not a football opinion. It was: "He played WHAT."
Trombone. Nick Mansour, our new head football coach, marched trombone in the Spartan Marching Band from 2016 to 2019, then apparently switched to bass guitar for the basketball band during a Final Four run. He is 28 years old. He graduated from here. Six years ago he was, in theory, standing in the same tunnel under Spartan Stadium that the actual team runs out of, except he was holding a brass instrument and probably freezing.
I have spent the last four days trying to figure out whether this is embarrassing, funny, cool, or somehow all three at once, and I regret to report the answer is genuinely all three.
Let me start with the band kids, because the band kids are going through it.
The band is defensive and mortified at the same time
You would think the Spartan Marching Band would be doing a full end-zone celebration right now. One of theirs made it. All the way to the top. Instead the group chats I got shown are a beautiful mess of pride and pure horror.
"Okay so on one hand, yes, band supremacy, we run this school now," said Priya, a junior in music education who plays mellophone. "On the other hand every single person I have ever met has texted me the trombone thing like I personally am responsible for it. I did not hire him. I was eleven when he was in the band."
There is a specific pain to being a band kid this week, which is that everyone assumes you have inside information. You do not. You marched a Michigan game and a homecoming and now a stranger from your arts-adjacent friend group is asking if the coach "can even read a defense or just a drum cadence." (He can read a defense, allegedly. That's the whole pitch.)
Marcus, a sophomore trombone, put it more bluntly: "If we go 2-10 they're going to make it about the band. I already know. It's going to be 'what did you expect, they hired a section leader.' And I'll have to just sit there. In my uniform. At the game. Playing the fight song for the team he's losing with."
And yet — you cannot fully kill the pride. Every band kid I talked to eventually, quietly, admitted the same thing: if this works, if any part of this works, it belongs to them forever. The section will never let it go. There is already talk of a trombone appreciation sign for the student section. There is talk of learning his old cadence. It's unhinged and I support it.
The generational cold war in the group chats
Here is the split I did not expect. It is not Michigan fans versus MSU fans. It is students versus everyone's parents.
Basically everyone under 22 I talked to landed somewhere between "sure, why not" and "this is the most interesting thing our athletic department has done in my entire lifetime." Meanwhile the parents and the older alumni are, to use a technical term, losing it.
"My dad called me to yell about it and I wasn't even the one who hired him," said Dev, a senior studying supply chain. "He kept saying 'a nonprofit guy, from the internet' like that was the worst sentence he could construct. And I'm like, dad, everyone I know found their entire career from the internet. That's just where jobs are now."
That came up over and over. The hole in the résumé that terrifies a 55-year-old barely registers with anybody in my hall. Nobody I talked to thinks it's weird that a guy built a reputation making football content and evaluating draft prospects online and then got hired to do football, because that's just how everyone here assumes jobs happen now. If anything the students think doing the work before somebody gives you the title is the more legitimate version of it, which I'm sure is very comforting to the donors.
"I'm not saying it'll work," Dev added, which is the other real theme. Nobody's promising anything. It's more like — the students are willing to be entertained, and the parents are not.
"Are we actually going to care this year?"
I have to be honest about the student section, because I've stood in it, and the last couple years it has emptied out by the third quarter like someone pulled a fire alarm. There is a whole cohort of students here who have functionally never seen this team be good. We show up for the tailgate. We are, let's say, flexible about the actual game.
So the question going around isn't "will we win." It's a smaller question and a way more embarrassing one to say out loud: are we actually going to care this year?
The consensus, weirdly, is maybe yes — but for the wrong reasons, which around here is the right reason. "I'm going to every home game this season not because I think we're good," said Hana, a first-year in journalism, "but because I need to see what happens. Like it's a show. It's a reality show and I have a season pass and I live here."
A 28-year-old coach calling both offense AND defense himself — which, I looked it up, is not a thing people normally do — is exactly the kind of storyline that gets a checked-out student section to come back just to watch the wheels either turn or come off. That's rubbernecking, not loyalty, and nobody I talked to is pretending otherwise. It still fills seats, and Spartan Stadium has badly needed something to fill seats.
This is SO Michigan State and everybody knows it
There's a phrase that came up in almost every conversation, unprompted, usually with a sigh attached to it: "this is SO Michigan State."
People said it as an insult and a compliment in the same breath. We are the school that finds the strangest possible door and walks through it. We step on our own feet constantly and then somehow occasionally faceplant into something great. Draymond. The 2015 Cotton Bowl run out of nowhere. Getting to a Final Four as an 11-seed. So of course the band trombone player is the football czar now. This school has never gotten anywhere by the normal route and I genuinely don't know why we'd start.
"Ohio State would never," said Emmanuel, a junior in mechanical engineering, and he did not mean it as self-deprecation. "Michigan's over there bragging they have a five-star quarterback. Cool. We have a guy who used to play in the pep band. One of those is a story and one of those is a depth chart."
I don't know if it's going to work. Genuinely, nobody I talked to knows, and the ones who claimed to know were lying. What I can tell you is that for the first time in a while, people in my building are talking about Spartan football in the dining hall, in the elevator, in the group chat, at 1 a.m. for no reason. Half of them are excited, half are horrified, and a decent number switch sides depending on who they're talking to.
And somewhere on this campus is a guy in a music theory class who swears he had a section with somebody who marched with Mansour, and he has become the most important person in his friend group. He knows nothing. He has told the story forty times. We are all going to be fine.
Go find your trombone.