EAST LANSING, Mich. — Four days out from the first football game of the Nick Mansour era, the thing people inside this building keep coming back to is that there is still nothing to point at. Eight months of arguing about a hire, an entire offseason of it, and the first piece of physical evidence anybody gets is a noon kickoff against an FCS opponent they are supposed to beat comfortably.
Over four days I spoke with 13 Michigan State players, all granted anonymity so they could say things they will not say at a table with a green backdrop behind them. Some of them are men I talked to during the bye week. Some are not. They are identified here by position group and class only. Two asked me to change a detail so their teammates wouldn’t place them, and I did, and neither detail was about football.
Nobody I talked to thinks this team is fixed. Nobody thinks it’s broken, either. What comes through is a room full of people who mostly like the man running it, don’t trust him yet, and are annoyed that the first thing anybody gets to judge is a game where the judging won’t mean much.
“Everybody’s going to have a whole opinion Sunday morning and none of us are going to know anything more than we know right now,” a fifth-year defensive lineman said. “That’s what’s been bugging me all week. It’s been bugging me since the schedule came out, honestly.”
The part they actually like
Ask what’s better and almost nobody starts with football. They start with a piece of paper.
“Sunday night, like eight o’clock, you get the whole week,” a second-year receiver said. “The whole thing. Times on it and everything. Meeting’s at 6:40, meeting’s forty minutes, this is what you’re getting asked in it. And then Wednesday comes and the thing happens at 6:40. Every week so far. I know that sounds like nothing to you. It’s not nothing. I don’t know how to explain to you how not-nothing it is.”
He kept going without being asked to.
“I know how many reps I’m getting Thursday and I know it on Sunday. Last year, figuring out whether I was in or out was like a second job on top of the job. You’re reading the room, you’re watching who Coach walks in with, you’re texting a dude in a whole different position group like, what’d you hear, what are they saying. That’s your Tuesday. That’s your whole Tuesday.”
Then, flatter: “The actual thing that changed for me is I got a class at four on Tuesdays that I had to drop last year. That’s it. That’s my whole answer. Everybody wants the culture answer and I’m telling you about a class.”
A third-year linebacker put the same thing in football terms and thought his version was the more important one. “They took a whole game plan and made it two questions,” he said. “Not two questions for the defense. Two questions for me, at my spot, against their stuff. I haven’t been taught like that here. Before it was, here’s everything, good luck, don’t be the guy.”
“The install’s short and then the test is hard, that’s the part. You can’t just nod your way through a meeting anymore. Three weeks in you could already tell who’d been getting by on nodding.”
A true freshman defensive lineman, eight months on campus and no basis for comparison, listened to me describe what the older players say has changed and seemed mildly baffled by it.
“I don’t have a before,” he said. “Everybody keeps asking me if it’s different and I’m like, different from what? This is just what my life is. The older guys talk about last year like something happened to them and I genuinely don’t know what they’re talking about. I show up and there’s a schedule.”
He did offer one thing he’d noticed, and offered it as though it were unremarkable.
“A walk-on told him he was wrong in a meeting. Out loud, in front of everybody. And he goes, yeah, you’re right, and changed it. And guys were coming up to me after like, you know that’s not normal, right. I don’t know. It’s normal to me. It’s the only thing I’ve seen.”
Nobody has heard him raise his voice
Not one player I spoke with has heard Mansour yell. Several went out of their way to say they’ve been watching for it. For some of them that’s the most reassuring thing about him. For others it is the open question. The split runs mostly by age, with enough exceptions that I stopped guessing which way a man would go before he told me.
“He’s really good at people,” a fifth-year safety said, and then immediately tried to sand it down. “That’s not, I don’t mean that as a compliment exactly. He knows what I can hear. He says the version of it I can hear. That’s a skill. My uncle sold cars for thirty years and he had that same skill.”
Is he being managed?
“I mean, probably? Somebody younger than me is managing a room full of grown men and doing it well enough that nobody’s mad about it. That’s what I think is happening. And here’s what’s driving me crazy. Every single thing he has told me has been true. Every one. So far. I keep waiting to catch him in something and I keep not catching him, and now I don’t know if the thing I’m waiting for is even there or if I just want it to be.”
