EAST LANSING, Mich. — Grambling State took the opening kickoff on Saturday, and for the next four minutes Michigan State’s defense looked like the exact thing this program has spent nine months insisting it was no longer going to be. Two enormous misdirection runs, a 30-yard touchdown, and a stadium making a low collective noise that has been made in that building many times in the last three years and never about anything good.
Then Grambling did not record another first down for the rest of the afternoon. Michigan State won 56-7, put up 618 yards, was flagged one time, and by Sunday the conversation outside the program had already reorganized itself around whether any of it counted.
Over three days I spoke with 11 Michigan State players, all granted anonymity so they could talk honestly about a game they won by 49 without it reading as complaining. They are identified by position group and class only. Several are men I talked with in August and again the week of the opener.
Almost none of them wanted to talk about the score. Every single one of them wanted to talk about the first drive.
Four minutes
“It was four minutes and I aged,” a third-year linebacker said. “I’m not being funny. I felt it happen.”
He was careful to separate what the plays did from what they meant. The plays, he said, were not confusing.
“It wasn’t like we hadn’t seen it. We had seen it, it was on the sheet, I could have drawn it for you Wednesday,” he said. “The problem was I was standing way too far up, so by the time I recognized it I’m already going the wrong direction with all my weight. And then they run it again. That’s the part that got me. They ran it again and I knew it was coming and I was still late.”
What he actually kept circling back to was not the play at all.
“I’ve had that exact afternoon in that stadium before. Twice. And both times it did not get better, it got worse for three more hours,” he said. “So when it’s 7-7 my head’s not going, all right, adjust. My head’s going, oh, we’re doing this again. That’s a real thing that happened in my brain and I’m not proud of it.”
A fifth-year safety saw the two long runs from behind the whole thing, which he described as the worst seat available.
“From the back you get about a second and a half where you can see everything that’s about to happen and there’s not one thing you can do with it,” he said. “Both those runs, I knew at the mesh. I knew before our linebackers knew. And then my whole job is to be the last guy, so I’m running downhill going, please just let me get him at the twenty.”
He got one of them. He did not get the other one.
A second-year offensive lineman spent the drive on the sideline with his helmet on, waiting.
“Our sideline got real quiet and then it got real loud, and the loud part was worse,” he said. “Guys yelling stuff that doesn’t mean anything. Like, come on now. Let’s go. Nobody’s saying a real sentence.”
A true freshman defensive lineman, whose entire experience of Michigan State football is eleven months long, had a different afternoon than everybody else did.
“I didn’t know it was supposed to be a whole thing,” he said. “They score, it’s 7-7, I’m on the sideline like, okay, we’ll go score. And then guys are coming off and they look gray. Like actually gray in the face. And I’m thinking, it’s the first quarter, what is happening right now.”
He asked somebody about it later.
“One of the older guys told me you had to be here the last couple years to get it. Which, fine. But I still kind of don’t get it.”
The bench
The correction happened between the end of Grambling’s drive and the start of their next one, on the bench, and every defensive player I asked described it the same way and in almost the same number of words, which is unusual.
“Four sentences,” the third-year linebacker said. “Take a guy off the ball. Play at your normal depth. Quit triggering on the first thing you see. Trust the guy inside you. That’s the whole thing. It took no time at all.”
Joe Rossi did most of the talking. Two players brought that up without being asked.
“Coach Rossi wasn’t loud,” a fourth-year defensive back said. “He came down the row with the pictures and he was going one at a time, this is you, this is you, this is you. He does that. He’s been doing this a long time and it shows in about four seconds when something’s gone wrong.”
Several of them were watching the head coach. In August, more than one player told me they had never seen Mansour respond to anything going badly, because nothing had gone badly yet.
“I was watching him. On purpose,” the fifth-year safety said. “I told you in the summer that’s what I was going to do and that’s what I did. And he came over, and he wasn’t mad, and he wasn’t doing a calm act either. He said his piece, it was like fifteen seconds, and then he went back over to the offense and started yelling at the offense about something else.”
He added one detail he seemed to find funnier than I did.
“One of our corners told him we were lined up too far up before he said anything about it. Just said it to him. And he goes, yeah, I know, we’re fixing it. Didn’t get weird. That’s normal in there now, guys say stuff to him, but I don’t think I could have done that at nineteen anywhere else I’ve been.”
The third-year offensive lineman who was annoyed with me in August was in a considerably better mood and still didn’t want to talk about defense.
“I don’t know anything about their fix, I wasn’t out there,” he said. “What I know is we came out after that and went three-and-out and threw it three times, which was stupid, and everybody wants to talk about the defense’s bad drive and nobody has said one word about ours.”
Was that his read or something a coach said?
“He said it. Sunday, in front of everybody. Said he got pass-happy and that was on him.” He shrugged. “He does that a lot. It’s still weird to me.”
The fourth quarter
Nobody I talked to had a bad word about the twenty minutes at the end, and several of them brought it up before I did.
“Loudest we were all day,” a second-year receiver said. “We won by forty-nine and the loudest our sideline got was a five-yard drag route in the fourth quarter. I don’t know what that says about us. Probably nothing. It was awesome, though.”
A fifth-year offensive lineman has been in this building through three coaching staffs.
“I’ve never heard a sideline do that for a backup quarterback in a blowout. Not here, not anywhere,” he said. “And it wasn’t for show. Nobody was doing it for a camera, guys were falling over each other.”
