Flint Metro League preview
Everybody had nine months to figure out Fenton. Friday we find out if anybody did.
The Tigers went unbeaten in the regular season for the first time since 2003 and then lost their quarterback and lost in the second round. Nine other coaches spent the offseason watching the same film.
Let's start with the part that nobody in this league has stopped talking about since last November, because pretending otherwise would be silly.
Fenton's quarterback threw 35 touchdown passes last fall and was not intercepted. Not once. He also ran for 850 yards, led the team in both categories, and did all of it in his first season of organized football at any level, having previously been the kid who printed the practice scripts.
I have covered this league for nineteen years. I have never written a paragraph like that one and I do not expect to write another.
Here is the other part. Fenton is not suddenly a powerhouse. This is the same program that has spent most of the last two decades finishing second, third, or fourth, chasing Goodrich, and going out in a district game. The roster around Mansour is good — Kevin Lack is the best receiver in the Metro, Kobe Lookebill and Troy DeGayner are both returning honorable-mention linemen, Chase Lynch is the only player in this league I would bet money on playing FBS football — but it is a Metro roster. Last year's nine-and-oh was not the arrival of a juggernaut. It was one extraordinary player and a schedule that never quite caught up to him.
The schedule has had nine months. That is the whole story of this season.
How I think it finishes
| # | Team | 2025 | The one-sentence version |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Goodrich | 8–1 | Reloads at every position every year, wins the line of scrimmage in eight of nine games, and does not particularly care what your quarterback did last season. |
| 2 | Fenton | 9–0 | The best player in the league and a legitimate question about whether anything else has changed. |
| 3 | Flushing | 6–3 | Two returning backs and a defensive front that will make Fenton's fourth-quarter offense look very different than Clio's will. |
| 4 | Linden | 5–4 | Young last year, not young now, and they have circled one date on the calendar. |
| 5 | Corunna | 6–3 | Will run it 42 times and try to hold the ball for 30 minutes, and against Fenton that is not a bad plan at all. |
| 6 | Holly | 4–5 | Beats somebody they should not. It happens every year and nobody can predict which week. |
| 7 | Kearsley | 4–5 | Hard to play at Kearsley. Easier to play everywhere else. |
| 8 | Carman-Ainsworth | 3–6 | Most raw athletes in the league, fewest reps together. |
| 9 | Clio | 3–6 | New defensive coordinator, a lot of sophomores who are now juniors, and the unluckiest Week 1 assignment in Genesee County. |
| 10 | Swartz Creek | 2–7 | Big school, thin roster, rebuilding in the honest sense of the word. |
Fenton
Coach: Jeff Setzke, 9th year. 2025: 9–0 regular season, lost in the district semifinal. Returning: most of it.
The interesting question about Fenton is not whether Nick Mansour is good. Everyone in this league has now watched the film, and several coaches I spoke to used stronger language about him than I am going to print.
The interesting question is what happens when a defensive coordinator has an entire offseason and decides to do something about it. Three of the coaches I talked to described some version of the same plan: keep two safeties deep, make him check it down, be extremely disciplined in the rush lanes, and accept that he is going to complete a lot of five-yard passes. Make him drive it. Make him do it fourteen plays in a row.
"You're not gonna stop him," one Metro assistant told me. "You're gonna make him be patient and hope a seventeen-year-old gets bored."
Whether that works is the season. Fenton's answer is presumably Kevin Lack in space, Shane Kolinski grinding out the short yardage he always gets, and junior Zach West — 6-3, long, and the guy Mansour himself named as the thing opponents are underrating.
One more thing on Fenton, and I want to be straight about it because I have gotten calls: no, as far as I have been able to determine, Nick Mansour does not currently hold a college scholarship offer from anyone. Not a MAC school, not a Division II school, not a preferred walk-on conversation. His own offensive coordinator said out loud on the school's broadcast last week that nobody has called. I have asked around and I cannot find anyone who has.
I do not have a satisfying explanation for that. He is 175 pounds, he plays in a league nobody scouts, he got hurt before the playoffs so there is no postseason film, and he has never been to a camp where somebody could measure him and time him. Add those up and you get a kid who is invisible to the machinery. It does not make the machinery right.
Week 1: Clio at Fenton
Friday, August 28, 7 p.m., Fenton High School
Clio went 3–6 last fall and lost to Fenton 42–14 in a game that was over midway through the second quarter. They also started nine sophomores on defense in that game and those sophomores are juniors now, which is the kind of thing that shows up in Week 1 of the following season more often than people expect.
New Clio defensive coordinator Marc Teague came over from Chesaning and runs a considerably more disciplined structure than what Fenton saw last year. He was polite and told me almost nothing.
"We know what he is," Teague said of Mansour. "Everybody knows what he is. Knowing and doing something about it on a Friday are pretty different things, in my experience."
Clio's offense will lean on senior back Deonte Massie, who ran for 1,100 yards last year on a bad team, which is a real accomplishment and one nobody outside Clio noticed.
The other thing worth watching Friday, and it is not a small thing: this will be Nick Mansour's first live contact in ten months. He suffered a lacerated kidney in the final week of last season, was held out of the entire playoff run, and was not cleared until March. He has not been hit by a stranger since October 17.
"He's cleared, he's fine, next question," Setzke said, which is exactly what Setzke says about everything, and which is also, to be fair, medically accurate.
Rest of the Week 1 slate
| Game | Site | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Clio at Fenton | Fenton | 7 p.m. Orange-out. Expect the biggest Week 1 crowd Fenton has had in years. |
| Goodrich at Corunna | Corunna | The best actual football game on the board. |
| Linden at Holly | Holly | Both teams think they are better than last year. One of them is wrong. |
| Flushing at Carman-Ainsworth | C-A | Flushing's front against C-A's athletes. |
| Swartz Creek at Kearsley | Kearsley | Somebody has to start 1–0. |
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Dale Ostrander has covered prep sports for the Tri-County Times since 2007. Reach him at dostrander@tctimes.com.