A fifth-year starter on the offensive line, two coaching changes deep, has a narrower complaint, and it surprised me.
“He explains everything,” he said. “Everything. Why the schedule’s shaped like that. Why we’re doing this drill and not the other one. Why there’s ORs on the chart. Guys love it. Guys come out of there feeling like they know something.”
He does not.
“I don’t need it. Tell me who and where and let me go do it. I’m an easy guy to coach, I’m a very easy guy to coach, I just don’t need the reasons.” He sat with it a second. “And I’ll be honest, when somebody explains that much, part of my brain starts going, okay, why do you need me to agree with you. I don’t know if that’s fair to him. It’s probably not fair.”
Then, right away: “That’s mine, that’s not his. I’ve had three head coaches in this building and two of them lied to my face. My read on people is off. I know it’s off.”
The third-year linebacker has been circling the same question since August and says he’s no closer to an answer.
“I told you before, I can’t tell if he’s secure or if he just hasn’t figured out yet that he should be worried. Still can’t tell,” he said. “Something moved a little, though. He changed his mind in front of the room again last week. Second time I’ve seen it. And this time nobody in there even reacted. That’s the part I keep thinking about, more than him doing it. Guys just expected it. I don’t think anybody planned that, it just kind of happened.”
The quarterback, one more time
Four days out this is still not resolved, and the people who think it’s wrong have gotten better at explaining why.
The fifth-year defensive lineman made the case in about two minutes, without heat. He had plainly said it before, to somebody in the building, and gotten nowhere with it.
“Nobody makes this argument right,” he said. “They make it sad. Oh, the old guy earned it, the old guy deserved it. That’s not the argument, that’s not even close to the argument.
“The argument is that this year you need one thing. One. You need to look like a functioning football program on television twelve times. That’s the assignment this season, that’s all of it. And there is a man in this building who has already been hit. Twelve games of getting hit. He knows what the first quarter of a real Saturday does to your hands. And we went the other way, and the other way might be better in a year, I’m not sitting here telling you it won’t be.”
“But that pays off in 2027. I’m not here in 2027. Our left tackle’s not here. Our best receiver’s probably not here. So you’re asking about fifteen grown men to eat a rough September so a nineteen-year-old is really good the year after we’re all gone. Coaches do that constantly, it’s not evil, it’s not personal. It’s a calendar. I’m just on a different calendar than he is.”
He wanted one more thing in.
“You sit down the guy the room actually follows and that costs you something. Might be small. It isn’t nothing. And I’d say that to Coach’s face, I’ve said a version of it to him, he didn’t get weird about it. He just didn’t agree with me.”
The second-year receiver has no patience left for any of it.
“That’s people being sentimental and putting a suit on it,” he said. “They’re not defending a decision, they’re defending a dude. Which, I love him too, everybody in there loves him. But take the names off. Put two guys on tape with no names on them and nobody in this building picks it the way the old heads are picking it. Nobody. Not one guy.”
“And respectfully, the veterans around here have been right about what, exactly? We’ve been doing it the sentimental way for four years and we’re the joke on the FOX show. So maybe the guys who’ve been here longest aren’t who I want telling me what’s obvious.”
He asked me not to make it sound like he doesn’t like the older players. He does. He said they’re the reason he came back.
The fifth-year safety split it and did not enjoy splitting it. “The kid can throw. I’m not one of these guys pretending Leo can’t play, he can play, we see it every day, DBs know before anybody. That was never my thing.” He started over. “My thing is I’ve watched a room not know what its own rules are, and then the season starts anyway. And then it’s October and you’re finding out. That’s the part I don’t like.”
The offensive lineman would not go back through any of it and said one thing.
“I said what I had to say in August and nothing came of it, which is fine, that’s how it goes.” Then: “What I care about now is that our tape doesn’t make it worse. Whoever’s back there. If we’re bad in the middle, everybody’s going to say the freshman looked shaky, and that will not be what happened.”
A junior running back, who talked for less than ten minutes and gave the shortest answers of anybody, was the only player who declined the subject outright.
“I’m not doing the quarterback thing. I’m tired of the quarterback thing,” he said. “Y’all have made this the biggest nothing I’ve ever been around. We haven’t played a game. Not one game. There’s grown men on TV with opinions about a football team that doesn’t exist yet.”
