Afternoon. Okay, so we’re going to do this every Tuesday at twelve-thirty, and I’d like it to be boring and predictable so you can all plan your day around it. Availability, then the opponent, then whatever you’ve got.
Availability, there’s nothing. Nobody new. We came out of camp in decent shape, which is mostly luck and partly Priya and her staff, and I’ve been told the correct thing to do is not say that out loud because you jinx it. So, sorry, Priya. Couple guys will ride a bike Wednesday and play Saturday. That’s just the last week of August. If anything changes I’ll tell you.
Grambling. I’ve read some of the stuff written this week and they’re sort of scenery in it, and I don’t think that holds up. They run the option, they run a whole lot of it, and they’re good at it. Not good for an FCS team. Good at it. So it’s a real week of preparation for us. I’m happy to get into the why on that, I just don’t want to talk for eleven minutes about it if nobody in here wants it.
Gates at ten, students at ten-thirty, noon kick. Get there early. I’ll probably say that again before Saturday and I’ll say it again on Saturday.
That’s all I’ve got. Go ahead.
Coach, easy one to start. What does a good day look like Saturday?
Play fast, play clean, get a lot of guys some snaps, come out of it healthy. That’s pretty much the list.
That’s the list? Nothing about the score, nothing you want to see from the offense?
I mean, I’d like to win. Yeah, no, we want to win the game, I’m not being cute. I just don’t have a number in my head and if I gave you one I’d be inventing it at the podium.
Those four things are what I’m actually going to check on Sunday. The offense part is the fun part for you guys and it’s a smaller part for me. Sorry, that’s a boring answer.
Do you know what you’re wearing Saturday?
Green and white, I assume. Somebody sends me a picture on Thursday and I say great. I’ve never once had an opinion about it and I’m not planning to develop one.
Are you changing anything with the walk? The Spartan Walk?
No. Same time it’s always been, ten-fifteen, same route. There’s no reason to touch any of that in year one and I’d probably get it wrong if I tried.
You put a depth chart out Monday and a large chunk of it is the word OR. One interior offensive line spot has three names on the same line. I’ve been reading these things for fifteen years and that’s more hedging than most. What are we supposed to take from it?
Honestly the chart’s a document we put out because we’re supposed to put out a document. It isn’t how we talk about it inside.
At a couple of those spots we don’t really have a starter, because we haven’t decided the job is one job. There’s a guy for first down and there might be a different guy for third-and-eight. If I put one name up there, I’ve told you something that isn’t true and I’ve told the kid in the second row something that isn’t true. So when we know, we’ll say.
With respect, that’s a nice philosophy and I don’t think it covers all of it. Three names on one line inside isn’t a package. That’s a staff that hasn’t found an answer.
Yeah, that’s fair. Some of it’s both. Some of those are a rotation on purpose and at least one of them is us not knowing yet.
Inside I can make a case for four combinations and I can’t make a great case for any single one, and I’d rather say that in August than say something confident that gets contradicted on tape in six days. That’s not a shot at those guys. Some of them are eleven practices from being good and eleven practices is a long way from Saturday.
Some of it’s on me, too. I ran the first ten days of camp at a pace that was too much for a line with that many new pieces, and then we spent about four days getting back what I took off them. They didn’t do that to themselves, I did it to them. Anyway.
You offered to go deeper on the option, so I’ll take it. Everybody’s writing that Grambling is a tune-up. What does an option team actually do to a defense that a normal opponent doesn’t?
Yeah, I’d love to. Okay. So.
Most offenses attack a place. Right? You know roughly where the problem’s going to be, it’s the tight end side, it’s the thing they love on third down, and you can go put a good player near it. This isn’t that. This one attacks whoever’s wrong, and it doesn’t decide who that is until after the ball’s snapped. So on a given play I’ve got, what, three guys who each have exactly one thing to be right about, and the offense gets to look at all three of them and hand it to whichever one of them was wrong. And then they do it again. Forty-five times.
Where it’s hard for us specifically. The inside part, the dive, that’s not really about the six yards. The six yards are a bonus. What it’s there to do is hold your linebackers, and what it wants is a twenty-year-old to take one hard step downhill. And we’ve been telling that kid to take that step since he was nine. Everybody’s praised him for it his whole life. So he takes it, the quarterback keeps it behind him, and there’s a crease. Nobody busted anything on that play. It’s a habit we put in him.
Then outside, eventually you end up with a corner or a safety having to tackle a pitch guy in space with a lead blocker in front of him. And nobody recruits a corner because he’s great at that. You recruit him to cover people. So the difference between four yards and forty is somebody doing the third-best thing he does against people who do it first.
