Sign In
Subscribe
The Spartans beat Eastern Michigan 41-13, ran it 39 times for 209 yards, did not punt and were not penalized. Inside the twenty minutes when the run game did not work, a defense that gave away a half before it took one back, and a cornerback having a hard September.
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Michigan State led 20-10 at halftime on Saturday and the building did not believe a word of it.
A full house, sold on the strength of a 56-7 opener, watched an Eastern Michigan tailback named Braydon Bennett come out of arm tackles on a loop and got quieter every time he did. Nobody booed. What happened instead is the thing this fan base has more practice at, where seventy thousand people arrive independently at the same low-grade stomach ache and stop making noise.
Michigan State won 41-13. It ran the ball 39 times for 209 yards, did not punt, was not penalized, converted eight of ten third downs and finished with 495 yards at 8.3 a play. It outscored Eastern Michigan 21-3 after halftime, seven of those points arriving when Tre Bell caught a Noah Kim throw at his own 29 and took it back seventy-one yards.
Both ends of that afternoon have been argued about since Saturday night. The middle is more interesting than either one.
For about twenty minutes of game clock Michigan State could not run the football, against one player, for a reason visible on the second snap of the second possession. What the 28-year-old calling the plays did about it took three series and produced 209 rushing yards on a day that opened with a drive in which Michigan State did not hand off once.
Michigan State’s first possession was eight plays long and every one of them was a throw. Leo Hannan opened with a hitch to KK Smith, then a seam ball to Brennan Paracheck, then Smith again on a dig. On the eighth play, from the eleven, Smith ran a fade against Eastern Michigan corner Caleb Dobbs and Hannan put it back-shoulder into the space Dobbs had already given up. Seven points, no handoffs.
The reason it was not a heavy, conservative opening drive had nothing to do with aggression.
“I didn’t think we could run it,” Nick Mansour said. “That’s the whole reason, it isn’t a feel thing. I watched them play San Jose State twice and I thought their three-technique was going to be a problem for us in there, the tackle who lines up on the outside shoulder of the guard, Tayou, he’s their best player. I’d rather find that out on second down in the second quarter than on the first snap off a script I wrote Tuesday. So we threw it. Then Leo was really good, which makes it look smarter than it was.”
An Eastern Michigan defensive assistant, granted anonymity because he is not authorized to discuss game plans, said the opening drive was the one part of Saturday nobody on his staff had prepared for.
“Everything we did all week was about the back,” he said. “First drive they don’t hand it off. Not once. And they’re doing it out of two tight ends, which is the part that got us, because our call in that personnel puts our safety on the tight end and leaves the corner out there alone. That’s our rule. They ran our own rule at us for four quarters and we never got out of it.”
Bryce Llewellyn is a fifth-year safety and one of Eastern Michigan’s three captains. He spent much of Saturday on Michigan State tight ends. Paracheck and Eddie Whiting caught six passes for 114 yards between them.
Eastern Michigan had four sacks and Tayou had all four. He beat Nick Sharpe twice, once with a long-arm and once on a bull rush that put Sharpe in Hannan’s lap. He beat Luka Vincic once. The fourth came on a stunt where he looped outside behind the end, and Rustin Young, who is playing center for the first time in his life, let him go and nobody picked him up.
He was also the reason Michigan State’s early run game did not exist. Cam Edwards’s first eight carries gained 21 yards, and on at least five of them the play was over before he reached the line, because Tayou was two yards into the backfield and the guard assigned to him was going backward. Eastern Michigan’s center, Nicholas Gallegos, was doing a version of the same thing in the other direction, moving the Spartan interior off the football in the run game.
Neither Ben Murawski nor Conner Moore, the Michigan State tackles, gave up a pressure all afternoon.
Michigan State stopped running at Tayou. From late in the first quarter the Spartans went almost exclusively to two tight ends and sometimes three, put Jayden Savoury in motion across the formation, and ran the football at the edges: outside zone away from Tayou’s alignment, and a pin-and-pull scheme where the tackle and the tight end down-block and a guard comes around them. The point of attack moved off the two weakest players on the offensive line and onto the two strongest, with Paracheck and Whiting doing the work at the end of it.
Edwards’s last fourteen carries gained 137 yards.
“Nick said it on the headset before I did, and I want that to be accurate because he’ll tell you it the other way,” Mansour said, meaning Nick Sheridan, the offensive coordinator. “We were running gap scheme directly at the best player on their defense, which is a stupid thing to do. I built the opening script that way on purpose because I wanted to see it once. I saw it three times. So we went around him and let Ben and Conner and the tight ends have it, and it turns out those guys are pretty good at their jobs.”
“He said it first, and he’s going to tell you I did,” Sheridan said. “Middle of that second series he goes, we’re not doing this, we’re going to the perimeter, tell Leo the run checks are gone.”
The second effect is what turned the day. Heavier personnel is supposed to buy a defense a heavier box and a simpler coverage. Eastern Michigan’s rules did the opposite: the extra tight end pulled Llewellyn out of the middle of the field, which left Dobbs alone on KK Smith.