The other decision
The chart came out Monday and put a 6-foot-7 offensive tackle at center. Rustin Young has been taking those snaps since June, so nobody in the building was surprised by it, but Monday was the first time it was a public fact, and Monday is when the phones started.
A third-year offensive lineman is the only player I talked to across four days who seemed annoyed at me, which he was, and not about the decision.
“It’s fine,” he said. Then nothing. Then: “That’s the answer. It’s fine.”
I asked what fine covered.
“Ball comes back. Calls come out. I know what I’ve got before the snap, which is all I need from a center. He’s tall. He was tall in June. He was tall at tackle and nobody wrote a word about it.”
The part he actually wanted to talk about came out faster and louder.
“What’s weird to me is my phone. Eleven people have texted me about my own job this week. My cousin sent me a video of a guy at a whiteboard. About leverage. I’ve been doing this since I was fourteen and my cousin sells insurance in Toledo and now we both know about leverage.”
He doesn’t think the objections are stupid. He thinks they’re loud in a way that has nothing to do with any football getting played.
“If it’s bad, you’ll see it. You’re not going to need a diagram. And if it’s good nobody’s going to say one word, because nobody has ever said one word about a center who was good. I’d rather have him in there than not have him in there.”
A fourth-year edge rusher was careful with it in a way none of the linemen were, and it wasn’t nerves. He asked me twice to describe him only by his year and his side of the ball, nothing narrower, and then said one thing and spent the next minute making sure I hadn’t taken it further than he meant it.
“If we had two guys inside you could sleep on, Rustin’s still playing tackle. That’s all I’m saying.”
Does he think it’s a bad idea?
“No. I think it might be a good idea. Those are two separate things and everybody outside is acting like they’re the same thing. You watch your own front for a year, you know what you’ve got, that’s all I mean.”
Would he say it to a coach?
“I’d say it to Rustin. He’d agree with me and he’d use about four words.” He thought about it. “Don’t make me the guy who said our line’s bad. I’ve got to be in that room tomorrow morning and I like those dudes.”
A second-year tight end had clearly been waiting for somebody to ask, and conducted most of the conversation as a series of half-finished questions.
“Have you, okay, so have you read the stuff? Because I’ve read all of it. Like all of it. I shouldn’t. My mom’s telling me get off your phone and she’s right and I’m not going to.”
He wanted one fact in the story more than he wanted to make a point with it.
“He didn’t ask for it. Nobody outside knows that. He got told in June and he went okay, and that was the whole thing, that was it. And he’s not in there being weird about it. He’s the same dude. He eats the same food every single day, it’s chicken and rice, every day, for two years, I’ve watched him do it, it’s honestly kind of upsetting.”
“And everybody out there is losing their mind and he’s like the calmest guy in the building. Which, I don’t know. Maybe that means something. Or maybe he’s just a quiet dude and it means nothing. I’m a sophomore, so.”
He got where he was going by accident, on his way out.
“I just think if you’re gonna be mad about it, be mad at, like. Not him. You know?”
I asked all three whether they’d want the job. The lineman said no and didn’t elaborate. The edge rusher laughed for a while. The tight end said, “At center? Bro, I’d die on the first play and I’d deserve it.”
The one who wants to be yelled at
The most uncomfortable conversation I had was with a fourth-year defensive back, in a car, and he started it by warning me it was going to sound bad.
“I play better when somebody’s mad at me,” he said. “That’s it. That’s the whole thing and I know how it reads.”
He described a high school coach who used to grab his facemask in front of the whole team.
“And then I’d go be the best player on that field for two hours. Every time. I’m not saying that’s good. I’m not telling anybody to do that to a kid, I know exactly what that is. I’m telling you that’s what’s in me and I didn’t pick it.”
Mansour, he said, has been exactly what everyone describes. Direct, prepared, unbothered.
“He came to me in camp with the tape and told me the exact thing I do wrong on one concept. Calm. Real specific, like, on this leverage you’re peeking, here’s four plays of it. And he was right. I fixed it, took two days.” He stopped. “And I walked out of there and nothing had happened to me. The football got fixed and I still went home like, was that it? I don’t know what to do with that.”
He has thought about asking for what he wants and cannot work out how.