And then eyes. Not looking at the football. That’s the hardest thing to teach in six days and it’s the one that costs you.
Sorry, what was the rest of it. Oh, the scout team, that’s the other thing. We can’t rehearse it honestly. Our scout offense learned this last Wednesday and they’re imitating guys who’ve been running it since they were sophomores in high school, so the mesh is a hair slow, every rep is friendlier than the real one. I’ve spent all week telling our defense the version they’ve been stopping is the easy version. I don’t know if that lands. Probably doesn’t. That’s just a thing you say.
And the clock, which I don’t think anybody’s brought up to me. If they run it forty-five times, my offense is standing on the sideline. For a nineteen-year-old making his first start, three possessions in a half is a completely different afternoon than eight. So their offense is a problem for my offense too.
I’m not telling you how we’re playing it. Was that what you wanted?
You’ve built a lighter defense on purpose, speed over size, and spent eight months arguing you can stop the run without getting bigger. This is the exact opponent built to embarrass that. Does it make you second-guess the premise?
No. It makes it checkable, which isn’t the same thing.
The bet was never that light is better. Light and a half-step late is bad, that’s a bad football team. The bet is that if you’re going to be light you have to be right, and you have to be right basically every time, because you don’t have the bodies to cover for being wrong. So we’ll find out. If we’re a step out of place Saturday I’d rather know that in Week 1 with a hundred practices left than find out in October.
And if we’re fine, that doesn’t prove anything either. It means it survived one afternoon.
Leo Hannan makes the first start of his life Saturday, at a position and a program where the last few years have not been kind. What have you actually said to him this week?
Honestly, not much, and that’s on purpose.
I talked to him Sunday and I haven’t brought it up since. Because if I go find him every day to tell him he’s fine, what he actually hears is that I’m worried. So I’ve been normal at him all week deliberately, and that’s been harder than it sounds.
What I said Sunday was basically, the plan’s not yours to carry, it’s mine. I wrote the sheet, I picked what’s on it and what isn’t, and if Saturday’s a mess it’s got my handwriting on it. And his job is small and specific and he’s good at it. That was the whole thing, it took two minutes.
The person you should be asking about Leo is Nick Sheridan. I don’t teach him. Nick teaches him. Leo in a meeting room in March and Leo in a meeting room last week are not the same guy, and none of that is me, so I’d be taking something that isn’t mine if I let you write it that way.
Couple weeks ago Leo stopped an install to ask why we were tagging a route the way we were. In front of the room. He was right, we changed it. Which, I mean, that’s what’s supposed to happen. Anybody can do that here. He’s not special for doing it, and I don’t want it written up like he did something brave.
Is there a point Saturday where you’d take him out?
If he’s hurt. Or if the game’s decided and there’s nothing left to get out of it.
Not for a bad throw. Not for two bad throws. If I pull a nineteen-year-old in his first start because he missed a comeback route, I’ve taught him something about this place that takes a year to un-teach. I’d rather he make Saturday’s mistakes on Saturday.
Alessio Milivojevic hasn’t spoken publicly since the quarterback decision and he isn’t on this week’s availability list. Is that his choice or the program’s? And how’s he doing?
It’s his. He told me he didn’t want to do it this week and I said okay. He’s not hiding from anybody, he just doesn’t want to talk into a microphone right now, which at twenty-two is a completely reasonable thing to decide about your own life. If he changes his mind Thursday he’ll be sitting right there.
How he’s doing I’d rather he tell you than me. I’m not going to do the bit where a coach stands up here and says he’s handled it like a pro, because what’s happening in that sentence is a coach using a kid to make himself look good at managing people.
What I can tell you is he’s working. There’s a third-down thing on our sheet this week that’s in the shape it’s in because Alessio came to me in the spring and said the way we were teaching the back’s release was making him late. He was right. We fixed the footwork, kept the play, and it goes in the plan Saturday for a quarterback who isn’t him. So.
Will he play Saturday?
If the game gives us that, sure, and I hope it does. I’m not going to script him a series so everybody gets a nice photo. He’d see through that in about four seconds.
Saturday you run out of that tunnel as a head coach for the first time. Have you let yourself think about what that’s going to feel like?
Not really, no.
Nothing? Ten years ago you were on that field with an instrument in your hands.
I’m sure it’ll be great. I’ve got a call sheet that isn’t done and it’s Tuesday, so that’s where my head is.
Ask me Sunday and I’ll have something for you. That’s a bad answer, Wes, I know it’s a bad answer. Sorry.
