The kid who lost the job had the best eleven minutes of anybody’s Saturday.

The best thing that happened at Spartan Stadium on Saturday happened when the game was already decided and about a fifth of the crowd had gone home to beat the traffic on Harrison.

Michigan State was ahead 42-7. The fourth quarter had started. And a 21-year-old from the western suburbs of Chicago named Alessio Milivojevic jogged onto the field with his helmet in his hand, and the Michigan State sideline turned to watch him the way a family watches somebody walk into a room.

He threw five passes. Four of them were caught. Two of them went for touchdowns. He gained 100 yards in about eleven minutes of football, which is an absurd number, and none of that is the reason anyone is talking about it.

The reason is what happened on the sideline.

The first touchdown was a short throw to Rowan Merlino that Merlino caught around the five-yard line and then ran fifty-four yards with, untouched, because there was nobody in the neighborhood. You could see it developing from the upper deck. Merlino was still running when the Michigan State bench came off the fence.

Not the backups. The starters. Cam Edwards was halfway onto the field. Ben Murawski, who is six foot five and weighs more than most refrigerators, had both arms over his head. Somebody’s helmet went in the air, which is a fineable offense in some conferences and was not called here.

Then a couple of series later Milivojevic threw an 18-yard touchdown to Eddie Whiting, and when he came off the field the line of people waiting to get to him was three deep and he could not get through it.

He is the guy who lost the job.

The job he lost

In August, Michigan State named Leo Hannan its starting quarterback. Hannan is a redshirt freshman. He had never played a college game. He is 19 years old.

Milivojevic is 21. He had been in the building longer. He had, by the account of nearly everybody who was around the program last year, been the steadier of the two for most of camp, and had already played meaningful snaps for a team that was falling apart around him.

He did not get the job. Nick Mansour, who is 28 and had been the head coach for about eight months, gave it to the younger one.

There is no version of that which is not a hard day for a 21-year-old.

What Milivojevic did next is the part people in the building keep bringing up without being asked, which is that he did not do anything. He did not enter the transfer portal in August, which he could have. He did not stop showing up early. He did not become a problem in a room where a problem would have been noticed immediately.

Three different people used almost the same phrase about him to me last week, before any of this happened, and I did not write it down at the time because it sounded like a thing people say. It was that he had been good about it.

Section 15

Marko and Dina Milivojevic drove in from Illinois on Friday and stayed at a hotel on Trowbridge because it was the last room in Okemos that was not four hundred dollars.

Marko is 54 and works in commercial insurance. Dina is a school nurse. They have made most of the home games for four years, which is a five-hour drive each way, and Marko will tell you the exact mile marker on I-94 where he starts getting nervous.

They have watched their son not play a lot of football.

“I want to say something and I want to be careful how I say it,” Marko said Sunday, on the phone, from a rest stop somewhere outside Kalamazoo. “We were happy for the other kid. Leo. We are actually happy for him, that’s not a line. Alessio likes him. They eat together.”

Then he stopped for a second.

“But I have watched my son be sad since August and there’s nothing you can do about it from Illinois. You can call. That’s it. That’s the whole thing you can do.”

Dina was on the same call and mostly let him talk, and then she said one thing.

“When they all ran at him, I lost it,” she said. “I was fine the whole game. I was fine when he threw it. And then the boys ran at him and I was gone. My husband had to hand me a napkin.”

They did not stay for the postgame. Dina works Monday and it is five hours. They got as far as the parking lot and sat in the car for twenty minutes because Marko said he did not trust himself on the road yet, and then they drove home.

What he said

Milivojevic spoke to reporters on Sunday for the first time since the season started. Michigan State does not make its backup quarterback available most weeks. He was made available this week for obvious reasons and it was a little awkward for everybody, because there is exactly one question in the room and it is a question nobody should have to answer on the best day of your year.

Nobody asked it. That is to the credit of the eleven people who were in there.

What he did say was mostly nothing, in the way that 21-year-olds say mostly nothing.

“I didn’t know I was going in until Coach Sheridan told me to get loose,” he said. “Then I was just trying not to screw it up. That’s honestly it. That’s the whole thought process.”

He was asked about the sideline reaction and he laughed, and then he did a thing that was more revealing than anything he could have said about the depth chart. He named people.

“Cam was the first one I saw. Then Murawski, obviously, he’s hard to miss. Rowan was still trying to get his breath and he was yelling at me. My whole thing was I couldn’t hear anybody, everybody’s got a helmet on.” He shrugged. “It was good. It was a really good day. I don’t have anything smarter than that.”

Somebody asked whether he had talked to his parents. He said his mom had called four times before he got to his phone.

The coach

I asked Mansour about it on Sunday. His answers about people are usually longer than his answers about football. This one was not.

“I’m glad,” he said. “That’s it. I’m really glad it happened for him. He’s had a hard four weeks and he didn’t make it anybody else’s problem, and there’s not a lot of 21-year-olds who do that.”

