Zero snaps played. Everything below is a temperature read and nothing more than that.
Nobody has kicked a ball off yet, and that is the honest disclaimer for all of it. Nothing here is a depth chart. It's where six weeks of camp access and a whole lot of staff language leave a program that hasn't been tested by anybody except itself. Treat the arrows as leanings, not facts. Grambling fixes some of this in eleven days.
Edwards didn't come to East Lansing to be a complementary piece, and nothing in camp has suggested the staff sees him that way either. He is the most talented player Michigan State has, portal pedigree included, and whatever this offense becomes in Year 1 is probably going to run downhill through him first and figure the rest out later. The passing game will get its turn. The easiest yards on this roster are currently behind Edwards.
Separate this from whether he's ready, because that's a different conversation. Mansour picked Hannan over a quarterback who stabilized the offense a year ago, and he did it for one reason: arm talent and developmental range that Milivojevic doesn't offer. Nobody in that building has argued Hannan is the better August quarterback. They've argued he's the better November one.
A redshirt freshman starting at tight end because the staff thinks his combination of size and movement breaks how linebackers and safeties are taught to defend that spot. Nobody in the building is calling him a finished product — he isn't — but the traits are the kind Mansour's personnel staff was built to identify. Watch how fast a redshirt freshman's skill set translates against actual college speed.
Bell came in as an outside corner prospect on paper. The staff looked at his fluidity and physicality and decided his best football is inside — a nickel who can cover a slot receiver, blitz off the edge, and still show up in the run fit. It's the clearest proof-of-concept for what this defense wants from its defensive backs, and it only works if Bell is actually as versatile as the staff believes.
Jordan Hall, Dion Crawford, Dejae White, Brady Pretzlaff, Cam Stodghill — this is the position group Mansour trusts most, and it isn't close. Athletic, deep enough that one injury doesn't wreck the plan, and the only room on this roster where a bad Saturday would read as an outlier rather than the pattern. Coverage reps in space are still the thing to watch.
Whatever you think about the résumé, the way he handles a room — press conference, team meeting, a reporter's follow-up — has not looked like a 28-year-old figuring it out in real time. That skill was the actual argument for the hire, separate from scheme or roster building, and six weeks in, it's the part that hasn't needed a disclaimer yet.
This is the least-trusted unit in the building, and it's not particularly close either — just in the other direction from linebacker. If the interior can't hold up in protection or move people at the point of attack, everything downstream gets harder: Edwards has to create more than he should, tight ends and backs get pulled into pass pro instead of running routes, and Hannan or Milivojevic loses the clean pocket both of them need early.
Upside and readiness are not the same question, and the second one hasn't been answered by anybody outside the building. A redshirt freshman with a big arm and a live decision-making process is exactly the profile that can look brilliant on Tuesday and lost on Saturday. Grambling is a soft landing. Eastern Michigan follows, and then it's South Bend.
He stabilized a broken offense last season and lost the job anyway, and to the staff's credit, nobody in the building has treated that like a demotion he needs to be grateful for. He's QB2 by convention as much as competition, and Mansour has been careful — publicly and, from what's filtered out, privately too — not to make him sound like a caretaker. What happens if Hannan struggles is the next question, not this one.
Given where the interior line sits, the passing game's structure — protection calls, sight adjustments, how much help stays in versus releases — may end up mattering as much as any individual matchup. This is where "complex for opponents, simple for us" gets its first real stress test, because a rattled protection plan makes everything else on the call sheet harder to trust.
Sheridan and Rossi didn't sign up to be yes-men, and nothing about the collaborative, self-scouting culture Mansour has built suggests he wants them to be. That's mostly a strength. It also means a building full of people with their own credibility and their own read on the program, and rooms like that don't stay frictionless once the record has actual games in it.
Forget style points. The lowest bar available, and the most revealing one: can this team take the field against Grambling and look like a program that knows what it's doing? Clean operation, no self-inflicted chaos, no sign that six weeks of installing a new identity broke something that used to work. Normal would be a genuine data point right now.
