The first thing anybody said to me about Saturday was not about the football team. It was Tunde Balogun, at 1:47 a.m. Wednesday, in a group chat that has been called “spartan fc” since 2023 for reasons nobody in it can defend:
“who is bringing the tent”
Eleven people were awake. Nine answered inside four minutes. Four of them said some version of “not me.” One sent a picture of a dog. One said “i thought this was handled,” and then nobody said anything for six hours.
So that is where campus is. First home game of the year, a noon start, ninety-some hours out, tent situation unresolved.
I spent the week asking people what they were doing Saturday. Not what they thought about anything. What they were doing, where they were meeting, who was driving. Here is the report.
Quick note on method. I have a press pass this year, which is a laminated rectangle that makes people I have known since freshman year start talking like they’re on television. Most of this happened with it in my pocket. The pocket version is better. Sorry to the professionals.
The 7:30 a.m. problem
A noon kickoff is an act of violence against college students and I want that stated in the paper of record.
Noon means up at eight. Eight means somebody has to be in a lot by 7:30 with a canopy and a folding table, and every group chat on this campus spent Wednesday and Thursday determining, through a process that closely resembled jury deliberation, which unlucky person that is.
Grace Vollmer, a junior, made a spreadsheet. It is color-coded. There is a row that says “ice (2nd run).” Two people have already quit the spreadsheet, which I did not know was something you could do.
“They didn’t say anything,” Grace said. “They just stopped being in it. I still don’t know how they did that.”
Another chat has been arguing since Monday about whether you can start on Grand River and then get into a lot afterward. You cannot. They have been told this by three separate people, one of whom works for the university. They are still arguing about it.
A third chat contains a guy with a flat-top griddle who has become, functionally, a public utility. Four different friend groups are counting on him Saturday. He is aware of two of them. He works mornings at a coffee place on Grand River and has no idea any of this is happening around him.
The forecast argument
It is supposed to be sunny and in the mid-70s, which is close to perfect and has not stopped anybody from fighting about it.
Half of every chat is dressing for a heat wave. The other half is dressing for September as a concept, which means a hoodie they will carry around for six hours and never put on. One person in Halle Sirota’s chat has been sending the hourly forecast every three hours like a town crier.
Halle, a junior in advertising, runs a chat of nineteen people that she describes as “a support group with a football problem.” Her contribution to the week was a poll about whether the whole group should wear white.
“It failed,” she said. “Six people voted. One of them voted twice, which I don’t think is possible, so I don’t know what that was.”
Sadie Lindqvist, a sophomore, bought a jersey off a resale site in July with a number on it that nobody on the current roster wears. She found this out in August. She is wearing it anyway.
“It’s a nice jersey,” she said. “It’s green. I paid forty dollars for it.”
Sadie watches most of the first half of most games and does the rest of her following on her phone, which is where she found out we had a new coach. Her roommate is the one who told her who we’re playing. The two of them discussed it for about eleven seconds and then had a much longer conversation about brunch, which they had already had twice this week.
Somebody in every one of these chats is going to be cold at eight in the morning and unwell at one in the afternoon. Nobody is planning for this.
Tickets, and the freshmen
Emeka Duru is a freshman in Case and is going with eight people from his floor, which appears to be how most freshmen are going. Somebody’s cousin had extras. The eight of them are meeting at 10 outside the hall, hitting Brody first because the dining hall opens before anything else does, and walking down together.
“I don’t really know what you’re supposed to do,” he said. “Everyone keeps saying leave early. Early from where?”
I told him gates are at 10 and student gates at 10:30. He put it in his notes app, which I appreciated more than I expected to.
The student ticket chats have been calm this week, which is its own piece of information. Nobody is scalping a home opener against an FCS team. The going rate for an extra, as far as I could establish, is that you owe the person a coffee at an unspecified future date, and that debt is not enforceable and everyone knows it.
The two people I know who actually watch
Imani Ferrell is a senior and has been to every home game since she got here, including the ones that were not worth going to, which she can list, in order, unprompted.
She is the person her friend group asks things. She does not enjoy this.
“They ask me who’s good,” she said. “I say Cam Edwards. That’s always the answer. Cam Edwards is good. And then they ask me something else and I’m like, I don’t know, man, I don’t work there.”
She found the old videos in December like everybody else did, the ones the coach made before anyone knew who he was, and then kept watching them after everybody else got bored and stopped.
What she is actually feeling about Saturday is not complicated. She is nervous about the quarterback because he is nineteen.
“He’s nineteen,” she said. “My brother’s nineteen. I don’t let my brother drive me anywhere.”