Then somebody asked whether it changes anything at quarterback and he said no, plainly, and then went out of his way to come back to it.

“I don’t want to leave that there, because ‘no’ sounds like I’m dismissing him and I’m not. Leo’s our quarterback. Alessio knows that, we talked about it in August and we’ve talked about it since. But it’s not a mercy that he played. He’s good. He’s actually good, and if something happens to Leo I’m not going to be up all night about it.”

He also said he had already talked to Milivojevic’s father, which I did not know until I checked with Marko, who confirmed it and said the call came Saturday night and lasted about six minutes and was mostly about the drive home.

The walk-on’s mother

There is a linebacker on this team named Chris Piwowarczyk who was not on scholarship, started his first college game on Saturday, and was very good in it. He found out on Wednesday, in a hallway, in about nine seconds.

He called his father from the parking lot. His mother found out second, which she has decided not to hold against anybody.

Bernadette Piwowarczyk is 49 and works in scheduling at a medical office in Grand Rapids, and she got the news at 4:40 on a Wednesday afternoon while she was standing at a printer.

“I said, starting what,” she said. “That’s what I said. Starting what. Because he’s said things before, like he’s going to be up on a certain unit, and I have learned not to get ahead of it. So I said starting what, and he said the game, Mom, and I sat down.”

She said she called eleven people. She has a list, on paper, of who she called and in what order, because she did not want to miss anybody and then have it come up at Christmas.

They drove over Saturday morning, her and her husband and their daughter and her husband’s brother, and they got there at nine for a noon game because none of them could think of a reason to wait.

“He’s not a big kid,” she said. “I want that in there because it’s the whole thing. Every year somebody has told him he’s too short, since he was in eighth grade, and he just kept going and doing it anyway and not saying anything about it. He doesn’t complain. He has never once complained to me.”

She said she did not see either of his best plays live, because she was watching the wrong end of the field both times, and had to be told what happened by the man behind her.

The first ten minutes

Before any of the good parts, there was a stretch of Saturday afternoon that everyone in that stadium recognized immediately and nobody enjoyed.

Michigan State scored fast, and then Grambling scored, and it was tied, and the noise in the building went out like somebody had unplugged it.

Terrance Vaught is 46, supervises a warehouse in Holt and has had four seats in the south end since 2009. He described those ten minutes as a physical feeling and then apologized for describing it that way.

“You know how you know,” he said. “The whole section just went, ugh. Nobody said anything. It was like everybody at once decided to be quiet. I looked at my kid and he looked at me and neither of us said anything about it because what are you going to say. It’s the first quarter.”

It lasted about ten minutes and it has not come back since. Vaught said he did not think about it again until Sunday, when his son brought it up at the kitchen table.

Four minutes in the second quarter

The other thing that happened Saturday was a call that went against Michigan State in a game Michigan State won by 49 points, and the reaction to it was the single loudest thing this stadium has produced in several years.

Ten seconds left in the half. Michigan State ahead by two touchdowns, at the goal line. Crishon McCray went up in the end zone with somebody hanging on him and came down with the football, and the officials decided the ball moved when he hit the ground.

Nothing about it mattered. The score was 21-7 and it finished 56-7.

Julie Tarnowski, who is 51 and drives a school bus for Waverly and has had the same two seats since her father died in 2011, threw a cup.

“I threw a cup,” she said. “There was ice in it. I’m not proud of it and I would do it again.”

She was not the only one.

“Do you want to know the honest reason?” Tarnowski said. “Because we haven’t had anything to be mad about together in a long time. Everybody’s been mad separately. About the coach, about the athletic director, about all of it. That was the first time in I don’t know how long that the whole place was mad about the same stupid thing at the same time. It felt fantastic.”

She said she had a sore throat on Sunday and had to call in a substitute for her morning route.

A man who gave up his tickets

Lou Dabrowski lives in Okemos, threw away his renewal notice in March after forty-one straight seasons, and told me last week that he would rather be annoyed than be right.

He watched Saturday’s game in his garage, on a television bolted to a shelf above a workbench, while doing something to a snowblower in September.

I called him Sunday afternoon.

“Well, I’m annoyed,” he said.

He was not calling it a conversion. He said the word “Grambling” four times in eleven minutes, twice with an emphasis that made his position obvious. He said his neighbor Ed had texted him at halftime with three exclamation points, and that Ed is a man who gets excited about carpet.

Then he said something else.

“The quarterback thing at the end. The kid who wasn’t playing. That was nice. I don’t have any analysis on it, I’m not going to pretend I do. It was just nice to watch. My wife came out to the garage for that part and she does not come out to the garage.”

I asked him about the seats. He said the ticket office had sent him something in July and he had not thrown that one away, which is not the same as calling them, and that he was aware of the difference.

“I’m not doing anything in September,” he said. “Ask me in November. If they’re 6-3 in November you can call me and I’ll say something dumb.”

The quarterback who is coming back

On Saturday at noon, Eastern Michigan will come up US-23 from Ypsilanti, and its quarterback will be Noah Kim, who was Michigan State’s quarterback in 2023.

