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Credit

One Fenton coach let Nick Mansour into the building. A second one taught him to be a quarterback. A third argued against all of it and has been asked about it by nobody. In a county that has spent nine months telling this story, the three of them keep getting swapped around.

The story that has been circulating in this county since roughly last October goes like this. A hard-nosed old-school football coach looked at a skinny band kid, saw the thing nobody else could see, took a chance on him, and changed a boy's life.

Jeff Setzke has been offered that story on a radio show, at a Rotary lunch, and by two separate parents at his daughter's soccer game. He is not a stupid man and he knows exactly what he is being handed each time.

Asked directly, on a Tuesday in August, standing in the doorway of a room that smells like wet nylon, he declined to take it.

"I didn't see something in him. This is going to sound worse than it is." A pause, and no attempt to soften what followed. "I brought him in because he was free and he was smart and I needed somebody to break down opponent third downs, and a seventeen-year-old will do that for nothing. That's the truth. He was a very useful kid."

And the spring practice?

"He started throwing and inside about ten minutes it was obvious we had a problem." He caught the word and did not take it back. "An opportunity. But it felt like a problem for about three weeks, because I had a senior quarterback who had done everything right."

So he is not the coach who changed the boy's life.

"I'm the coach who put him on the field. That's a real thing and a lot of guys wouldn't have. Don't turn it into more than it is."

Fourteen months of being ignored

Here is what I did not know when I began this piece, what I suspect almost nobody in this county knows, and what Jeff Setzke told me without any visible discomfort whatsoever.

Nick Mansour asked him for the job. Three times. Over fourteen months. Beginning when he was fourteen years old.

The first message went to Setzke's phone in October 2023 — a freshman in the marching band who had charted every Fenton game that season for nobody, saying he had found something fixable on third down and asking for ten minutes. It ends "I'm not asking to play, I just want to help."

The second came a year later, four days after the boy published a column in the school newspaper about a Fenton loss. That one contains an apology, in case the column had come across badly.

Neither got an answer.

The third, on December 12, 2024, told Setzke that Mansour had charted all nine games — personnel and snap counts, every opponent, by down and distance — that it came to forty-one pages, and that Setzke could simply have it, with nothing expected in return and no request to be let near the team.

Two days later Setzke replied with two words: Send it. Nine days after that he told the boy to be in the field house at six in the morning on January 6, and added, unprompted, that it was not a tryout.

I asked why the third one worked when the first two had not. He did not reach for anything.

"Because the third one had forty-one pages attached to it." A shrug. "The first two were a kid asking me for something. The third one was a kid handing me something. That is a completely different text message."

Did he regret ignoring the first two?

"I don't think about it that way. I get a lot of texts."

Then, and this is the only moment in ninety minutes when Jeff Setzke sounded like a man working something out rather than recalling it:

"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."

"The first two were a kid asking me for something. The third one was a kid handing me something. That is a completely different text message." Jeff Setzke, head coach

The third coach

The trouble with a story about two men is that this one had three in it.

Marty Sitko has coached quarterbacks at Fenton for eleven years. He runs the junior varsity program. His day job is at the middle school. In nine months of radio segments, Rotary lunches and coffee-counter arguments about who deserves the credit for Nick Mansour, this newspaper cannot find a single instance of anyone in this county asking him anything at all.

He was not hard to find. He was standing at the same practice as everybody else, behind the quarterbacks, holding a whistle he never blows.

"I didn't want it," Sitko said, of the spring of 2025. "I'll say it plain, because I've said it plain to everybody who has ever asked me, which until you is three people. I was against it. I thought it was wrong."

Ben Haijcar has been his quarterback since the eighth grade.

"Ben did every single thing a program asks a kid to do. Nine starts, never late, never sulked, played hurt at Holly. And I was being asked to tell him that a boy who had never taken a hit was taking his job because he threw well in shorts in April." He shook his head, once. "I'd fight that again. I'd fight the same fight tomorrow with the same information."

Asked what he thinks now, he did not do the thing people usually do, which is soften it.

"I was right in April and wrong by November. Both. That is not a paradox, that is just what the year was. He took the job and then became the best quarterback any of us have ever had on a field. Those don't cancel out. People want them to cancel out."

Nine days, not one afternoon

The version this county tells contains a single scene: the correction, the demonstration, the job. It took nine days and there was an argument in the middle of it.

By four accounts — Setzke's, Shaffer's, Sitko's, and a fourth person who asked not to be named because they still work in the building — Mansour, then an unpaid student assistant, said something to Haijcar about his back foot on a Tuesday in the second week of April 2025. Haijcar told him to show him. Shaffer was fifteen feet away. Nothing was said to anybody that day, or for more than a week afterwards.

What happened during that week was three coaches disagreeing, twice in an office and once in a parking lot.

The alternatives were real. Fenton could have run it back with Haijcar, a returning starter who had gone 5–4 with a defence giving up thirty a game. There was Cole Whitmer, a junior, since graduated. Shaffer floated moving Kevin Lack to quarterback and says the idea survived "about ninety seconds"; Lack, reached this week, said he had never heard about it and would like it noted that he would have been good at it.

