EAST LANSING, Mich. — Michigan State won by 28, gained 495 yards at 8.3 a play, did not punt, and was not penalized once, and for most of the first half of Saturday’s game the noise inside Spartan Stadium was the noise a crowd makes when it has decided in advance how this is going to end. Eastern Michigan’s running back was running through people. Third downs were going the other way. A team that had scored 56 points a week earlier was tied at 7 and then leading by three and it did not feel like leading by three to anybody in the building, including the players, several of whom described the same specific sound and used almost the same words for it.
Over three days I spoke with 12 Michigan State players, all of them granted anonymity so they could talk about a comfortable win without it reading as ingratitude, and about a teammate without it reading as a knife. They are identified by class and position group only, and most of them are men I have talked to before, in August and after the opener. Two of them asked me first how much trouble the last piece got anybody in. The answer was none, which surprised them.
Almost nobody wanted to talk about the second half, which was the part they were good at.
Braydon Bennett
Eastern Michigan’s tailback carried 18 times for 111 yards and caught eight passes for 55 more, nearly all of it before halftime, and every defensive player I spoke to brought him up before I did. He is 5-foot-9. He is not fast in a way that shows up on a stopwatch. The fifth-year safety, who has been playing college football since 2021 and has a low opinion of most of the people he tackles, spent about four minutes on him without much prompting.
“Nobody got him down. That’s the whole first half, that’s the entire thing,” he said. “I don’t need a meeting about it. He is a hard man to tackle and we tackled him like it was a Tuesday. One guy at a time, one shoulder at a time, arriving all soft. And he doesn’t fall, he just kind of keeps going through you, and by the second one of those you can feel our sideline getting quiet.”
The third-year linebacker was more interested in the third downs, which he considered the actual failure and which nobody outside the building has said much about. Eastern Michigan converted four of its first six, and Michigan State was fine on first down and fine on second down all afternoon.
“The runs were bad and the runs are fixable. The third downs were worse,” he said. “Every one of them, somebody was standing there wide open. Not beat, open. Which means it was us not getting lined up right or somebody carrying the wrong guy, and I’ve seen the tape so I know which one it was on two of them and it was me on one.”
A fourth-year defensive back described the first quarter as the closest thing to a familiar feeling he has had this season, and then got annoyed at himself for saying so.
“You could hear it happening in the stands. That low thing,” he said. “I hate that I know what that sounds like. I’ve been here three years and I can tell you exactly what forty thousand people sound like when they’ve decided we’re about to do it again.”
The true freshman defensive lineman, who told me in September that he did not understand why the veterans looked gray during Grambling’s opening drive, said he understood it a little better now and still not completely.
“It was 10-7 them and guys were acting like it was the fourth quarter,” he said. “And I’m over there like, we’re going to score four more times, what are we doing. Which we did. So I was right. But I also don’t think I get to be right about it, because I wasn’t here for whatever they’re remembering.”
Halftime
Michigan State allowed three points after halftime, sacked Noah Kim twice, broke up passes it had not been near in the first half, and finished the day with two interceptions, one of which Tre Bell returned 71 yards. Every defensive player I asked described the halftime correction as small and boring, and several of them were visibly disappointed that it was not more interesting than it was.
“Slow it down. Let it come to you. Fit it with two guys and quit trying to be the one who makes it,” the third-year linebacker said. “That’s it. That’s the whole halftime. I was standing there waiting for a hard conversation and it was four minutes and then guys were eating orange slices.”
“Halftime was Coach Rossi, all of it,” a fourth-year defensive back said. “Which is normal, that’s his side of the ball. He told us we were going back to the stuff he’s been running for twenty years and to quit worrying about the rest of it. Coach Mansour didn’t come over to us at all, he was with the offense the whole time. And then we went out and it was over, so.”
The tackling itself is the part they keep coming back to, because it is the part that does not have a fix you can draw. A fifth-year defensive lineman, the most talkative man in the building and the one who most enjoys being argued with, said the second half looked different for a reason that is going to sound stupid written down.
“We hit him with two guys in the second half and he went down like everybody else does,” he said. “That’s the adjustment. I keep waiting to find out it was more than that and it wasn’t more than that.”
Several defensive players volunteered something about Derrick Simmons without being asked, which does not happen often and which I noted at the time because the same thing happened in reverse three weeks ago, when the sophomore defensive tackle had a rough opener and nobody said anything at all.
“He was in the backfield all day and he did it against a center who was moving people,” the fourth-year edge rusher said. “I’m glad for him. He took a lot last week and he didn’t say a word about it to anybody, he just came in Monday.”
Charles
Charles Brantley was beaten for a 44-yard touchdown in the second quarter, missed a tackle on Bennett in the flat that cost about twenty more, and gave up a 22-yard completion on third-and-9 in the fourth. It was the second consecutive Saturday he had been the specific reason for points. He was not removed from the defense at any point, and he is still the kick returner, and he did not speak to reporters this week.