That is a story about how a group of people treated a 20-year-old three years ago, and what, if anything, they would like to do about it now.

Kim started for Michigan State during the worst institutional collapse this university’s athletic department has had in living memory. He did not cause it. He was a kid who had waited his turn and finally got the job in the exact season when the job was radioactive, and he took it in the mouth for a year, and then he left.

He went to Coastal Carolina. Then he went to Eastern Michigan. He got an extra year from the NCAA and he is 24 now, in his seventh year of college football, which means he has been playing this sport since some of the freshmen in his own locker room were in seventh grade.

Nobody who currently works for Michigan State football was here when he was.

Vaught, the warehouse supervisor from Holt, wants to say something about 2023 and has been waiting a while for somebody to ask him.

“I was terrible to that kid,” he said. “I want to be specific, because it’s easy to say it soft. I stood up in the fourth quarter of a game we were losing by 30 and I called him things. Loud. Loud enough that a woman two rows down turned around.”

He said his son was eleven at the time and was sitting next to him.

“That’s the part. My kid heard me do it. He was eleven and he heard his dad scream at a college kid, and he asked me in the car if the quarterback could hear us and I said no. Which is a lie. They can hear you. I know they can hear you, I’ve been going since I was in college.”

Vaught said he is going Saturday. He said he has not decided what he is doing when Kim comes out of the tunnel.

“I’m not going to boo him. That much I know. Whether I stand up and clap for the other team’s quarterback in my own stadium, I don’t know, that feels like a lot. Maybe I just sit there and don’t do anything.”

What Mansour knows about him

Almost nothing, which is its own strange fact.

“I’ve never met him,” Mansour said. “Somebody told me on Sunday and I said okay, and then I went and looked it up. Which probably tells you how much of that history is in this building right now. Everybody here got here in December.”

He was asked how he would handle it with his team, whether he would say anything about it in a meeting. He said no, and then he said something that was not about football.

“He’s a guy who’s still playing. Seventh year. That’s a person who really likes doing this, or he’d have stopped, because there are easier things to do than be a seventh-year quarterback at your third school.” Then, and this was the only sharp thing he said all afternoon: “I don’t need our people to have a feeling about him. He didn’t do anything to anybody.”

A note about 56-7

I do not have football vocabulary and I am not going to pretend to have acquired it over one weekend. What I can tell you is what the people who do have it were saying afterward, which was some version of: it was Grambling.

The Spartans played a school that is not in their financial universe, and they beat it very badly, and every person I talked to in that building said so before I asked. The head coach said it in his first ninety seconds. A staffer said it to me twice in one conversation.

So the number is not the story, and if you came here for a verdict on whether this is working, I do not have one and neither does anybody else.

What I have is a scoreboard operator named Gerald who has worked in that stadium since 1994 and who told me, unprompted, on the concourse, that the loudest he heard it Saturday was not any of the touchdowns.

It was the fourth quarter, he said. The backup quarterback.

“Which makes no sense,” he said, “because we were up forty-two.”

Michigan Avenue, about seven o’clock

Renée Sobczak has tended bar on the same block of Michigan Avenue for nine years and has a very reliable instrument for measuring a Michigan State football season, which is how long people stay.

“Last year they came in and they had one and they left,” she said. “Two years ago they came in mad. You could set your watch. Twenty minutes and somebody’s telling me about the athletic director.”

Saturday, she said, was the first night in a while where the place had a wave at six, another at seven, and people still in the booths at nine who had clearly not planned on being there.

She is 38 and grew up in Bath and does not particularly follow football, which she will tell you within about a minute of meeting her, and she has strong feelings about the crowd anyway because they are her Saturdays.

“They were nice,” she said. “That’s the whole review. Nobody was a problem. A guy tipped me forty on eighty and told me he hadn’t had a good one in a while, and I said congratulations, and I genuinely did not know what happened in the game at that point. I found out about the backup quarterback thing from four different tables. Four. Everybody wanted to tell me about the backup quarterback.”

She said the only argument she heard all night was about the call at the goal line.

Saturday

Eastern Michigan is 1-1. Chris Creighton has coached there for more than twelve years and by every account is very good at his job and very well liked by people who do it, and he took a program that used to be a joke and made it not a joke, which is a harder thing to do than what anybody at Michigan State is currently attempting.

Their roster has Michigan kids all over it. A running back from Hartland. A running back from Portage. A receiver from Howell. A defensive back from Trenton.

Those are boys from thirty and sixty and ninety minutes away who Michigan State did not take, and I am not going to turn that into a grievance, because every program in every state has a list like that and most of them are nobody’s fault.

It is worth knowing when they run out of the tunnel that some of their parents grew up going to this stadium.

Kickoff is noon. Marko and Dina Milivojevic are not coming, because it is five hours each way and they were just here, and because their son is unlikely to play.

Marko said they will watch it at home, and then he said the thing that parents say, which is that they will probably drive up anyway if the weather is good.