Then there is Desmond Pryor, a junior, who opened by telling me he isn’t going. Said he’s over it. Said he hasn’t watched a full game since sophomore year. Direct quote: “it’s just not part of my life anymore.”
Over the following ten minutes he told me, unprompted, what time the gates open, which lot his friend’s brother parks in, that the lot fills by 9, and that he has a shirt.
I did not say anything. I just looked at him.
“I might go,” he said.
The band is not a bit
I need everybody to hear the band on this, because they are tired.
The Spartan Marching Band has been on campus since Aug. 10. Ten-hour days, outside, a practice field and a whistle and a tower and a man with a megaphone counting to eight for four hours at a stretch.
And for nine months, every national conversation that has involved them has been a joke about a trombone.
“It stopped being funny around the eightieth time,” said Theo Brandt, a junior trombone. “Which was January.”
Theo is not mad at Nick Mansour. Nobody in the band is mad at Nick Mansour. Several of them have met him and report that he is normal, which in this context is a compliment and is meant as one.
“Everyone thinks we’re a novelty attached to his résumé,” Theo said. “Like we’re the cute part of the story. We rehearse more hours a week than I have class.”
Half this campus calls him the band guy coach. I have heard it in the dining hall, on the 30, and once from a professor. Nobody means anything by it. It is just the fastest way to say who you mean.
Wendy Nakamura, a senior and a section leader, was blunter about the week, and she said it in the flattest voice imaginable, which made it land about ten times harder than yelling would have.
“If the team plays badly Saturday, we’re the joke,” she said. “Not the offensive line. Us. It’ll be ‘what did you expect, they hired a band kid,’ and then we stand up and play the fight song anyway, in uniform, in front of everybody, for the rest of the season.”
I walked into that conversation assuming the band was nervous about the football team. They are nervous about themselves.
First pregame show of the year, biggest curiosity crowd in years, and a lot of people in the stands who are there to look at this school rather than watch it. Report time is 8:45 a.m.
Grambling’s band is the actual event and nobody here knows it
Jasmine Toussaint is a second-year grad student from Baton Rouge and has spent two weeks listening to this campus talk about Saturday with an expression I can only describe as patient.
“Y’all googled them Tuesday,” she said. “Be honest. Tuesday.”
Reader, I googled them Tuesday.
Jasmine grew up going to SWAC games and would like the record to reflect two things.
One: Grambling State is a real school with a real football program and people who take it seriously, and saying the word “tune-up” out loud in a dining hall is a choice you are making about yourself.
Two, and this is the one nobody here has clocked: a big chunk of the people coming Saturday are coming for the bands.
“Where I’m from you don’t leave at halftime, halftime is why people bought the ticket,” she said. “Grambling’s band is famous. Like actually famous. There are going to be people in that stadium Saturday who drove up here for it and could not tell you who plays quarterback for either team, and they are going to have a better day than you.”
I asked whether that was a problem for us. She laughed for a while.
“It’s the best halftime this stadium’s had in years and nobody on this campus knows it’s happening. Write that instead of the trombone thing.”
So, done. Stay for halftime. That is the one piece of concrete, actionable advice in this entire article.
The walk
If you live in Brody it is about twenty-five minutes, and it is twenty-five minutes with almost no shade, and you will be carrying something.
If you live in Wonders or Case you are basically already there and should stop complaining. You will complain anyway. I will hear about it.
The buses will be full. They are always full, and every single year somebody is astonished by this. If you are getting on a bus at 11:15 for a noon kickoff, that is a decision you have made about your own life and I can’t help you.
The Rock got painted three times this week, which I am told is above average. One of the three was a trombone.
Also, a public service announcement I am authorized by no one to make: there is a 9:20 Friday lecture in Wells that a large percentage of the people quoted in this article are enrolled in, and I would like to state on the record that Friday is not Saturday and attendance continues to exist as a concept.
So does anybody stay?
Honest part, because this is the student section’s paper and we should be able to say true things to each other in it.
The last two years, our student section has emptied out by the third quarter like somebody pulled a fire alarm. I’m allowed to say that because I did it too. I have left early, gone and gotten food, and felt absolutely nothing about it afterward.
So the real question Saturday is what that section looks like at 2:45 p.m. if the whole thing is already decided by then.
The answer I got, over and over, from people who genuinely want to be there, was “depends.”
Depends how hot it is. Depends if it’s fun. Depends if there’s somewhere to be after.
Nobody promised me they’d stay. Not one person, and I asked twelve times, directly, with the press pass out.
Which is fair. Nobody here has been handed a reason yet. What we have is a new guy, some old videos, a schedule and a lot of tents.
And we’re all going anyway. Provisionally. With an exit strategy. I don’t really know what that makes us.
See you at 8 a.m. Bring ice. Stay for halftime.