Coach, here’s the version my callers give me. The bar Saturday, as far as they’re concerned, is don’t embarrass us. That’s the whole hope. Does it bother you that the ceiling this week is a Big Ten program looking competent against an FCS team?
It doesn’t. And I want to be careful, because that’s going to sound like a dodge, and the real answer’s a little worse than that. I think your callers have it about right.
We haven’t done anything. There’s no result attached to this program since December. There’s a hire. A hire isn’t a result, a hire is a press conference and then eight months of everybody arguing about it. So when people say the bar is “look organized,” I don’t hear an insult. That’s them doing the math with the evidence they have, and there isn’t much because we haven’t made any.
The only place I’d push is on the word competent, because people say it like it’s where you land when you stop trying. Competent is just a lot of little stuff going right in a row. And all of it is somebody’s job. Like every piece of it is a person. Somebody gets the call in. Somebody gets eleven guys on and eleven guys off in eleven seconds while it’s loud. There are probably ninety people in that building who have never done their job on a Saturday in there. If we look organized it’s because a bunch of people none of you are ever going to interview did it right. If we don’t, then I built the week wrong.
So, no. It doesn’t bother me. I think it’s a fair place to start.
So the goal Saturday is to be boring.
In the ways that lose you football games, yeah. Boring on kickoff coverage. Boring on substitutions. Nobody sprinting on as a twelfth guy because he didn’t hear his name. I would like all of that to be extremely boring, please.
That’s going to play great on my show.
I figured.
Okay, our whole newsroom made me ask this. Grambling’s band is famous. More famous than the football team famous. Half the group chats I’m in care more about halftime than the game. You were in the marching band here. Thoughts?
Oh, I have a lot of thoughts. You’ve made a mistake.
No, that band is a serious institution. They’ve been doing that longer than anybody in this room has been alive, they travel, and they do a thing that a Big Ten band structurally cannot do. And I say that as a guy who loved being in ours. It’s a different tradition doing a different job, they’re not really the same activity. Whatever happens at halftime Saturday is going to be the most rehearsed thing in that stadium, minute for minute, and I’m including our football team in that.
I don’t get to watch it. I’ll be under the stadium with Joe and a whiteboard going through everything we got wrong in the first half, which is fine, that’s the job. But I want it noted that I’m giving something up here.
[laughter in the room]
Why is that funny.
[more laughter]
I’m being serious. If our students leave at halftime to go stand in a beer line, they’re idiots. You can print that. Stay for the band.
Do you think our band could—
Nope. Our band’s excellent and I’m not doing this two days before a game. Next one.
You’ve never coached a football game. Not at this level, not at any level. Saturday you call the offense and the defense in front of a full stadium. Are you nervous?
Yeah. Yeah, I am. I’m not going to stand here and perform calm at you.
The strange part of it hits me about once a day and never at a big moment. It’s always something administrative. Monday somebody handed me a laminated card with a sideline org chart on it and my name was at the top of it and I looked at that a beat too long. That’s the whole feeling, honestly. It’s never the tunnel or whatever, it’s always some piece of paper somebody hands me.
The nervous part is narrower than people probably think. It isn’t whether I belong out there. If I were still working that out in August I had no business taking the job in December. It’s that I built this week. I decided what got reps and what didn’t. There’s a list in my head of stuff we didn’t get to, it’s about six things, and if one of those six shows up Saturday that isn’t a young-coach problem and it definitely isn’t a young-quarterback problem, it’s that I picked wrong on a Tuesday in August with a whiteboard in front of me. That’s the actual worry. It’s a pretty boring worry.
Cam Edwards is the best player on your roster. Do you have a number in your head for how many times he touches it?
I don’t. I probably should. Sheridan would very much like it if I had a number.
There’s two lazy versions of Saturday and I’d like to skip both of them. One is you hand it to your best back thirty times, you win comfortably, everybody drives home happy, and you’ve learned nothing while putting thirty hits on the guy who has to be standing up in November. The other one is you sit him early to protect him and you never find out whether any of this works with him in it, which is the only version that matters.
The thing about Cam nobody’s going to write is he’s the best pass protector in that room. He is. For a first-time starting quarterback that’s worth more than an explosive run. So I’d like him out there being a problem in a couple of different ways early and then it should belong to other people.
And I’d like our offensive line to knock somebody backwards for a day. Those five have taken it in the teeth in the paper all month and a decent amount of that is fair. There’s no stat for it. I’d just like them to have it.
You’re calling both sides. Practically, on Saturday: when your offense is on the field, who’s coaching the defense?
