ROAD TO GLORY
RTG-01 · Underdog Run · Week 0
ROAD TO GLORY
RTG-01 · Underdog Run · Week 0
Division 3 is quietly the best bracket in Michigan high school football and I do not think it is especially close.
You get schools large enough to field genuine depth and small enough that one transcendent player still moves a whole season. Every year four or five programs that nobody outside their own county has heard of in August are being discussed statewide by the second weekend of November. Last autumn's semifinal round produced two one-score games and a 49–42 track meet, and I would put that Friday up against any bracket in the state.
Six teams I think are being undersold. Some of these will be wrong. That is the arrangement.
We are doing the hard one first.
For two decades Fenton has been a perfectly fine program. Fine. Competitive most seasons, occasionally good, generally a step behind Goodrich in the Flint Metro. That is not an insult and every person in Fenton will tell you the same thing in the same words. Nobody there is inventing a tradition.
Then last autumn they went 9–0 in the regular season with a first-year player at quarterback, the whole thing came apart in week nine when he got hurt, they lost in the second round without him, and most of the state moved on by Thanksgiving.
I want to spend a minute on the quarterback, because four separate coaches have now asked me about him unprompted and that is not a normal number.
Nick Mansour is a senior. Before last year he had never played a down. He was — and still is — a band student: first chair trombone, and a pianist his director describes in language you do not normally hear a public school teacher use about a seventeen-year-old.
The part of his biography I had wrong until last week, and that everybody has wrong, is how he got into the building in the first place.
The version in circulation is that he wrote a clever breakdown in the school paper, the head coach read it, and the head coach brought him in. Fenton's own student newspaper ran a front-page correction on that this month, which is more institutional courage than most professional outlets manage in a year. The head coach never read it.
What actually happened: Mansour texted Jeff Setzke three times across fourteen months, starting as a freshman. He got no reply to the first two. On the third he attached forty-one pages of opponent charting — personnel groupings and snap counts, every game, by down and distance — that he had done on his own initiative for nobody, and he offered it for free with no conditions and no request to be let near the team.
Setzke, who deserves some credit for not dressing this up, says he brought the kid on in January 2025 as an unpaid student personnel assistant because he was free and useful and would do what he was told.
So for a season he printed practice scripts, cut film, counted personnel groupings and carried water. In April of that spring, standing behind a drill holding a script he had printed himself, he corrected the starting quarterback's footwork, got asked to demonstrate, and by August he had the job.
I have covered high school football in this state a long time and I have never typed a paragraph like that one.
I get sent film constantly and I watch almost none of it, so it is worth explaining what made this different.
In June a coach at a Division 2 program in this state — not one I cover, and one I am not going to name because he did not think he was talking to a reporter — asked me whether I had seen "the Fenton kid." Two weeks later a Flint Metro assistant asked me the same question at a seven-on-seven. In July a coach from an entirely different league brought him up unprompted and then said the sentence that actually made me go and find the film:
Four coaches. Not one of them works at Fenton. Not one of them, as far as I can establish, has passed the name to anybody in a position to act on it. Everybody in this story keeps telling somebody who cannot help.
I watched three full games. Here is what I saw, and you can do what you like with it.
He gets the offence out of bad plays before the snap, routinely, without a signal from the sideline. He works to a third read — not a scramble drill, an actual progression — which I see maybe twice a season at this level. He throws from different arm slots and the ball arrives in the same place. He is not big and does not have a huge arm and does not appear to need one, because the football leaves before the window shuts.
He also ran for 850 yards and scored zero rushing touchdowns, which reads like a misprint and is not. Fenton gives it to Shane Kolinski inside the five. Every time. That is the entire explanation and I checked it twice because I did not believe it either.
I charted 148 snaps across the Linden, Flushing and Holly games, with the standing caveat that one man with a laptop is not a scouting department.
| Charted, 148 snaps | Mansour | What I'd expect at this level |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-snap changes with no sideline signal | 19 | 2–4 |
| Throws to a third progression read | 11 | 1–2 |
| Off-platform or altered arm slot | 23 | Rare, and usually a mistake |
| Turnover-worthy throws | 4 | 8–14 |
| Sacks taken with a scramble lane available | 6 | The one number that is a problem |
Nineteen is the number I keep returning to. Nineteen times in three games a seventeen-year-old looked at a defence, decided the play he had was wrong, and changed it, with nobody telling him to. Most high school offences in this state are not built to allow that. Fenton's is not especially built to allow it either. He does it anyway and his head coach has decided, on the record, that the sideline keeps the check.
I sent eight minutes of it to an FCS assistant I have known for a decade, on the condition that he could be blunt and would not be named.
"That's a college brain. I don't have a question about the brain."
Then the rest of it, which is the part that matters: "He's 155 pounds and there's no timed number anywhere and I have never heard of one team he played. I couldn't take that into a room. Not because I don't believe you — because I'd have nothing to put on the table when somebody asked me what he runs."
I asked him what happens to a player in that position.
"Usually nothing. Usually he plays great, everybody local says he was great, and in February there is no signing day for him and everybody agrees it's a shame. That happens more than anybody wants to talk about."
2. Zeeland East (7–3). Return nine on defence and a quarterback nobody outside Ottawa County discusses. The reason they are here is a schedule that gets soft in the middle third, which is how you find yourself 8–1 and hosting.
3. Chelsea (6–3). Lost four games by a combined eleven points and returns the entire interior of both lines. Nobody wants this draw in the second round and everybody would rather say so quietly.
4. Whitehall (8–2). A running back who is going to run for two thousand yards and a coaching staff that has been together long enough to have four answers to everything.
5. Cadillac (5–4). The record is a lie. Four of those losses were to playoff teams and three were on the road, and they were a two-point conversion from a very different narrative.
6. Detroit Country Day (7–3). Always athletic, occasionally organised, and if those two arrive in the same October they are a problem for everybody.
Fenton opens Friday against Clio and I am going. I do not usually drive to Genesee County for a Week 1 game between a 9–0 team and a 3–6 team.
I am going because four coaches asked me about a kid nobody has offered, because his own school paper corrected itself on the front page about how he got there, and because I would like to know whether the nineteen is real or whether it is the Flint Metro.
Ask me Saturday.