Locked On Spartans, Wednesday. Will Hunter here, Shane Sheehan is at his house, and I'm going to be honest with everybody, we did seventy minutes Sunday and we covered about a third of it, so today is a landfill. We're going to dump everything in and then we're going to talk about Saturday.
It's a good landfill though.
It's a fine landfill. How's the thing.
The thing is a car wash fundraiser and it is happening in my driveway and there are nine children out there and one hose.
Great. Start where we have to start. The first drive.
I want to say something about the first drive and I want to say it before anybody accuses me of being dramatic. I was fine going into that game. I told you Thursday, I said I'd worked myself out of it. I sat down, I had a normal amount of dip, I was fine.
You were fine.
They score in like ninety seconds, right, Collier catches the deep one and then Edwards runs seventeen yards untouched, it's seven nothing, and I'm sitting there going oh, this is going to be pleasant. And then Grambling gets it.
And then Grambling gets it.
Will, I have been watching this football team since I was eleven years old. I know that sound. When the fullback broke it and went thirty and the whole place made that noise, I did not think we were going to lose the game. I never thought we were going to lose to Grambling State, not for one second.
But.
But I felt every single one of the last six years all at once. Like a shove. And then we go three and out on the next drive, in our own end, and I turned the TV down. Not off. Down. Which is a thing I have not done since Rutgers.
Which Rutgers.
You know which Rutgers.
I do know which Rutgers, I wanted the people to hear you say it.
I'm not saying it.
Okay so how long did that last, honestly.
Four minutes? Four minutes. That's the whole scary part of the game, four minutes.
Four minutes and then nothing. And this is the thing I've been chewing on for three days, because the story is not that they won fifty-six to seven. Everybody knew they were going to win. The story is that the exact nightmare showed up on schedule, right on time, first possession, and then it got turned off and it never came back on.
Never came back on.
Grambling did not get another first down. In the whole game.
That's the stat. That's the one I've been sending people.
Five first downs total, four on that drive, one of ten on third down, eighteen tackles for loss.
Eighteen.
Eighteen tackles for loss is a number you get in a video game.
Now do the part where you ruin it.
I'm not going to ruin it, I'm going to say the true thing, which is that it was Grambling State and they are an FCS team and their whole offense is running the football and we stopped them from running the football. That's what happened.
See, you ruined it.
I didn't ruin it, I contextualized it.
Same difference.
Alright, defensively, and I'm going to try to do this without turning into a guy with a laser pointer, because that's not what we do. Everybody spent August being told this was a 4-2-5 team. Four down, two linebackers, five defensive backs, that's the base, that's what we were promised.
Right.
They didn't really play it. Against a team that runs it every down they played three down linemen, they played four, at one point they had five guys with their hand in the dirt and two linebackers behind it, which is an old, old front that you basically never see anymore.
Why.
Because when a team is only going to run it, you want more bodies on the line and you don't need all those defensive backs standing around. And nobody expected that from this staff because nobody's seen this staff do anything.
That's the part I actually like the most and I don't think people are going to talk about it enough. Not that it worked. That they had it ready. It's the first game. You've got one game of tape on yourself in the world, which is zero, and they showed up with three different looks.
And they were wrong on the first drive.
They were so wrong on the first drive.
They were crowding the line of scrimmage so hard that the middle of the field was empty and Grambling ran two plays right into the empty part, one of them for thirty and a touchdown. It's not complicated, honestly. They left the middle of the field open and Grambling ran into the middle of the field.
And then they fixed it.
And then they fixed it, and we don't know if the fix was clever or if it was just, hey, back up. Which is also fine.
It is fine. Back up is a real coaching decision.
Alright, one, Piwowarczyk.
I want to do Piwowarczyk.
Chris Piwowarczyk, walk-on linebacker, starts over Cam Stodghill who is a scholarship player, and has two tackles for loss.
He's shorter and he's thicker. That's the whole reason. They wanted somebody who was harder to move against a team that was going to try to move him, and the guy they picked is a walk-on.
And that's not a fairy tale, that's just a fit thing, but it's also a little bit of a fairy tale.
It's a little bit of a fairy tale. Let it be a little bit of a fairy tale.
Two, Charles Brantley had a bad day.
He did.
Grambling completed two passes all afternoon and both of them were on third down and both of them were on him, and both of them were a receiver just going up and boxing him out for it. And then they never threw at him again.
I don't want to make a week out of it.