Joe Rossi. And I mean actually, not on a chart. When we’re on offense, that sideline is his, the corrections are his, and I’m not standing over his shoulder making a face at him. Same the other way with Nick Sheridan. If those things aren’t true then what I’ve built is two good coaches waiting around for me to become available, and that’s a worse team.
People get this question a little wrong, I think. They assume the hard part is the play calls. The play calls are the part I’ve done ten thousand times in a quiet room. The hard part is the ninety seconds after a turnover when about eleven things arrive at once. Take the penalty or don’t. Is that kid on the bench coming apart. Do I have a timeout. That’s a head coach thing and it’s got nothing to do with scheme.
So we rehearsed it. Actually rehearsed it, in an empty stadium with a clock running, out loud, until it was tedious. Whether that holds up at a hundred and ten decibels with something already gone wrong, I don’t know. That’s a real I don’t know. That’s one of the things Saturday’s for.
Does that include the kicking game? A lot of people around the sport would say special teams is where a first-year staff loses games nobody’s paying attention to.
Whoever told you that is right. First-year staffs lose a couple games a year on kicking game and then everybody writes eight hundred words about the quarterback.
It’s the easiest thing in the world to let it get the leftover attention, because offense and defense and the portal and recruiting all scream at you and the punt team never does. I’m not going to tell you we’ve solved it, because it’s August and I don’t know. I’ll tell you it hasn’t been leftover.
Different subject. Miami beat Notre Dame 42-6 on Saturday. You play at Notre Dame in three weeks. Did that change anything about how you see that game?
Everybody wants me to say Notre Dame’s in trouble and I’m going to be useless to you here.
One Saturday tells you less than people are about to say it does, in both directions. Which is also what I’m going to be asking all of you to remember about us on Sunday morning, so I should probably be consistent about it.
I’ll have real thoughts on them in two weeks and you’ll get plenty of them. An hour spent on it today is an hour taken off a team that’s actually coming here Saturday.
One more. Forget the scoreboard, forget what any of us write. What’s a small thing that could happen Saturday that would make you happy on the drive home and that nobody watching would even notice?
Oh, good question. Uh.
A change of possession where we substitute fast and nobody looks over to the sideline for help. I know that sounds like nothing. It’s about the best tell there is of whether a team’s been taught, because there’s no play to hide inside. It’s eleven people knowing where they go while a stadium is loud and the last thing that happened was bad. Teams give up a lot of free yards on that over a season and never mention it once in a meeting.
Jayden Savoury’s the other one. Redshirt freshman, he’ll be out there, and his job Saturday isn’t to be great. It’s to be somewhere a defense has to look at him. If it ends up being, he ran the same route from three different spots and a linebacker had to declare all three times, I’ll take that and be happy about it.
Tre Bell too, inside. If Tre plays the run fine from the nickel and nobody says his name once, that tells me something.
That’s three. You asked for one. Sorry.
Last one. Wes asked what running out of that tunnel would feel like and you gave him almost nothing. Different direction: your family will be in that stadium. What’s actually in your head at 11:58 Saturday?
That was a fair question and I gave him a bad answer. Let me try yours.
At 11:58 I’m going to be thinking about whether our punt team knows the call. I know how that sounds. That’s genuinely what’s going to be in there.
My mom’s going to be in that stadium. She’s been in it maybe six times and every one of those she was watching a kid holding a trombone. She informed me last week that she isn’t planning to watch the game, she’s going to watch me the entire time, which is a horrifying thing to be told by your mother. My dad’s going to watch the game. Somebody has to.
Let me say the thing I actually came in here to say, and it’s why I keep telling people to get there early. There are going to be people in that stadium Saturday who’ve had a miserable three years being attached to this program. People who quit wearing the hat to work. It’s a noon kick against an FCS team, there’s nothing on the line, and they’re coming anyway, at ten in the morning. Nobody in this building has done anything to earn that yet. Me least of all.
So one ask, and then I’ll go. If it goes sideways early, and it might, first days are ugly, Leo Hannan is nineteen and it’s the first start of his life. Give him a few minutes before you decide anything about him. And if you need to be mad at somebody, be mad at me. I picked him and I wrote the plan and I’m not hard to find.
Okay. Thanks, everybody. See you Saturday.
The session ran thirty-one minutes against a scheduled twenty. Mansour stayed another few minutes off-mic by the door, mostly with the two student photographers, and left through the coaches’ entrance carrying the coffee he came in with, which he never opened. Michigan State (0-0) hosts Grambling State (0-0) at noon Saturday at Spartan Stadium. Coordinators Nick Sheridan and Joe Rossi meet with reporters Wednesday; player availability is Thursday.