Flint Metro League preview

Nine months. That is how long everybody has had to solve Fenton. Friday we find out if anybody did.

An unbeaten regular season for the first time since 2003, and then the quarterback went down in week nine and the season ended in the second round. Nine other coaching staffs spent the off-season watching the same film.

We are starting with the thing nobody in this league has shut up about since November, because writing around it for four paragraphs first would insult everybody reading.

Fenton's quarterback threw thirty-five touchdown passes last autumn and was not intercepted. Not once, in nine games. He also ran for eight hundred and fifty yards and led his own team in both categories, in the first season of organised football he has played at any level, at any age.

And the season before that he was the unpaid student assistant who printed the practice scripts and carried the water — which I did not know three weeks ago, and which nobody at Fenton has ever volunteered to me in nine months of asking about him.

Nineteen years covering this league. That paragraph is the only one of its kind I have ever typed and I doubt I will type a second.

Now the less enjoyable part. Fenton has not become a powerhouse. This is the same program that has spent most of two decades finishing second, third or fourth, chasing Goodrich, and going out in a district game on a cold night. The roster around Mansour is good — Kevin Lack is the best receiver in the Metro, Kobe Lookebill and Troy DeGayner are returning honourable-mention linemen, Chase Lynch is the only player in this league I would put 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 with him.

The schedule has now had nine months to think about it. That is the entire story of this season and everything below is a version of it.

How I think it finishes

The plan, in the words of nine different coaching staffs

Eight of the nine other head coaches talked to me, along with eleven assistants. Two of the head coaches would not discuss Fenton at all, on or off the record, which is itself informative.

Of the rest, every single one had a plan, and it was in every meaningful respect the same plan. Assembled from all of them and confirmed by four:

1. Two safeties. Always. Nobody is playing single-high against him. One coach put it as "I'd rather lose 28–24 than get seven touchdowns behind us."
2. Rush four, disciplined lanes, do not chase. Every one of them believes pressure is worse than no pressure, on the grounds that he is more dangerous outside structure than inside it. Contain, don't hunt.
3. Give him the flat and the hitch. Let him complete it. Concede eighty percent of what he wants underneath and make him take it.
4. Make him drive it fourteen plays. Tackle in space, get lined up, repeat, and gamble that a Metro offensive line commits a penalty somewhere inside fourteen plays.
5. Hit him legally and often. Nobody said this on the record. Four people said it.

That last one needs a sentence. Nobody I spoke to proposed anything dirty, and if anybody had I would not be printing it. What several of them said, in nearly identical language, is that a 155-pound quarterback who ran for 850 yards is going to be on the ground considerably more this season than last, because last season nobody had a reason to make it a priority.

"Nobody is going to hurt him on purpose," a Metro defensive coordinator told me. "He is going to get hurt because eleven people are finally running the correct angles."

The dissent came from the one head coach who thinks the whole plan is wishful thinking.

"Everybody in this league has drawn a beautiful two-high answer on a whiteboard in June. Then it's Friday, and your safety is seventeen, and he bites on a hard count, and it's forty-two yards. That is what happened to all of us last year. Not one of us lost because we did not know what he was."

Fenton

Coach: Jeff Setzke, ninth year. 2025: 9–0 regular season, lost in the district semi-final. Returning: most of it.

The question worth asking about Fenton has nothing to do with whether Nick Mansour is good. Every staff in this league has watched the film now, and several coaches used stronger language about him than I am going to print in a family newspaper.

The interesting question is what happens when a defensive coordinator gets a whole off-season and decides to do something about it. Fenton's answer is presumably Kevin Lack in space, Shane Kolinski grinding out the short yardage he always gets, and junior Zach West — six-three, long, and the player Mansour himself named as the thing opponents are underrating.

Whether that works is the season.

One more thing about Fenton, and I am going to be blunt because I have taken four telephone calls about it this month.

No. As far as I have been able to establish, Nick Mansour does not hold a scholarship offer from anybody. Not a MAC school. Not a Division II school. Not a preferred walk-on conversation. His own offensive coordinator said it out loud on the school's own broadcast last week — nobody has called — and I have spent two weeks trying to find somebody who has, and I cannot.

What I did find is that the boy has sent twelve emails to college programs himself since the end of June, that he wrote every one of them, that two coaches wrote back, and that his own head coach did not know any of it was happening until an assistant mentioned it in passing this week.

I am not going to editorialise about that. I am going to print it in a football preview and let people sit with it.

I do not have a satisfying explanation and I have stopped pretending I am close to one. The roster sheet in my hand says 149 pounds; Fenton tells me he weighed in at 155 on Monday and the sheet was printed in June, which is its own small lesson about how information travels. He plays in a league nobody scouts. He got hurt before the playoffs so there is no postseason film. He has never been to a camp where anybody could measure him or time him.

Add those together and you get a player who is invisible to the machinery. It does not make the machinery right.

