I want to talk about the four minutes in the second quarter when this entire stadium lost its mind about a play that did not matter even a little bit.
Here is the setup, and I am going to explain it the way it was explained to me by the guy standing behind me, because I did not understand it at the time either.
Michigan State was winning by two touchdowns. There were ten seconds left in the first half. They were extremely close to the end zone. They threw it, a guy named Crishon McCray caught it, everyone within forty rows of me was already celebrating, and then the referees said he did not catch it.
What happened next was the loudest I have ever heard this stadium and I have been to every home game since I was a freshman.
People were screaming. My friend Malia, who came to the game because her boyfriend had an extra ticket and who does not follow football at all, was screaming. She could not have told you what the rule was. Nobody around us could have told you what the rule was. It did not slow anybody down.
They put the replay on the big screen twice and both times it got worse.
Somebody two rows up threw ice. Then somebody else threw ice. There was a brief window where a lot of ice was in the air.
Then it was halftime and everybody went and got a pretzel and by the third quarter nobody mentioned it again.
Michigan State won 56-7
That is the score. I checked it three times because it looks fake.
I do not have any football analysis for you. That is not what this is. If you want somebody to tell you about the defense there are approximately nine hundred men on the internet who would like to do that for you at length.
What I can tell you is that the mood in the student section on Saturday was completely different from last year and the year before and honestly from the last four years, and that difference did not come from the score.
It came from the fact that nobody was embarrassed at any point.
Sam Ocampo, a senior in supply chain from Wyandotte, put it in a way that a lot of people said a version of.
“I came in ready to be a bit,” he said. “Like I had jokes loaded. I had a whole thing prepared for if it went bad, because it always goes bad, and then it just didn’t go bad and I had nothing to do with any of it.”
The first ten minutes were bad, briefly
I do want to say that it was not immediately great.
Early on, the other team scored, and it was tied, and my entire section went silent in a way that was unsettling. I have never heard sixty thousand people all decide to shut up at the same time.
Anna Kuiper is a freshman from Grand Rapids and this was her first game.
“Everybody just stopped,” she said. “I didn’t know what was happening. I asked the girl next to me if that was bad and she said yeah kind of, and then like ten minutes later everybody was fine again. I still don’t know what changed.”
Nobody I talked to could explain what changed. Several people told me confidently, and every explanation was different, and I am not going to print any of them.
What people did in the fourth quarter
Here is the actual interesting thing about Saturday and I did not expect to be writing about it.
Michigan State was up 42-7 going into the fourth quarter. That is the exact score where everybody leaves. That is the score where you go beat the crowd and get in line at Crunchy’s at four instead of six.
A lot of people did leave. Probably a third of the student section was gone by the middle of the fourth.
But two-thirds of us stayed, which is not what happens, and there was a specific reason, and the reason is that a different quarterback came in.
I did not know who he was. I want to be honest about that. A guy behind me said “oh that’s the other one” and I said which other one and he explained the whole situation to me in about nine seconds, which is that this guy was supposed to be the starter and then he wasn’t.
Then he threw it to somebody who ran for what felt like a very long way and scored, and the entire team on the sideline ran at him.
You could see it from the student section. The whole bench emptied. For a backup quarterback. In the fourth quarter of a game that was already over by an hour.
Priya Ramaswamy, a sophomore in kinesiology, described the reaction around her.
“Everyone got so loud and I would say sixty percent of us had no idea who he was,” she said. “But you could tell it mattered because of the guys on the sideline. Like they were losing it. So we lost it. It was very much a situation where you just go with it.”
Then he threw another one and everybody stayed for that too.
The group chat evidence
I asked people to send me screenshots and got 41 of them, which is 41 more than I got in August when I asked the same thing.
A sample of what people were actually saying, with permission and with names removed:
“ok so are we good?? is this a real thing now or”
“my dad has texted me 6 times he never texts me”
“WHY did they take that away”
“someone explain the rule” (nobody explained the rule)
“this is the first time ive been at a game where we were winning at halftime and i graduate in may”
That last one is from a senior in Bessey and I have verified it and it is true.
The walk back
Something I noticed and then confirmed with about a dozen people: the walk out of the stadium was slow in a way it has not been slow.
Usually people leave fast. Everyone is going somewhere and nobody is talking about the game because there is nothing to say about the game.
