The first board on this site with a football game underneath it. Michigan State 56, Grambling State 7, and the specific thing Eastern Michigan would actually prove written next to every name.
Last week this page had to move on decisions and information because there was nothing else. Now there are numbers, and the numbers are enormous, and almost none of them are worth what they look like. Michigan State put up 618 yards at 9.4 a play against a mid-tier FCS program. That is what a Power Four roster is supposed to do to a mid-tier FCS program. The scoreboard is not the evidence here.
What is evidence: how a player looked doing his actual job, whether a specific worry showed up or didn’t, and what happened on the handful of snaps where the opponent was competitive. Grambling’s opening possession qualifies. So does a fourth-and-goal sequence in a game that had already been decided. Most of the rest is a scrimmage with a crowd.
So every entry below carries a line about Eastern Michigan. Not a prediction. The Eagles are 1-1, they beat Sacramento State and lost to San Jose State, and they are a MAC team, which means Saturday is a slightly harder version of the same problem: it can disprove things much more easily than it can prove them. Where an entry couldn’t be given an honest Saturday line, it got cut.
Movement here comes from what a player did on the field, weighted down hard by who he did it against. A big number against Grambling State is worth less than a small number in a difficult moment, and the difficult moments on Saturday were the first ten minutes and about four plays at the end of the half.
Sixteen carries, 147 yards, two touchdowns, a long of 33. Nine yards a carry is a number you can wave away against this opponent, and the way he got there is not. He broke tackles he didn’t have to break, he was decisive on the first read, and the second half was mostly him running behind a line that had started moving people. Nothing about his standing changed, because it was already at the top. What changed is that everyone outside the building has now watched it once.
The one thing the day did not settle is workload. Sixteen carries in a game that was over by the third quarter is just what was left after the score got out of hand.
The completion rate is the least interesting thing here and it is the number everybody is going to repeat. Against this opponent a redshirt freshman should complete a lot of passes. What actually moved his price: he was clean in the pocket when the pocket was clean, he took what the coverage gave without forcing anything, no interceptions, and he ran six times for 24 yards with three of them moving the chains. The 43-yard throw to Braylon Collier on the first possession was placed away from a defender playing vertical cushion, which is a decision more than an arm.
The operational half matters as much. Michigan State did not take a delay of game, did not burn an early timeout on confusion, and substituted cleanly all afternoon. That is the specific thing this staff said it wanted from him in Week 1, and it happened.
Jordan Hall eight tackles and two for loss. Brady Pretzlaff seven tackles and three for loss. Chris Piwowarczyk four tackles and two for loss in his first career start, as a walk-on, over Cam Stodghill. Seven tackles for loss between three linebackers, on a team total of 18, against an offense whose entire purpose is to make linebackers wrong.
Start with the opening drive, where they were wrong twice and it cost seven points. They were standing too far forward, which was a call rather than a mistake, and the misdirection to the fullback went behind them because that is what it is designed to do. The room did not fix that. The staff did, in about four minutes on the bench. What the room did was play the rest of the game without the error recurring.
Seven catches for 105 and 30 more on the ground, out of a receiver room where five players caught passes. He was the most-used receiver on the field and he was used in more ways than anyone else, which is the part that suggests it wasn’t an accident of coverage. He also dropped one and volunteered it to reporters before anybody asked.
He may be emerging as the first option in this offense. The depth chart still says Crishon McCray, and McCray caught two touchdowns and returned five punts, so nobody has been displaced. One game is one game. But if a staff wants to know who its best receiver is, the way it finds out is by moving him around and seeing what holds, and that is what happened Saturday.
Four of five for 100 yards and two touchdowns with Grambling’s second unit on the field. The football content of that is close to zero and he said so himself. The Rowan Merlino touchdown was a five-yard drag that Merlino carried 54 yards, and the throw to Eddie Whiting was behind him and Whiting caught it anyway.
His stock moves for a different reason. A backup quarterback who lost a public competition in August came out for garbage time and his teammates lost their minds, twice, hard enough that somebody shoved the head coach from behind. That tells you what the locker room thinks of him, which is the one question about Milivojevic a stat sheet could never answer. He also spoke publicly for the first time this season and did not relitigate anything.
Zero sacks allowed and one penalty in the entire game, a hold. For a unit that spent all of August being described as the thing most likely to make everything else unreachable, that is the best possible version of a first day. Ben Murawski was solid in both phases and sealed edges for Cam Edwards, including a block he was still finishing ten yards downfield on the 33-yard run. Nick Sharpe was moving people at the first and second level. Conner Moore was good in both phases. Rustin Young was up and down in the run game and mostly up, and got off blocks into space, which is the athletic case for putting him at center in the first place.
The caveats are large and they are the same caveats as everything else on this page. This was an FCS front. One penalty is a number that says as much about a game being over as it does about discipline. And one member of this group is in the Fallen column below.
This is a small sample and it is a bad one. An option team threw the ball almost never, converted two third downs through the air, and both were contested catches where a receiver used his body to box Brantley out at the catch point. He was not targeted again after that. Neither play was a blown coverage or a missed assignment. He was there, and he lost the ball.