“We tried to have it both ways,” the Eastern Michigan assistant said. “We wanted the safety on the tight end because the tight end was killing us, and then they run it out of the same personnel and we’re a body short on the edge. That’s not them being geniuses. That’s us not having an answer. But somebody over there knew we didn’t have one.”
Rustin Young gave the answer he gives. “We were running at their three-technique and it wasn’t going anywhere, so we stopped running at their three-technique,” he said. “I got beat on the loop in the second quarter. That one’s mine, I let him go.” Asked whether the early part had been frustrating: “Not really. It’s the second game.”
Edwards carried 22 times for 158 and spent his availability handing it to other people.
“Early on it wasn’t no lanes, that’s all that was,” he said. “Their big boy inside was giving us problems, that ain’t a secret. Then Coach start running it out wide and I ain’t really have to do nothing after that. Brennan and Eddie did it. I’m not finna sit here and tell you I broke a bunch of tackles today, because I didn’t.”
Hannan threw fifteen passes in the first half and six in the second, and finished 16 of 21 for 286 with two touchdowns and a rating of 222. Two hundred of the yards, both scoring throws and his own one-yard touchdown run came before halftime. After it he handed the ball off and got out of the way.
Bennett carried 18 times for 111 yards and caught eight passes for 55 more, nearly all of it before the break. He is not big and he is not especially fast. He runs with his pads down and Michigan State kept arriving at him one man at a time and one shoulder at a time.
The Spartans were fine on first down and fine on second down. Eastern Michigan converted four of its first six third downs and every one of them looked the same, which is to say somebody was uncovered.
“He’s a problem, straight up,” said Jordan Hall, who had eleven tackles and did not want to be complimented about it. “I had him in the hole four, five times that first half and he came out the back of two of them, and both of those are mine. And we wasn’t sound either, there were lanes we handed him. But the main thing all half was we wasn’t getting him down. It ain’t more complicated than that.”
Charles Brantley has had two bad Saturdays in a row, and the second one was worse than the first.
Late in the second quarter, with Eastern Michigan at the Michigan State 44, the Spartans showed a five-man pressure and rotated the free safety away from the field. That left Brantley alone on Nick Devereaux with no help within twenty yards of him. Devereaux stemmed two steps inside. Brantley opened his hips to the inside and had to flip and run, and by the time the two of them were fifteen yards downfield there were three yards between them, and at twenty-five there were six. Kim’s throw was ordinary. Devereaux caught it in stride at the 22 and slowed up around the 5 because there was nobody left to run from. Forty-four yards, walk-in, 10-7 Eastern Michigan.
It was not the only one. Earlier in the same quarter he came downhill unblocked on a checkdown to Bennett in the flat, went in low and to the outside, and Bennett ran through his shoulder for twenty more. In the fourth quarter, on third-and-9 with Michigan State ahead by four scores, he played eight yards off, a receiver ran a comeback in front of him and he was still going backward when the ball arrived. Twenty-two yards, and Eastern Michigan kicked its second field goal five plays later.
A week ago he lost two contested balls on third down to an FCS receiver, which was easy enough to write down as one bad afternoon. Two in a row is a pattern, and this one came against an offense that finished 13-of-26 with two interceptions. He is also still Michigan State’s kick returner, with three returns for 58 yards Saturday, and he was not taken off the field on defense at any point in the game.
Mansour was asked about him three times Saturday and twice more Sunday and did not answer the question once, which he will tell you himself.
“I’m not going to grade a player for you,” he said Sunday, cheerfully, to a reporter he likes. “You know that. You’ve asked me twice already and somebody else is going to ask me in about four minutes and I’ll say this again and we’ll all have a nice time.”
Then he answered a question nobody had asked.
“What I’ll tell you about that play is I called a five-man pressure and rotated the safety away from that side, and the ball came out in under two seconds. So there’s a man out there by himself against their best receiver on a down where I gave him nothing behind him. That’s my call. I wanted the quarterback off his spot and I didn’t get him off his spot, so what I actually did was hand them a free one. If somebody wants to be angry about that touchdown, I’m available all week.”
Then, without being prompted, the other half of it.
“I’ll give you something you don’t have. Monday he came in and asked for every press rep he’s played this season, the good ones too, and sat and watched all of them in one go. He asked me for them, I didn’t go find him. If people are writing about him this week, that’s the true thing about him I’d want in there.”
That is a better answer than the one the question was fishing for, and it is the second consecutive week Mansour has produced a version of it about the same player. The shape is familiar enough now that reporters recognize it before he finishes the first sentence. It is also a head coach who has watched a starting cornerback get beaten badly on tape two weeks running and has said in public only that he himself is the problem.
A former Big Ten head coach who watched the game said a locker room reads that inside a month and never forgets which coach protected them. A former Michigan State player from the Dantonio years said the opposite: players always know exactly who is playing badly, and a coach who will not say so starts to sound like a man handling them.
Brantley did not speak to reporters Saturday. He is not obligated to.