He said the reason is not complicated.
“He lost the job in August and then he went to work and everybody watched him do it. Every day. That’s all that is. Guys aren’t stupid, they know who works.”
The second-year receiver, who in August argued forcefully that the veterans in the room were sentimental about Milivojevic, said his position had not changed and that this was separate.
“I said what I said in the summer and I still think it,” he said. “That’s got nothing to do with Saturday. Saturday he came in and threw it great and my guy scored and I was jumping around like everybody else.”
“Ask anybody in there”
The Eastern Michigan question got the least interesting answers of the week.
“Ask anybody in there if they think we’re losing Saturday and every single one of them says no,” a fourth-year edge rusher said. “Every one. That’s just true. I’m not gonna sit here and tell you our room is quaking about Eastern Michigan, we’re not.”
Does that bother him?
“A little. I don’t know what you do about it, though. You can’t make grown men scared of somebody on a Wednesday. Coaches try it every year and everybody sees right through it.”
A junior running back was tired of the subject before I finished asking.
“It’s Thursday. We’ll go play the game,” he said. “I’ve been on a team that lost one of these. You know what happened? We played bad. That’s the whole story. There wasn’t a reason.”
A fifth-year defensive lineman, the most talkative player in the building and the one who most wanted to be argued with in August, said the thing he thinks is actually going on.
“Nobody’s looking past Eastern. Everybody’s looking past Eastern at Notre Dame, which is the same thing but people won’t say it like that,” he said. “Two weeks. That’s the game this whole state has had circled since December, and now they’re a mess, and everybody’s decided we’re supposed to beat them. That’s new. This program has not been in the position of being supposed to beat somebody in a long time and I don’t think anybody here knows how that feels yet.”
He also mentioned his phone, which he said has been the worst part of his week.
“Michigan played Western and everybody in my family watched it and every single one of them sent me the same text. My aunt sent me a text about a MAC team. My aunt.”
The quarterback on the other sideline
Eastern Michigan’s quarterback, Noah Kim, was Michigan State’s starting quarterback in 2023, in the middle of the worst institutional collapse in the program’s modern history. He is a seventh-year graduate student now, on an NCAA waiver, at his third school. He will play in Spartan Stadium on Saturday.
Most of the players I asked were not hostile about it. They just don’t know him.
“I never played with him. I don’t know the guy,” the third-year linebacker said. “I got here after. So it’s the same to me as any other quarterback, which I know is not the answer you’re looking for.”
The second-year receiver was blunter about it.
“I looked him up,” he said. “Sunday night. I’m not going to lie to you and act like I knew. I knew the name and that was it.”
The true freshman did the math out loud and then laughed at it.
“2023? I was a sophomore in high school. I was watching Ohio State.”
The fifth-year defensive lineman was on the roster in 2023, and he is the only player I spoke with who has any real memory of Kim at all.
“I was a redshirt freshman when he was the quarterback,” he said. “I wasn’t in his rooms, I wasn’t on his schedule, I wasn’t anywhere near him. So I don’t know him and I’m not going to sit here and act like we were close. But I was in that building that year and I know what that year was.”
He thought about how to put the next part.
“People were rough on him. Grown men in this state were rough on a kid about a thing that had nothing to do with him. He wasn’t why any of that happened. He just happened to be the guy whose name was on it.”
He does not, he said, think of Saturday as anything.
“It’s not a story to me. He left, he played somewhere else, he played somewhere else again, and now he’s a seventh-year quarterback who’s still playing. That’s it.”
Then, immediately: “I’m going to try to hit him, though.”
The fourth-year edge rusher had the only strictly practical take.
“Seven years. He’s seen every coverage that exists and he’s seen it a hundred times,” he said. “That’s the only part of this I’ve thought about. You’re not going to disguise anything on that dude.”
Two players brought up the crowd without being asked, and both of them were nervous about it.
“I hope they don’t boo him,” a fifth-year offensive lineman said. “They might. It’s September and everybody’s in a good mood, so maybe not. But some of them will and it’s going to be on the internet in four seconds and then that’s the story instead of the game.”
“My roommate has been arguing about it for four days”
The only player who wanted to talk about 56-7 was the one who thinks the entire discussion is ridiculous, both sides of it.
“I genuinely don’t understand what the argument is,” a fourth-year offensive lineman said. “Half of them are going, we’re back, and the other half are going, calm down, it’s Grambling. It’s Grambling and we beat them by forty-nine. Those aren’t two opinions. That’s just what happened.”
“Like what would you like me to say about it. We were supposed to do that and we did it. If we hadn’t done it, that would have been news.”
He said the part that actually annoys him is closer to home.
“My roommate has been on the internet arguing about this for four days. Four days. He plays here. He was in the game.”
The fifth-year safety, who told me in August that what he wanted from the opener was to watch the sideline in the minute after something went wrong, got exactly that in the first quarter, and was careful about how much he thought it was worth.
“I got my look,” he said. “Something went wrong, I watched the bench, and it was fine. Nobody came apart. Nobody was pointing at anybody. Coaches said a thing and guys went and did it and it worked. All of that is true.”
He stopped there for a second.
“It was Grambling, though. Nothing was actually on fire. Nobody in that stadium thought we were going to lose that football game, including me. So I got a look at something and I honestly don’t know how much it counts for.”
“Ask me in a couple weeks, in South Bend, when it’s a real one and it’s 14-10 and something goes wrong.”