It is out of character, which is why it counts as movement rather than noise. Two reps are barely anything, and both of them came on third down. There is no version of Saturday where a corner wants his only two targets to look like that.
A sophomore who was playing on the edge in the spring, now inside, on the lighter side for the position, against an offense whose entire design is to come off the ball low and displace an interior lineman. He got displaced. It happened more than once on the opening drive and it was a real part of why two runs went for very long yardage.
The head coach put a share of it on himself for having Simmons in there on that drive, and kept it separate from the alignment problem. That is fair and it does not change the entry. Nobody called Simmons into getting displaced. He lost the rep.
He gave up several pressures. It was not a disaster and the quarterback was never sacked, and on a day where the group as a whole graded out well, he did his job and not much more. That is why he sits in this column: on a line where three players were finishing blocks ten yards downfield, one guard was holding his ground and stopping there.
Pressures allowed against an FCS front do not stay flat against better ones. That is the whole concern.
A lot of this roster did not move, and that is the correct outcome of a 49-point win over an FCS opponent. Some players were fine and unremarkable. Some had no opportunity to be anything. Some had a big afternoon that told you nothing you didn’t already know. Dressing any of that up as movement would make this page worthless by October, so here it is flat.
Every objection to a 6-foot-7 tackle playing center was specific: pad level against a nose playing under him, snap mechanics while making the line calls, movement in short yardage from a high stance, and whether the identification calls should come from a man learning the position. Saturday tested exactly none of them in a way that counts. The exchanges were clean. The line took one penalty as a unit. He got off blocks into space, which was always the case for the move. Grambling State does not have the nose tackle that this argument is about.
He is included in the offensive line entry above because the group deserved the credit. As a standalone question this is untouched.
The most-discussed personnel idea of the offseason after the center. He was on the field, he was part of the fourth-and-goal sequence on a dive that got blown up, and there is no line on the stat sheet that says whether the theory works. The theory was always about whether a defense has to change something when he moves, and against an opponent this overmatched, nobody had to change anything about anything.
Last week’s board said option football aims everything at the flat and he would get tested fifteen-plus times in the run game. Then Michigan State didn’t play its 4-2-5. It played three-man fronts, four-man fronts and a five-man front, because of the opponent, which means the fifth defensive back was not on the field for a lot of the snaps this entry was written about. He does not have a line on the stat sheet. There is nothing here.
Liam Boyd went eight for eight on extra points and did not attempt a field goal. Rhys Dakin punted one time, for 52 yards. The head coach spent Week 1 pointing at the kicking game as the thing first-year staffs neglect, and then the game was so lopsided that the kicking game barely happened. Nobody learned whether there is a placekicker here. Crishon McCray’s five punt returns for 78 yards is the only special teams volume on the page and it came off seven Grambling punts.
Mansour called both sides, Sheridan was in the box, and the arrangement everybody was worried about ran for three hours without producing a single visible problem. Substitutions were clean on both sides, including on possessions that changed quickly.
What kept it flat rather than up: none of it was tested. There was no two-minute drill against a defense that could stop anything, no sequence where the offense and the defense needed the same twenty seconds. The one moment where a call sequence went sideways, at the end of the half, the head coach put on himself in public and did not put any of it on his coordinator.
Michigan State lined up in three-man fronts, four-man fronts and a five-man front against a run-heavy option team, which is a great deal more multiple than anybody outside the building expected from a first-year staff. That is a real fact and it is the single most interesting thing on the tape. It is also completely unreadable as identity, because a game plan built for the option is by definition not the base plan.
The other half is that the fronts got beaten for ten minutes and then were not beaten again, and the fix was one adjustment about depth rather than a new front. Whose defense this is has become a question people are asking out loud, which it wasn’t in August.
Carson Coakley, the No. 1 overall player, put Michigan State in his top group with an official visit scheduled, competing with Alabama and Indiana. Jake Landing named them to his top group with an official scheduled, where they are a long shot. Michigan State is the leader for Sateki Vaeao, Devin Jennings, George Dickinson and James Thomas. Diego Fajardo has them in his top five. On the other side of it: Patrick Paul cut them loose, Josh Ingold is going the other way, and the staff dropped Jeremiah Stick rather than keep spending on him.
All of that is genuine forward movement and none of it belongs in a column that moves on football games. Recruiting is graded in December.
Last week this entry said the measuring stick was measuring something unstable. Since then Notre Dame lost to unranked Wisconsin 38-10, a week after Miami beat them 42-6, and dropped out of the Top 25 entirely. The game this entire early schedule was hung on is now a road trip to a program in freefall that people are going to expect Michigan State to win.
That is a different kind of pressure than the one this fan base spent eight months preparing for, and nobody here has any practice at it. It also puts a much heavier weight on this Saturday, because the trap is no longer three weeks away.
Eastern Michigan is a better team than Grambling State and a worse team than everything that comes after. That makes Saturday the last game on this schedule where a bad afternoon would be a genuine emergency and a good one would still not be evidence. The right way to watch it is to ignore the score entirely and count the same four things: wrong gaps, pressures allowed, pre-snap penalties, and how many times somebody has to look at the sideline before a snap. All four travel to October.