Michigan State has not released a depth chart and, per the staff, does not intend to release one before the week of the opener. What follows is our own projection, assembled from open-practice viewing periods, who took reps with whom, and the way position coaches referred to players in the few availabilities we got. It will be wrong in places. Camp bodies move.
| Pos | First | Second | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| QB | Leo Hannan RS Fr. | Alessio Milivojevic Jr. | Named, publicly, and framed as a ceiling decision rather than a competition anyone lost. |
| RB | Cam Edwards Sr.Centerpiece | Trey Boudreau RS Fr. | The gap between one and two here is the widest on the roster. |
| WR (X) | Braylon Collier So. | Emmett Rowe Jr. | Collier ran with the ones almost every period we saw. |
| WR (Z) | Kobe Vandermeer Sr. | Elijah Prentiss So. | Projected. This spot rotated more than any other skill position. |
| WR (slot) | Jamari Wexler Jr. | Ty Ostrowski RS Fr. | Slot usage overlaps with Savoury detached, which muddies the read. |
| TE | Jayden Savoury RS Fr.Mismatch bet | Beau Lindquist Sr. | Lindquist is the in-line blocker; the two of them together is 12 personnel. |
| LT | Aaron Kolstad Jr. | Nate Ozuna RS Fr. | Projected. |
| LG | Griff Mahoney So. | Peter Bao RS Fr. | Interior spot. Least settled area on the projection. |
| C | Emil Vasquez Sr. | Charlie Renner So. | Makes the protection calls, which raises the stakes on the backup line. |
| RG | DeAndre Pitts Jr. | Kellan Boyce RS Fr. | Interior spot. Projected. |
| RT | Micah Trulson Sr. | Owen Brubaker So. | Projected. |
| Pos | First | Second | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| DE (field) | Trevonte Ashby Sr. | Kade Simmons So. | Projected. |
| DT (3-tech) | Malik Ouedraogo Jr. | Sam Vartanian RS Fr. | Projected. |
| NT (1-tech) | Tavien Okafor Sr. | Reece Dombrowski So. | Whether MSU can hold up here from lighter personnel is the whole defensive premise. |
| DE (rush) | Jonah Ekpe Jr. | Zion Marable RS Fr. | Projected. |
| MIKE | Jordan Hall Sr. | Cam Stodghill So. | Highest-floor room on the roster. |
| WILL | Dion Crawford Jr. | Brady Pretzlaff So. | Coverage in space is the open question, not the run fit. |
| Heavy personnel only — the third linebacker is a package, not a starter | |||
| SAM | Dejae White Jr. | Chris Piwowarczyk RS So. | Only on the field when the offense goes big. The size of this row is the tell. |
| Secondary — five defensive backs is the starting point | |||
| NICKEL | Tre Bell Jr.Proof of concept | Amari Whitcomb So. | Cover the slot, blitz off the edge, fit the run. If Bell can do all three, the base works. |
| CB | Devin Aldrich Sr. | Chase Bermudez RS Fr. | Projected. |
| CB | Kori Blackmon Jr. | Elias Thorpe So. | Projected. |
| FS | Rashaad Beauchamp Sr. | Landon Pyle So. | Projected. |
| SS / rover | Sami Haddad Jr. | Cortez Mullins RS Fr. | The interchangeability of these two safety spots is the thing the staff keeps describing. |
Specialists are left off deliberately. We didn't see enough live kicking to guess at it, and guessing at a kicker in August is how you end up apologizing in September.
"Complex for opponents, simple for us" is a personnel statement before it's a play-calling one. The way an offense disguises itself without asking the quarterback to learn more is by changing who's on the field and where they line up, not by adding pages to the call sheet. Here's the shape we'd expect, with the same caveat as everything above: projected, not published.
Ranges for a hypothetical normal Saturday against Grambling, meaning nothing weird happens with the game situation. These are our estimates. The program has projected nothing, promised nothing, and would probably like it noted that a coaching staff decides usage on Saturday, not a reporter in August.
Arrows are cheap in August. Below is the specific thing that would move each one, so this page can be graded later instead of quietly rewritten.