I don't either, I'm saying it because if we only say the good stuff we're a press release. He had a bad one. It happens. Derrick Simmons got physically moved off the ball a bunch on that first drive too, and he's a sophomore who just switched positions and he's on the lighter side for it, so, you know, that's real and it's also explainable.
Both those guys are going to be fine.
Probably. Three, the fourth and goal.
Oh boy.
Ten seconds left in the half, fourth and goal from the two, they've already run it three times and gotten nothing, and Mansour throws it. McCray comes down with it in the end zone and the officials say it didn't survive the ground.
The place came unglued.
The place came completely unglued and I have to tell you, for about ninety seconds it was the loudest that stadium has been in years, and the score was twenty-eight to seven.
That's the funny part.
It's a little funny. It also didn't matter at all and by the third quarter nobody was talking about it.
I got eleven texts about it and then I got zero texts about it.
That's exactly right. Burned out in about an hour.
Can I say the thing about the play call though?
Say it.
Three runs from the two and none of them go to Cam Edwards. Cam Edwards is the best player on the team by a distance, he had a hundred and forty-seven yards, and on three straight snaps from the two he's not the guy. That's the part I'd ask about, not the pass.
That's a fair question and I don't have the answer.
Nobody does, it's fine, I'm just saying it out loud.
Four. Actually no. Let's do the offense properly. Hannan.
Nineteen of twenty-three.
Nineteen of twenty-three, two hundred fifty, two touchdowns, no picks, eighty-two percent. In his first career start. Plus he ran it six times for twenty-four and a bunch of those were him pulling it down on third and four and just going and getting it.
That's the part I didn't expect. I expected him to be careful. He was careful and he was also not scared.
The offensive line gave up zero sacks.
Zero.
Six hundred and eighteen yards, nine point four a play, thirty-one first downs, seven for ten on third down, no turnovers, one penalty.
One penalty. In a whole football game. A hold.
I want everybody to understand that a first-year staff, in a first game, with a brand new offense, in front of their own crowd, committed one penalty.
Now do the thing where you ruin it.
I don't have to ruin that one. That one's real. Penalties are a practice thing. You practice the same way whoever's on the schedule.
Thank you.
Edwards, sixteen for a hundred forty-seven, two touchdowns, nine yards a carry, long of thirty-three. He's the best player on the field every single week and I don't think that's going to change.
KK Smith might be the number one receiver.
Seven catches, a hundred and five, and thirty more on the ground. One drop. I think that's the quiet development of the whole day and nobody's talking about it because of the other thing.
Do the other thing.
The other thing.
Fourth quarter. Milivojevic goes in. Four of five, a hundred yards, two touchdowns.
Five-yard drag route.
Five-yard drag to Rowan Merlino, and Merlino catches it with the entire state of Michigan in front of him and takes it fifty-four to the house.
And the sideline.
And the sideline goes absolutely nuts. Starters off the bench. Guys running down the sideline with him.
Will, I got emotional about it and I'm not going to pretend I didn't. That kid started ten games last year. He lost his job in August, in public, and then he had to hold a clipboard and watch a redshirt freshman go nineteen of twenty-three, and then when he finally got in there he went and did that, and every single guy on that team was thrilled for him.
It's the fourth quarter against their backups.
I know what it is.
I'm saying it so nobody thinks we don't know.
I know what it is and I don't care. That's a good locker room thing. You can't manufacture guys being happy for the backup quarterback.
You cannot. And it's an eighteen-yard strike to Eddie Whiting on the next one too, so it wasn't only the one lucky drag.
I've watched it maybe nine times.
Nine.
Nine. It's on my phone.
Okay. Big picture, and then we turn to Saturday. Notre Dame lost thirty-eight to ten. To Wisconsin. Unranked Wisconsin, in September.
They're out of the poll.
They are out of the poll entirely. Two weeks ago they were third in the country and now they are not in the top twenty-five, and we go there in two weeks.
This is the weirdest thing about this season so far and it's only been one week.
Say why.
Because that game was the whole calendar. That was the day we were going to find out what this actually is. You go into South Bend, they're third in the country, you get whatever you get, and even if you get beat sixty to nothing nobody at home really holds it against you.
Right.
And now that's gone. Now it's a program falling apart and everybody's going to spend two weeks telling us we should win it.
That is a completely different kind of week and this fanbase does not have a lot of practice at it.
None. Zero practice. We are extremely good at being underdogs and we are historically bad at being the team that's supposed to.