The rest of the league, at more than a sentence apiece

Goodrich (8–1)

Dan Prahl is sixteen years in and has won this league eleven times, and what makes Goodrich Goodrich is that none of those teams looked alike. They have won with a fullback. They have won throwing it forty times. Last season they won by being the only program in the Metro with two Division II offensive linemen and simply declining to let anybody else play football.

They return one of those linemen and a junior linebacker, Cam Hollifield, who I think is the second-best player in this league and who nobody outside Goodrich discusses, because he plays for Goodrich and nothing that happens there is a story.

Prahl on his own season: "We don't have a quarterback yet. We've got two of them and neither one has taken it. That's the only thing I'm worried about and I would appreciate it if you printed that instead of asking me about Fenton again."

Fenton goes to Goodrich in Week 8. It is the only fixture on Fenton's schedule that Goodrich has already started working on, a fact Prahl volunteered to me, cheerfully, in August.

Linden (5–4)

The rivalry game, and the only one on this schedule with real dislike in it. Linden was young last autumn and is not young any more, and Bob Sheaffer — no relation to Fenton's Shaffer, a question the pair of them have fielded for eleven years — has been unusually blunt all summer.

"We're not sneaking up on anybody. We know when they're on the schedule and everybody in our building knows. I've got a senior class that has lost to Fenton three times and one of those was 38–7 and they have not forgotten a second of it."

Asked about Mansour specifically, Sheaffer gave the best answer anybody gave me for this piece: "I've watched him more than I've watched my own quarterback. That is not a compliment to him. That is an embarrassing thing about me."

Linden gets Fenton in Week 3, September 11, at Linden, under lights half this county will be standing beneath an hour early.

Flushing (6–3)

The team most likely to actually execute the plan described above, because they are the only Metro program with the defensive front to rush four and mean it. Two returning backs, a three-hundred-pound nose, and a staff that has been together nine years.

They also gave Fenton its hardest game last autumn — 21–17, and Fenton needed a fourth-quarter drive I charted at fourteen plays and six minutes, which is, I would like everybody to notice, precisely the drive this entire league's plan is designed to force.

He completed nine passes on it. None longer than eleven yards.

Corunna (6–3)

The single most irritating opponent available, and I intend that as praise. Corunna will run it forty-two times, hold the ball for thirty minutes, and win 14–13 while the other team's quarterback stands on a sideline being extremely good at football and completely irrelevant.

"You can't intercept a guy who isn't on the field," said Tim Braddock, who then laughed for longer than the joke supported.

Holly, Kearsley, Carman-Ainsworth, Swartz Creek

Holly beats somebody they should not; two seasons ago it was Goodrich and the parking lot did not empty until eleven. Kearsley is 14–4 at home and 5–13 on the road across four years, which is a real phenomenon and not a joke. Carman-Ainsworth has the most raw athletes in this league and the fewest reps together, a problem that solves itself in October and never soon enough. Swartz Creek is rebuilding in the honest sense; coach Ellis Nardone has thirty-one players on varsity and told me the number without being asked, twice.

Week 1: Clio at Fenton

Friday, August 28, 7 p.m., Fenton High School.

Clio went 3–6 last autumn and lost to Fenton 42–14 in a game that was decided halfway through the second quarter. They also started nine sophomores on defence in that game and those sophomores are juniors now, which shows up in Week 1 of the following season more often than people expect.

Marc Teague, Clio's new defensive coordinator, arrived from Chesaning and runs something far more disciplined than anything Fenton saw from them last season. He was courteous and gave me nothing.

"We know what he is. Everybody knows what he is. Knowing what he is and doing something about it on a Friday night are, in my experience, unrelated skills."

Clio's offence will lean on senior back Deonte Massie, who ran for eleven hundred yards last year on a bad team, which is a genuine accomplishment nobody outside Clio noticed.

And the other thing worth watching, which is not small: this will be Nick Mansour's first live contact in ten months. A lacerated kidney in week nine, the whole playoff run watched from a sideline in a coat, and no clearance until March. Nobody who does not know him has laid a hand on him since October 17.

"He's cleared, he's fine, next question," Setzke said, which is what Setzke says about everything, and which is also, to be fair to him, medically accurate.

Nineteen years of getting this league wrong

I pick this league every August and I keep every one of them, so here is the ledger.

I had Fenton ninth last August. Not eighth. Ninth of ten, in a preview that ran under my own byline, in which I wrote — and I went and looked it up so that I would have to quote myself precisely — that Fenton "will go as far as an unproven quarterback situation takes them, which historically in this league is not far."

That is the worst sentence I have written in nineteen years of doing this and it is going to stay exactly where it is.

Which is precisely why I am now watching for the opposite mistake. Picking Fenton second is not brave. Everybody is picking Fenton second. The uncomfortable question — the one two different coaches put to me when I told them what I was writing — is whether a team returning most of an undefeated roster and the best player in the league should be picked second at all, and whether I have Goodrich first out of judgement or out of habit.

I have been chewing on that for a week. I am leaving Goodrich first.

Let the record show that I said in print that habit might be the reason.

· · ·

Dale Ostrander has written about prep sport for the Tri-County Times since 2007. Reach him at dostrander@tctimes.com.