Eastern Michigan gained 238 yards in the first half and 78 in the second, and converted none of its last five third downs. Brady Pretzlaff finished with nine tackles and two tackles for loss. Michigan State sacked Kim twice, once by Dion Crawford and once by Derrick Simmons, who added two tackles for loss a week after an opener he would rather not go through again.
Joe Rossi was asked what changed at halftime.
“We took some things out,” Rossi said. “What was left is stuff I’ve been running a long time. And then we tackled better.”
Pretzlaff said the halftime meeting ran four minutes and was mostly about tackling angles. “Nobody yelled,” he said. “Everybody was already annoyed at themselves.”
The building came back with the team. Michigan State scored on its opening possession of the third quarter and again in the fourth, both drives long and almost entirely on the ground, and the noise turned from relief into something closer to giddiness. Savoury, a redshirt freshman h-back who had two carries all day, got one of them from a yard out, and the section behind the Michigan State bench lost its mind about a one-yard dive.
Then, with 4:11 left, Kim threw a hitch to the boundary and Bell was sitting on it. He caught it at the 29, got to the sideline and nobody touched him for seventy-one yards. It was the loudest thing that stadium has done in two years, which is a strange sentence about a 34-13 game in the fourth quarter and is accurate anyway.
“I have never scored a touchdown,” Bell said. “Not in high school. Not in Pop Warner, and I played running back in Pop Warner. So the entire seventy-one yards I’m thinking about getting caught from behind.”
KK Smith caught seven passes for 136 yards and two touchdowns, had 53 yards after the catch and dropped nothing. Through two games he is at 14 catches for 241 yards.
Caleb Dobbs could not stay with him. The first touchdown was the back-shoulder throw Dobbs never turned to look for. The second came on third-and-one in the second quarter, when Michigan State lined up in a heavy set the whole stadium read as a run and Hannan threw it forty-four yards down the sideline instead.
The one that did not work was fourth-and-3 in Eastern Michigan territory before halftime, a slant to Smith into two defenders. Smith got a hand on it. Michigan State turned it over on downs.
“That’s a bad call,” Mansour said. “I had a better one on the sheet and I went to the one I liked instead of the one that was open, and he nearly caught it anyway, which he shouldn’t have had to do.”
Smith was asked, for the second week in a row, whether he is this team’s number one receiver.
“Somebody said that to me on the field,” he said. “Last week I told y’all ask me in October. It is not October. It’s the second week of September. I’m going to keep saying it, it’s a good answer and it’s free.” He laughed. “Dobbs is a good player, though, I want to say that out loud. He was fighting all day, he wasn’t quitting on anything. Some days it goes one way.”
Michigan State did not commit a penalty Saturday and has one in two football games. It also did not punt, and Rhys Dakin has punted once all season. Liam Boyd missed his only field goal attempt, from 43, and made five of six extra points.
“One flag in two games and it was a hold,” an operations staffer said. “I know it’s Grambling and Eastern, I don’t care. Two years ago in this stadium we had four procedure penalties in a half against Nebraska. That’s not about talent. That’s somebody counting bodies before the snap and somebody else getting the call in on time.”
Notre Dame beat Rice 52-10 on Saturday. Eight days before that it lost 38-10 at home to a Wisconsin team nobody had ranked, and two weeks before that it lost by 36 to Miami. The Irish were No. 3 in the preseason poll, fell out of it entirely, and are back in the part of the ballot where teams collect a handful of votes.
Michigan State plays there Saturday, and the two most confident people I spoke with disagreed completely.
A Big Ten personnel director who has watched all three Notre Dame games: “The Wisconsin tape is the real one. That’s a team that quit in its own stadium in the second quarter, and it does not come back in September. Rice is Rice. Michigan State should win that game and I don’t think it’ll be close.”
A former Notre Dame assistant, now out of coaching: “Everybody says that and everybody is wrong about it every year. You know what happens to a place like that after a week like that? Three weeks of the worst practices of anybody’s life, and then somebody walks into their stadium and finds out about it.”
Inside the Michigan State building the honest position is that nobody knows.
“I have two tapes of the same football team and they are not the same football team,” a Michigan State assistant said. “So which one am I putting on for our kids Monday? Show them Wisconsin and they think it’s free. Show them Rice and they think we’re walking into a buzzsaw, and it was Rice. Both of those are a lie.”
Mansour, asked whether Notre Dame is wounded or dangerous, took the question seriously and then did not answer it.
“I don’t know, and I’m not being coy. I watched both of them Sunday morning and I have no idea which one is them, and I told our guys that, because they can all watch television.” He thought for a second. “The Miami tape is probably the most useful one and it’s also the oldest, which is annoying. Here’s what I do know. Their front is a lot better than ours. I’ve said that to our guys too.”
Cam Edwards has never played at Notre Dame Stadium. “It look small on TV,” he said. “That’s all I got. Everybody keep telling me about the tunnel. I’ll find out Saturday.”
Michigan State is 2-0. It has beaten an FCS team by 49 and a MAC team by 28, which is what a Big Ten program is supposed to do to those two opponents. Kickoff in South Bend is Saturday afternoon.