I want to add one thing though, and I know it's not the fun take. Notre Dame has better players than us. That's just true. Whatever's wrong over there is not that they ran out of talent in nine days.
Sure.
So I'd be careful. I'd be really careful.
You're going to say this every day for two weeks, aren't you.
Every single day.
Saturday. Eastern Michigan, one and one, here, noon. And there is exactly one thing anybody wants to talk about.
Yeah.
Their quarterback is Noah Kim. Seventh-year graduate student, got an NCAA waiver, and he was Michigan State's starting quarterback in twenty twenty-three.
I have thought about this all week and I still don't know how I feel and I'm going to just say all of it out loud and let people take what they want.
Go.
So twenty twenty-three. I want to remind everybody what that actually was, because I think it's already turning into a bad memory people have rounded off. That was the Tucker thing. That was the interim coach, and then the other interim coach, and the whole country reading about our athletic department for reasons that had nothing to do with football, and a bunch of nineteen-year-olds going out on Saturday in the middle of it.
And he's the quarterback.
He's the quarterback for it. And the way people talked about him, Will, including on message boards I was on, was not okay. It wasn't. It was a bunch of grown men taking a really bad year out on a kid who threw a bad interception.
Were you one of them?
I never wrote anything about him personally, I don't think, but I was in those threads and I didn't say anything either. So.
That's most people.
That's most people. And then he left, and I'll be honest, I did not think about him again. Not once. He went to Coastal Carolina and I could not have told you that on Monday. He's been playing football this whole time and I stopped noticing the second he wasn't ours.
Here's where I am on it. I think there's a way of doing this that's worse than booing him.
Which is what.
Which is turning him into a sad story. Making him a guy things happened to. He's not a sad story. He's a twenty-four-year-old who's still playing quarterback in college football in his seventh year because he wanted to keep playing quarterback, and he's the captain of a team that's one and one, and on Saturday he's going to try to beat us.
That's a good way to put it.
He doesn't need us to feel anything about him. He's got a game.
What do you think happens when he comes out of the tunnel?
Honestly? I think it's split and I think it's loud both ways and I think about a third of the stadium has no idea who he is.
That's probably right. My mom's going to that game and she does not know who Noah Kim is.
Does your mom know who Cam Edwards is?
My mom knows who Cam Edwards is. My mom would tell you Cam Edwards is the only good player we have.
Your mom's not that far off.
Don't tell her that.
One more thing on it. Nobody on the current staff was here in twenty twenty-three. Not one person. Mansour has no history with this guy at all. Which means the quarterback on the other sideline knows more about the last version of Michigan State football than our own head coach does.
Huh. Yeah, that's weird.
It doesn't mean anything for Saturday. I just think it's a weird thing to be true.
And on our side it's Hannan's second start ever, and Milivojevic is behind him coming off that fourth quarter. So you've got three quarterbacks in that stadium and all three of them have completely different problems.
That's a good line, Shane.
Thank you. I wrote it down in the car.
I could tell.
Mailbag, quick, we're long. Andrea in Rockford: is anybody actually worried about Eastern Michigan or are we all just performing?
I'm a little worried and I'll tell you the exact reason. It's not their roster, I couldn't name three guys. It's that this is the second straight team nobody respects, and there's a top-ten-caliber trip to South Bend sitting two weeks out, and I don't think twenty-year-olds are any better about that than the rest of us.
Also Chris Creighton has been the head coach there for thirteen years and he is legitimately good at his job. That program used to be the worst job in America and he took it to bowl games.
That's a real coach.
That's a real coach. And they have Michigan kids all over that roster. Mattord's from Hartland, Fracassi's from Howell, Marshall's from Trenton. Those guys will be up for this.
They'll be extremely up for this.
Last one. Devon in Southfield: who's the one guy from Saturday you want to see more of.
Piwowarczyk. Easy. I want to see if that was a matchup thing for one week or if that's a guy now.
I'd say KK Smith. Seven catches, a hundred and five, one drop, and he did it quietly while everybody was watching the quarterback. Alright. Three things Saturday. One, do they play a normal defense now or was that all Grambling-specific. Two, does Hannan look the same when the other team can actually cover somebody. Three, whether we can get out of that stadium at four o'clock without anybody having said anything stupid about Noah Kim.
That third one's not on the team.
No, that one's on us. Locked On Spartans, back Friday, Saturday morning walk-up, Sunday reaction.
Sunday's going to be shorter this week.
Sunday is never shorter.
Sunday's never shorter. Go Green.