“You can’t ask a guy to yell at you. Like I’ve sat there and thought about how you’d even text that. There’s no way to text that. ‘Hey Coach, could you be meaner.’ You’d sound crazy.”
“Some days I think I’m broken and it’s my problem and I should grow up. Some days I think I’m going to be a completely average player in October and nobody’s going to notice until it’s on tape.”
Had he mentioned any of this to anybody in the building?
“Obviously not.”
“It’s not real yet”
Several players, mostly younger ones, described the last two months as provisional. Not bad, not good. Unreal.
“None of it’s real yet, it’s all meetings,” a second-year offensive tackle said. “Everybody in the state’s got a take on a guy who hasn’t coached a game. Including me. Mine’s worth exactly what theirs is worth, which is nothing.”
“Ask me at 3:30 Saturday. Everybody’s going to know a lot more at 3:30 and every single one of them is going to act like they knew it Thursday.”
The third-year linebacker named the thing he says nobody in the building will say out loud, and made me confirm twice that his name would not be on it.
“It’s not Saturday I’m worried about. Saturday should be fine, I’m not trying to disrespect anybody, but we should be fine,” he said. “It’s a one-score game in November. Fourth quarter. Our offense goes three-and-out, the defense is walking back out there, and the guy calling both sides has got to be in two places at once and he’s got about eleven seconds.”
“Nobody in here talks about that. Same as August. We’ve all sort of agreed not to look at it and I don’t know when we agreed to it.”
The fifth-year safety, asked what would actually move him, gave an answer that had nothing to do with the score.
“Something’s got to go wrong Saturday. Something always does. We’ll have a turnover, or a busted coverage, or some kid jumps offsides twice. I want to see the sideline in that minute. Not the speech after, the minute.” He shrugged. “I’ve seen a lot of calm guys in August. August is easy. So that’s what I’m watching. I’m probably not going to be watching the ball.”
The specialist nobody has asked
A fourth-year specialist agreed to talk and then spent eleven minutes on subjects nobody in this state has written a word about all year.
“Nobody’s asked me one question about any of this all year,” he said, not bitterly. “Which is correct. If people are asking me questions, something’s gone wrong.”
He wanted to talk about the pregame clock. The warmup window has been moved and rebuilt, and he can now tell you what happens in every segment of it, and his portion now has a coach standing in it.
“He came out to the north end in camp and asked me what the wind does over there after eleven in the morning. That was the question. Not how you feeling, not we’re counting on you. He wanted to know about eleven a.m. at the north end.”
“There’s an answer, by the way. It’s a real thing. I’ve had that answer for three years and nobody has ever asked me for it.”
He is aware this is a small story. “I’m not telling you the man’s a genius because he asked about wind. I’m telling you I’ve been here four years and somebody finally asked. Print it or don’t.”
Four days
The junior running back, at the end of a conversation he clearly wanted over, said the one thing he’d been sitting on.
“My dad’s coming Saturday. He came last year too. He came to the bad ones.” He picked at the edge of the table. “I just want him to have a normal afternoon. That’s what I want out of it. A normal afternoon.”
“Don’t make that a big thing. It’s not a big thing.”
The second-year receiver, asked the same question, laughed at it. “What do I want Saturday? Bro. I want to score early so my phone stops.”
The offensive lineman said he wants to walk off the field having been anonymous.
The fourth-year defensive back said he wants somebody to be mad at him about something, and then said don’t print that, and then said no, print it, nobody will know it’s me.
The fifth-year defensive lineman wanted the last word and asked for it directly, which nobody else did.
“I want to be wrong. Write that part down, because guys like me never get that part printed. I’m not sitting here hoping it goes bad so I can be the smart guy in October. I’ve got one fall left. I’d love for this to be the best thing that ever happened to this place.”
“I just don’t think Saturday tells anybody anything. It’s a game we should win, against a team that’s going to run it at us all day and make us prove we can be assignment-sound, which is actually a decent test. Nobody watching is going to grade it that way, though.”
“If it’s ugly, he’s a fraud and he’ll be a fraud for two months. If it’s clean, he’s a genius and every one of y’all writes the same column. And it’s neither one. It’s a game.”
He picked up his bag. Then he sat back down and asked me when the story was running.