Front page · The reconstruction

He asked three times.

Everyone at this school knows how Nick Mansour became the quarterback. This newspaper printed that version first, in November, under my name. Almost none of it is true, and what actually happened is a great deal harder to be proud of.

By Michael Pearce Jr. · Managing Editor
Reported over eleven days, August 8–19. Our sports editor, Hudson Villeneuve, is a friend of the subject and did not work on this story. He wrote the one on the opposite page and we kept the two apart on purpose. — M. Pearce Jr.

The story goes like this, and you have heard it, because everyone in this town has heard it and most of us have repeated it. A band kid wrote a clever article about a football game. The head coach read the article. The head coach was impressed, called the kid into his office, and gave him a chance. Two years later the kid holds the school passing record.

It is a good story. It has a beginning and a middle and an end, it makes everybody in it look reasonably decent, and it is the version I put in this newspaper on November 14, 2025, in a front-page piece with my name at the top of it.

Coach Setzke has never read the article.

He told me so on August 12, in a hallway, in about nine seconds, without any indication that he understood he was demolishing anything. I asked him whether the column was what got Mansour into the program. He said he had heard there was an article and that somebody mentioned it in a hallway. He said he does not read the school paper. I asked whether he had read it since.

"Why would I read it now."

So I spent the next eleven days finding out what did happen, and the answer took three conversations, one refusal, and a screenshot that a grown man handed over without appearing to realise what was in it.

October 2023

Nick Mansour was fourteen years old, a freshman, third row of the low brass in the marching band, and had charted every Fenton football game of that season. Nobody asked him to. There was no class it was for. He watched the film that goes up on HUDL for anybody with a link, and he wrote down what happened on every snap, and then he did it again the following week.

On the evening of Sunday, October 15, he texted the head varsity football coach, whose number is on roughly a hundred forms in a town this size.

Reproduced with the written permission of the recipient, who provided it.

I want to be fair about the silence, because it would be easy not to be. A varsity head coach receives a text from an unknown freshman claiming to understand football, and ignoring it is the correct decision nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of ten thousand. Setzke's entire comment on it: "I get a lot of texts." When I asked him to check whether it was still on his phone, he checked, and it was.

Fall 2024 — the part we got wrong

Two students told Coach Setzke about Nick Mansour before anything was ever printed. Sam Metcalfe and Matt Balok had classes with him and both, separately, at different times, said a version of the same sentence: the kid in my third hour knows more football than anybody in this building.

Setzke's recollection of how that registered: "roughly nowhere." Which, again, is a correct instinct that happened on this occasion to be wrong.

Then, on October 18, 2024, this newspaper published nine hundred words by a fifteen-year-old sophomore about why Fenton kept losing on third down. It charted an opponent's pressure looks, identified the two Fenton had no answer for, and laid out the protection adjustments that would have solved it. It ran on page six under a headline the author disliked. It is reprinted in full in this issue and it is, in my opinion, the best piece of football writing this paper has ever printed.

Nothing happened.

Not "something small happened." Nothing. No coach discussed it. Paul Shaffer thinks he read it "at some point, maybe that winter." Marty Sitko has not read it and told me, unprompted and slightly amused, that he is not going to start now. Two weeks later Fenton played Holly — the game the column explicitly warned about — and did not change the protection.

Four days after it ran, the author sent a second text.

A fifteen-year-old published a piece of analysis that was completely correct and then apologised in writing, four days later, to the man it was about, in case it had come across as arrogant.

He was ignored again.

"I thought that was going to work. I didn't think he'd make me the quarterback, that would be insane. I thought somebody was going to say something." Nick Mansour, asked this month what he expected after the column

Asked whether anybody did, he said: "Mrs. Grady said the diagram was good."

December 12, 2024

Fourteen months after the first text, at 4:31 on a Thursday afternoon, he sent the third one.

I have read that middle message more times than is reasonable and I keep stopping at the same place, which is not the forty-one pages. It is the last line.

I just don't want to have done it for nothing.

He was not negotiating. He gave it away. He removed every condition he had to offer and handed over a season of unpaid work to a man who had ignored him twice, and the only thing he asked for in return was that it not have been pointless.

Why the third one worked

Coach Setzke agreed to answer three questions about this and answered them without any visible discomfort, which I have decided is to his credit rather than against it.

"He'd already done the work. That was the thing. It wasn't that he was persistent — persistent kids are a headache." He said this in a hallway, holding a laminated call sheet. "He sent me forty-one pages I didn't ask for and didn't have to pay for, and it was good."

Then, the part that I think this town needs to sit with:

"You know what any assistant costs? I had a kid who wanted to count personnel groupings for free and would do what he was told. I'd have been an idiot."

I asked whether, at any point that winter, he thought he might have found a player.

"No. Why would I."

I asked whether he regretted ignoring the first two texts. He said he does not think about it that way, and then — the only moment in the entire conversation where he seemed to be working something out rather than recalling it — he said this:

"If he'd stopped after two, none of this happens. He'd be a senior in the band right now and I'd have Ben. And I'd have thought that was a normal year."