Saturday there was a clog on the ramps because people kept stopping to talk. I got stuck behind two guys who were re-enacting the catch in the end zone with their hands, in the middle of a ramp, while about two hundred people went around them.
Jaylen Brister, a junior in advertising from Ann Arbor, said his group did not have a plan afterward for the first time in his three years here.
“Normally we know exactly what we’re doing after,” he said. “We leave in the third, we go back, we do something else. Saturday we just kind of ended up on somebody’s porch for four hours and then it was dark.”
He also said his phone was at 4 percent, which came up in a lot of my interviews.
The people who actually know things
There are people on this campus who follow this closely and I always talk to a couple of them because they see a completely different game than I do.
Devonte Ferrell is a sophomore from Southfield who watches every snap and has opinions about all of them.
“It was Grambling,” he said, immediately, before I asked anything. “I’m happy. I’m happy, I had a great time, I’m not going to sit here and be miserable about it. But everybody needs to relax for one more week at minimum.”
He said that three separate people had come up to him after the game to ask him if the team was good now.
“Three people. In person. Who don’t normally talk to me about football at all. That’s the part that got me. That hasn’t happened in years.”
Grace Vanderhoof is a second-year grad student who has been coming to games since she was eight because her mom went here.
“I’m going to enjoy it,” she said. “I have spent four years being the person who says well actually and I’m not doing it this week. Ask me after Notre Dame.”
Does anybody know about the band situation
Related item that I am obligated to mention: Grambling brought their band, which is one of the most famous marching bands in the country, and they were extremely good, and about half the stadium was still in the concourse when they started.
I did watch it. It was the best halftime I have seen here.
The Spartan Marching Band played too, obviously, and there was a whole thing where people were waiting to see if the head coach would do anything about it because he was in that band, and he did not do anything about it, and he was standing on the sideline with a piece of paper the entire time.
Somebody in my section was very upset about this on his behalf.
So is anyone going next week
Michigan State plays Eastern Michigan at noon on Saturday. Same time, same stadium, same everything.
I asked twenty-two people whether they were going and the answers surprised me.
Eleven yes. Six no. Five said “probably” in a tone that meant no.
The yeses were not particularly about the football.
Malia is going.
“I had a really good time,” she said. “That’s it. That’s my whole reason. I was outside all day, I saw people I hadn’t seen since May, I got a really good picture. I’ll go again.”
Colton Reznik, a freshman from Traverse City, is not going, and his reason is the most freshman reason possible.
“I have so much work,” he said. “I have so much work. I did not do anything on Saturday and now it’s Monday and I have so much work.”
The nos and probably-nos mostly said some version of that. Noon games eat the entire day. If you go at 8 for tailgating and you are not back to your room until 5, that is Saturday, gone.
The thing about their quarterback
Four separate people brought this up to me without prompting, which for a piece about student attendance is a lot.
Eastern Michigan’s quarterback used to play here. He was Michigan State’s quarterback in 2023. His name is Noah Kim.
I was a freshman in 2023 and I did go to those games and I do not have a strong memory of him, which I suspect is the case for most people my age, because 2023 was a blur for reasons that had nothing to do with anybody who played quarterback.
Sam Ocampo remembers.
“I was a sophomore. It was rough for that guy,” he said. “People were awful. Like, in the stadium, out loud. And I remember thinking at the time, none of this is his fault, and then not saying anything about it, because I was 19 and I wasn’t going to be the guy who defends the quarterback.”
He said he is planning to clap when Kim comes out.
“I’m going to clap. If I’m the only one, I’m the only one. It’s not a big statement. He was a college kid who got put in a bad spot at this school and that’s it.”
Nobody else I asked had a plan. Most people did not know it was happening.
Practical stuff for Saturday
Noon kickoff again. Gates at 10, student gates at 10:30, which means if you want to be in the front section you are leaving your building at 9:15, which means you are up at 8:30, which is a lot to ask twice in eight days.
The weather is supposed to be fine.
Tickets appear to be easy to get, which was also true last week and stopped being true by Thursday. If the trend from last week holds, prices go up Wednesday night and everybody complains about it Thursday morning.
If you did not go last week and you have been going back and forth about whether it is worth it, here is my only actual argument: it was fun. It has not been fun in a while. That is a low bar and I do not care.