Michigan State vs. Grambling State: 8 things to watch in Saturday’s home opener

EAST LANSING — Michigan State opens the season at noon Saturday against Grambling State at Spartan Stadium. The game is on Big Ten Network.

It is the first game under head coach Nick Mansour, who is 28, calls the offense, calls the defense, and has not coached a college game before this one.

Michigan State is 0-0 and 0-0 in the Big Ten. Grambling State is an FCS program from the SWAC. The Spartans are heavy favorites and should be. There is a large gap in size and depth between the two rosters.

Grambling runs an option offense and runs it well. It is hard for a scout team to copy in practice and it asks a defense to do things it does not have to do most weeks. That is the football part of Saturday.

Mansour was asked Tuesday what a good day looks like and gave the least interesting answer available: “Play fast, play clean, get a lot of guys work, come out of it healthy. That’s the whole list.”

Gates open at 10 a.m. Student gates open at 10:30. Tailgate lots open at 7 a.m. The forecast is sunny and in the mid-70s with light wind.

Michigan State hosts Eastern Michigan next Saturday and plays at Notre Dame in Week 3.

Eight things to watch.

1Leo Hannan’s first career start

Hannan is a redshirt freshman. He won the job in August over Alessio Milivojevic, who started most of last season and was the more conventional choice.

Mansour has said the decision came down to how good Hannan could eventually be. Fans have argued about it since and will keep arguing about it regardless of Saturday. One game against an FCS defense does not settle it.

What it can show is whether Hannan looks comfortable running the offense: getting the play in, getting people lined up, playing on time.

The completion percentage will probably look good. How fast the offense operates between snaps is the more useful thing to watch.

Hannan met with reporters Wednesday for the first time as a starter and said very little, which is what quarterbacks are taught to do. He credited the offensive line twice and said the plan was simple enough that the volume of it did not worry him.

Milivojevic is expected to be the No. 2 on Saturday.

2The first look at the offense

Nobody outside the program has seen this offense.

Mansour has described it as multiple and flexible, borrowing whatever fits the players, with a stated goal of using formation, motion and personnel groupings to simplify the read for the quarterback.

That is a philosophy, not a play sheet. Saturday is the first time there is anything to watch. Expect motion. Expect the same formation to produce different plays.

Also expect Michigan State to hold plenty back. Notre Dame is in three weeks.

3How they use Cam Edwards

Edwards is a portal addition brought in to be the center of the offense in Year 1. Nobody on the roster is a better football player. Whether he can play is not the question.

The question is what they ask him to do. A young quarterback and a comfortable lead usually add up to a lot of handoffs and a quiet afternoon.

Watch whether Edwards is moved around, split out and motioned, or used as a back who gets the ball 20 times and goes home.

He also may not play the fourth quarter, and should not have to.

4Rustin Young at center

This is the most unusual thing on the Week 1 depth chart. Young is a 6-foot-7 offensive tackle and he is starting at center.

The line, left to right, is Ben Murawski, Nick Sharpe, Young, Luka Vincic and Conner Moore.

Centers are usually shorter and more compact, for leverage. A nose tackle lining up under a 6-7 player gets to work from below him. Watch pad level on short-yardage downs and watch whether Michigan State gets movement when it needs two yards.

There is also the snap itself. Young has not played the position, and the center makes the line’s identification calls before every snap. That is a lot of new work at once.

The argument for it is that he is the best athlete on the line and center is the spot where the best athlete touches the most plays. Staff members have said both versions of this out loud. It is not settled inside the building.

An FCS front probably will not punish it. Watch it anyway. This is the group the staff has been least able to solve, and it is the group that will decide how the Notre Dame game goes.

5Jayden Savoury, the surprise

Savoury is a redshirt freshman listed at fullback and H-back, which is the staff describing a job rather than a position. He is a move piece. Expect to see him detached, in-line and in the backfield, sometimes on the same drive.

He is on the field to create a matchup. The staff has been open about the fact that he is not a finished blocker.

How often he plays, and where he lines up, will say a lot about how much of the offense actually runs through that idea.

If he is in-line on running downs and split out on passing downs, defenses will sort that out quickly. If he moves around and Michigan State runs everything from everywhere, it is harder to plan for.

6The linebackers, and gap discipline

Linebacker is the deepest and most trusted group on the team. Jordan Hall, Brady Pretzlaff, Cam Stodghill and Dejae White are all expected to play meaningful snaps.

Michigan State’s base defense is a 4-2-5, which puts two linebackers on the field at a time. Treat it as a rotation rather than a starting pair.

Option football gives every defender one job on every snap. One player has the dive, one has the quarterback, one has the pitch. If one player takes the wrong one, a four-yard run becomes a much longer one.

Defenses that have not played together make that mistake more than defenses that have. Michigan State’s front has not played together.

The score will probably look fine regardless. The number worth counting is how many times a Spartan defender ends up in the wrong gap, and that is the number the staff will be working from when it starts on Notre Dame.

Saturday will show tackling and lane discipline and almost nothing about coverage, which is the least proven part of this group.

7Tre Bell at nickel

Bell was an outside cornerback and moved inside to nickel in the offseason. In a 4-2-5 that is a run-support job as much as a coverage job.

Grambling will run at him. Option offenses find the smallest defender on the field and go there.

Watch whether he takes on blocks and whether he tackles. That is the whole evaluation Saturday.

8Procedure and special teams

Every team is sloppy in Week 1.

Michigan State has a first-time head coach, a first-time starting quarterback, new systems on both sides of the ball and one man calling offense and defense.

The realistic risks are procedural: delay of game, 12 men on the field, a timeout burned in the first quarter to sort out personnel, a substitution that does not get made in time against an offense that snaps it fast.

Liam Boyd is the kicker. Rhys Dakin is the punter. Charles Brantley and Andrew Brinson IV are listed on kickoff returns; Crishon McCray and Brinson are listed on punt returns. None of those units has taken a live rep together.

An FCS opponent will not punish most of that. Notre Dame will.

Getting thereWhat to know about a noon kickoff

Lots open at 7 a.m., which makes the tailgate window short. Noon kicks are not popular in East Lansing for that reason.

Drivers coming in from out of town should give the Trowbridge exit an extra 20 minutes. Concession and restroom lines at a noon opener are long, and they are longest between 11:15 and kickoff.

Students return to a full campus this week, so the walk-in traffic from the residence halls will be heavier than it was for last year’s opener.

Both bands perform at halftime. Grambling travels with one of the better-known marching bands in the country, and a portion of Saturday’s crowd is there for it.

Grambling is here on a guarantee, the scheduling arrangement that funds a substantial part of an FCS athletic department for a year. The players are not going to treat it as that. Grambling has its own history, its own expectations, and it runs the football better than a roster comparison suggests.

Mansour marched in the Spartan Marching Band from 2016 to 2019, which has been the most repeated fact about him since December. He has answered questions about it at every availability he has held.

Michigan State has not lost to an FCS opponent since 2016, when Furman won at Spartan Stadium.