Michigan HS football: 6 Division 3 teams that could crash the party in 2026 — including one with a quarterback nobody can explain
Division 3 has quietly become the best bracket in Michigan high school football, and I don't think it's particularly close.
You get schools big enough to field real depth and small enough that one transcendent player still swings a season. You get four or five programs every year that nobody outside their own county has heard of in August and everybody has heard of by the second weekend of November. Last fall the Division 3 semifinal round produced two one-score games and a 49-42 track meet, and I would put that Friday against any bracket in the state.
Here are six teams I think are being underrated going into the season. Some of these will be wrong. That's the deal.
1. Fenton (9-0 regular season in 2025)
Let's do the hard one first.
Fenton has been a fine program for twenty years. Fine. Competitive most seasons, occasionally good, and generally somewhere behind Goodrich in the Flint Metro League. That is not an insult and everyone in Fenton will tell you the same thing. Nobody there is running around claiming a tradition that doesn't exist.
Then last fall they went 9-0 in the regular season with a first-year player at quarterback and the entire thing came apart in week nine when he got hurt, and they lost in the second round of the playoffs without him, and most of the state moved on.
I want to spend a minute on the quarterback, because I have now had four separate coaches ask me about him unprompted and I do not think that's normal.
Nick Mansour is a senior. Before last year he had never played a down of football. He was, and still is, a band student — a serious pianist, by every account I got — who joined the Fenton program as a student personnel assistant, meaning he printed practice scripts and cut film, because he'd written a game breakdown in the school paper that the head coach happened to read.
In spring practice of 2025 he corrected the starting quarterback's footwork, got asked to demonstrate, and by August he had the job.
I've watched three of his games. I'm going to describe what I saw and let you do what you want with it.
He gets the offense out of bad plays before the snap, routinely, without a signal from the sideline on at least a dozen snaps I charted. He works to a third read — not a scramble drill, an actual progression — which is a thing I see maybe twice a season at this level. He throws with different arm slots and the ball goes to the same place. He is not a big kid and he does not have a huge arm and he does not need one, because the ball is out before the window closes.
He also ran for 850 yards and scored zero rushing touchdowns, which sounds like a misprint and isn't. Fenton hands it to Shane Kolinski inside the five. Every time. That is the entire explanation and I checked it twice.
Here's the part I keep turning over. Nick Mansour does not have a college scholarship offer. Not from a MAC school, not from a Division II school, not a preferred walk-on conversation that anyone would call real. I asked his offensive coordinator, Paul Shaffer, whether anyone had called.
"Nobody's called," Shaffer said. "Twenty-three years. I've never had a player I wanted somebody to drive out here and watch this badly, and nobody's called."
I want to be careful here, because I am not a recruiting analyst and this is not a recruiting column. I do not know whether this kid is a Division I quarterback. Nobody does — there's no camp testing on him, no verified 40, no postseason film because of the injury, and the Flint Metro is not a league that gets scouted. Every one of those is a real reason a college staff moves on to a name they can actually evaluate. None of them are his fault.
What I do know is that I've covered this sport in this state for a long time and I have not seen a 35-to-0 season, and I'd like somebody with an actual evaluation job to go look before November so that we're not all writing the same regretful column in February.
Head coach Jeff Setzke, asked what he wants out of this season, gave me four words: "Beat Goodrich." Asked about Mansour's recruitment, he said, "That takes care of itself or it doesn't and either way we've got nine games." Setzke has never in his life pretended to be interested in a question he doesn't consider his job, which is one of the more refreshing things about covering him.
Why they could crash the party: Four returning offensive linemen, including two
honorable-mention all-state guys, and the best pass rusher in the league in senior Chase Lynch, who
is the one Fenton player with legitimate FBS interest.
Why they might not: They lost seven defensive starters. Seven. The secondary is one senior and
three kids with six career starts between them. And every coordinator in the Metro has now had nine
months and a full season of film to design something for the quarterback.
2. Chelsea
Everybody's default pick in this bracket and I'm not going to be contrarian about it. Big up front, disciplined, and they return a 1,400-yard back. The question is whether they can throw it when somebody finally sells out to stop the run, and last November somebody did.
3. Riverview
Nineteen seniors. Nineteen. That's the whole scouting report and it's usually enough.
4. Whitehall
Best defensive line I saw in the western half of the state during 7-on-7 season, which is a strange sentence, but the coaches there run a real camp and you can tell. Offensively they're going to be figuring it out until October.
5. Freeland
Perennially good and perennially not talked about outside the Tri-Valley. New quarterback, same system, same expectation. They will be 7-2 and everyone will be surprised again.
6. Croswell-Lexington
The team I'm least confident about on this list and the one I most want to watch. They were a fourth-quarter collapse away from a district title last year and they've brought back most of the people responsible for both halves of that sentence.
What I'll be watching Week 1
Clio at Fenton, Friday, 7 p.m. Clio has a new defensive coordinator in Marc Teague, who came over from Chesaning and has put in a two-high structure Fenton has not seen from them. Three Metro assistants described some version of the same plan to the Tri-County Times last week: stay two-high, stay disciplined in the rush lanes, make him check it down, and hope a seventeen-year-old gets impatient.
It'll also be Mansour's first live contact since Oct. 17.
I'll be at Goodrich-Corunna that night, which is the better football game. I already regret it.
Ryan Zuke covers Michigan high school sports for MLive. Follow him on X at @ryanzuke.