Nine of the 12 players I spoke to brought him up on their own before I asked. All nine said a version of the same thing.
“Charles is the fastest guy on our defense and he is the reason we get to play half the coverages we play,” the fifth-year safety said. “He’s had two bad games. He knows he’s had two bad games. Everybody in there knows it and nobody in there is worried about him.”
The fourth-year defensive back, who dresses next to him, was less calm about it.
“People act like we don’t watch it. We watch the same tape you watch, we watch more of it than you do,” he said. “What I don’t love is guys who never played corner in their life going on the radio and talking about him like he’s a subject on a show. He was at my house Sunday. He’s fine.”
A fifth-year offensive lineman who has been in the building through three head coaches said the thing that seemed obvious to him and does not appear to be obvious to anybody outside.
“He’s still out there. Coach didn’t take him out and he’s still returning kicks,” he said. “I don’t know what else anybody wants.”
Only one player addressed the fact that the head coach has now declined to grade Brantley five separate times in public, and he did it dryly.
“He’s never going to say it. Not about anybody,” the fourth-year edge rusher said. “Which is nice for us. It’s probably annoying for you.”
The part they actually wanted to talk about
Michigan State ran the ball 39 times for 209 yards and did not get anywhere with it for most of the first quarter, and the offensive players I spoke with all wanted to describe the middle stretch of the second quarter, when it stopped being difficult. Eastern Michigan’s defensive tackle, Warren-Stevens Tayou, had all four of the sacks and, by the account of the men blocking him, a good deal more than that.
“He beat me twice and one of them was a sack and I don’t have an excuse for it,” a third-year offensive lineman said. “He’s heavy and he plays low and he doesn’t stop after the first move. We were trying to run inside of him and it wasn’t there, it was never going to be there, and I think we all knew that by the third series.”
What happened next is the part they enjoyed. Michigan State stopped running inside, started running wide, and started using the tight ends — Brennan Paracheck had three catches for 51 yards, Eddie Whiting three for 63 — against a safety who could not handle either of them. Cam Edwards finished with 158 yards on 22 carries.
“Coach came over on the sideline in the first quarter and said we’re done running at him, we’re running around him, get to the perimeter and stay there,” a fifth-year offensive lineman said. “That was maybe ten minutes into the game. He didn’t wait for halftime and he didn’t make anybody feel bad about it. And then it was easy for two and a half quarters.”
The second-year receiver, who has been a reliable source of complaints all season, had one about how boring his afternoon became.
“He threw fifteen in the first half and six in the second and I ran routes on all of them anyway,” he said. “KK gets seven catches, I get two, and then we’re just running it. I’m not mad. I’m a little mad.”
A fourth-year offensive lineman brought up the penalties, which is the statistic the offensive line has quietly attached itself to.
“One flag in two games. That’s us,” he said. “That’s not an accident. Ask me again in November and maybe I look dumb.”
South Bend
Notre Dame lost 42-6 to Miami, lost 38-10 at home to an unranked Wisconsin team, fell out of the Top 25 after opening the season No. 3, and then beat Rice 52-10. Michigan State plays there Saturday. I asked all 12 players what they thought they were walking into and got, roughly, three different football teams.
“They’re hurt. You can see it,” the second-year receiver said. “Two teams punched them in the mouth and they didn’t do anything back either time. I watched both of those games.”
The junior running back thought that was nonsense and said so, cheerfully, in the same room forty minutes later.
“Fifty-two on Rice,” he said. “Everybody keeps saying it was Rice. Okay. When we beat Eastern by twenty-eight everybody said we were rolling. Which is it?”
The fifth-year defensive lineman had thought about it more than anybody and arrived nowhere.
“Here’s the problem. Both of those things can be true and I’ve been going back and forth on it since Sunday,” he said. “They lost by 36 and 28 and those were not close games, they were embarrassments. Also they’ve got better players than us at like six spots and their tackles have been playing since I was in high school. So I don’t know. I think they’re going to be desperate and I don’t love that.”
Nobody I spoke with said anything about the crowd, which surprised me, so I started asking about it directly. The answers were all some version of the fifth-year safety’s.
“It’s the first road game for about half our two-deep. I don’t know how that’s going to go and neither does anybody else in there,” he said. “I know it’s a place where they play music between plays and that’s about it, and I’ve been in louder.”
The third-year linebacker, who told me in the summer that he wanted one game this season where something went wrong and the sideline held, and who told me after Grambling that he did not think he had gotten his look yet, said Saturday still did not count.
“Nothing was on fire again. We were up the whole time,” he said. “Ask me Saturday night. If it’s 14-10 in South Bend and their crowd is going and we give up a long one, I’ll tell you exactly what our bench looked like, because I’ll be watching it.”
He mentioned that a defensive back had already told him he was going to do the same thing, and that they had agreed to compare notes.