"I had a kid who wanted to count personnel groupings for free and would do what he was told. I'd have been an idiot." Jeff Setzke, head coach

The job

On the single piece of paper where it exists, the title is student personnel assistant. There was no stipend, no letter, no jacket, and he is not in the sideline photograph in last year's yearbook.

I asked him about the water directly, because I wanted to know whether it had bothered him. He said "it wasn't a big deal," which is a sentence people use about things that were somewhat of a deal, and then changed the subject, which he did to me six separate times in eleven days.

Inside the team he was treated the way managers are treated, and I want to be exact here, because there is a version of this article that becomes a bullying story and that version would be false. Nobody was cruel to him. He was ignored. The players thought he was lame in a vague, unmalicious, high-school way. He knew he was cooler than they thought he was. Neither of those facts changed anything at the time and both of them are still standing in the huddle now.

Kevin Lack, who catches more of his passes than anybody alive: "I'm not going to sit here and act like I knew. He was the guy with the papers. I said maybe four words to him that whole spring."

Ben Haijcar, who was the quarterback: "He handed me the sheet every day for four months and I never said his name once. I've thought about that more than anybody else has."

And then April

Here is the part everybody already knows, told correctly for once.

On a Tuesday in the second week of April 2025, Nick Mansour was standing behind a quarterback drill holding a practice script, because handing out the script was his job. He told Ben Haijcar that his back hip was leaking.

Haijcar told him to show him. Paul Shaffer was fifteen feet away and saw all of it.

Shaffer says the first throw was a ten-yard hitch and that the hitch is not the throw anybody should be discussing. "Anybody can hit a hitch. What got me was the fourth or fifth one — I moved him, made him throw off his back foot on purpose, kind of a gotcha, and he put it on the guy's face mask without resetting. That's not a fluke."

Nothing was said to anyone that day. On the Wednesday, Shaffer put him through throws on air at the end of practice and framed it to everybody present as a joke; it stopped being a joke around the fifth throw. On the Thursday he told Setzke, whose entire recorded reaction was "Okay." On the Friday Setzke came and watched, and Mansour called the coverage aloud, pre-snap, on six consecutive skeleton snaps, and was right six times.

Somewhere in there the staff worked out that he already knew every play in the install. This startled them. It should not have. He had been printing the install since January.

Nine days, and the argument in the middle of them

The correction happened on a Tuesday. They settled it the Thursday of the week after. That is nine days, and every one of them was an argument, and reconstructing it takes four people, three of whom now describe it differently.

Coach Sitko has coached quarterbacks here for eleven years and coached Ben Haijcar from the eighth grade. He did not soften anything and did not need the question repeated.

"I was against it. I'll say that on the record and I've said it in front of him. Ben Haijcar is a tough, smart, accountable kid who did nothing wrong, and we were talking about handing his job to a boy from the band who had never taken a hit."

What changed his mind? "Nothing changed my mind. He won the job. Those are different things."

Does he think he was right? "I was right in April and wrong by November. Both. People want them to cancel out."

What it cost, and who paid it

Ben Haijcar moved to free safety with a package of quarterback snaps — partly football, partly a debt. He had four interceptions, the most by a Fenton defensive back since 2018, and he is probably the best safety in this league.

He is also having his only senior year, which he said out loud to me exactly once, after starting the sentence twice and saying "never mind," and which is quoted properly in the profile on page three where it belongs.

August 2025, and then the rest of it

The school found out the way schools do. An announcement, a roster sheet, and then forty-eight hours of people asking each other whether it was a joke. Teachers had to reconcile the starting quarterback with a student several of them had never noticed. Mr. Perkins reportedly said "our Nick?" twice inside one conversation, to two separate people.

A real share of the student body would not accept it until they watched him complete a pass in a live game.

Then: thirty-five touchdown passes, no interceptions, seventy-five percent, eight hundred and fifty rushing yards, and an undefeated regular season at a program that had not had one since 2003. Then a lacerated kidney in week nine, no playoffs, and a season that ended in a hospital gown and a folding chair.

What I got wrong, and what I think it cost

I printed the false version in November. It was easier, it was shorter, and I did not check it because it did not occur to me that there was anything to check. It has since been repeated by this school at an assembly, by two teachers in my hearing, by a radio segment, by a man at the Wing and Grill, and by this newspaper on four subsequent occasions, all of them mine.

Here is why I think it matters more than a factual correction usually does.

The false version is a story about a coach with an eye for talent. The true version is a story about a fourteen-year-old who asked for something three times, was ignored for thirteen months, gave away a season of his own work for free, took an unpaid job carrying water for people who did not learn his name, and only then got a look — and got it because he was cheap.

The first version flatters this building. The second one is about this building.

I asked him, at the end of the last conversation, what he thought about learning that Coach Setzke never read the column.

He was quiet for a second and said, "Okay." Then: "That actually makes more sense than the other version." Then, a while later: "Don't put that in."

Then, before I left: "Actually put it in, I don't care."

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