And there was Josh Czarnota, then a fourteen-year-old freshman — not a real option, but Sitko wanted him taking reps regardless, on the theory that a program surprised once should not arrange to be surprised again. He lost that argument too. This August, when Czarnota pushed Mansour through eight full practice periods, Sitko was the only man on that field who was not surprised.

The decision came the following Thursday. Setzke has publicly called the meeting short.

"It was not short," Sitko said.

The forty yards between them

At a Fenton practice you can locate both coaches without looking at either face.

Setzke is the one standing still at midfield with the call sheet and the stopwatch, moving the whole operation forward in five-minute blocks. He speaks in the imperative. When a period runs long he says a number and forty-eight people move.

Paul Shaffer is the one crouching.

Sixty-one years old, twenty-three of them at Fenton, and he spends most of a practice on one knee in front of a teenager, explaining. On this particular Tuesday he spent four uninterrupted minutes with junior receiver Zach West on a single detail — where West's eyes should go on the release against a corner playing inside leverage — while eleven other people stood and waited.

Setzke gave him three of those four minutes and then said a number.

"He'd let me have twenty," Shaffer said afterwards, laughing. "That's the job. Somebody has to run the clock or we'd be out here till nine."

What Shaffer actually did

Everyone in Fenton knows the 2025 numbers. Fewer people know what August of 2025 looked like, when the boy holding them had never played a down.

"He couldn't break a huddle," Shaffer said. "I say that to people and they assume it is a bit. It is not a bit. He'd give the call and then just stand there, and eleven kids are looking at him, and eventually somebody says 'you've got to say break, Nick.'"

Shaffer taught him the huddle. He taught him what to do with his hands on the sideline after a three-and-out, because Mansour's instinct was to explain to everybody immediately what had gone wrong — which is the correct football analysis, delivered at the worst available moment, to a left guard who has just been beaten in front of his parents.

"The other thing nobody thinks about," Shaffer said, "is that half that huddle watched him hand out the scripts the year before. You're seventeen and you're telling a senior what to do and that senior remembers you carrying the cones. I never once had to coach him through that. He just did it. I don't know how."

"By April he had more football in his head than I did. What he had no idea how to do was be a human being inside a huddle." Paul Shaffer, Fenton offensive coordinator

Shaffer makes no claim to have built the quarterback. Asked about the arm — the release, the way the ball leaves the same from four different slots — he shook his head.

"I can't teach that. Nobody taught him that. I have asked him where it came from and he says he has no idea, and I take him at his word. He picked up a football at sixteen and it was already in there."

Where they disagree

They do not disagree about much. Where they split is on how much latitude the quarterback should have.

Last November, in the second-to-last regular season game, Mansour changed a protection at the line on his own — not one of the checks he had been given, a different one, a full slide the staff had not called since week three. It worked. It produced a fifty-eight-yard completion.

To Shaffer it was the single best thing that happened all year. Setzke did not.

"He was right," Setzke said. "Fine. He's right a lot. But if I've got a quarterback deciding to run a protection we haven't repped since September, and one guy on that line doesn't hear it, my quarterback gets his ribs broken and I lose a season over a fifty-eight-yard gain."

He paused.

"He wasn't wrong. He was unauthorised. Those are two different words."

Shaffer, told what Setzke had said, did the thing where he laughs before disagreeing with his head coach on the record.

"Jeff's right about the risk. Jeff is always right about the risk. I just think — you've got a kid who sees the whole field, and every time you tell him no, you are teaching him not to look. That's a cost too. It just doesn't show up on Friday. It shows up in three years."

Asked whether he expects Mansour to have more freedom at the line this autumn, Shaffer said "yes" immediately. Given the identical question, Setzke said, "Ask me after Clio."

The question neither of them wanted

I asked both men a rude question, separately, in identical words. Is he better at football than you are?

Not better at football. Better at understanding it. Whether the seventeen-year-old in the meeting room is further along at reading a defence than the two men standing at the front of it.

Setzke's answer came inside two seconds.

"He's a very smart kid. He's coachable. What he sees is exactly what we coach him to see."

That is the entire answer. Asked a follow-up — whether there had ever been a moment when Mansour saw something the staff had not installed — he said, "There's always something you didn't put in. That's football." Asked once more, he said, "I'd rather talk about whether he's going to be sound on Friday. That's the part that decides games. Not whether somebody's clever."

I will not pretend to know what that means. I know he did not say no.

Shaffer took about forty seconds, most of which he spent looking at a whiteboard.

"I've been doing this twenty-three years. I've had maybe four kids who could tell you what they were looking at. It is not about what they did, but about what they were looking at." He stopped. "He's the only one who has ever told me something about my own offence that I hadn't thought of. That happened in March. I went home and thought about it. He was right."

Was that uncomfortable? He said no, immediately, and then said "Ask me that again when I was forty," and laughed.

"Look. I'm a good high school football coach. That is the ceiling on me and I have understood it for years. Every so often you get a kid who's operating somewhere you can't quite follow, and the job stops being teach him and starts being don't get in his way and make sure he eats. That's not humility. That's just what it is."

He asked me not to make it the headline. It is not the headline. It is, I think, the story.

The man who had the job before

Ben Haijcar has been asked about Nick Mansour four hundred times by his own estimate, and he arrived at that figure by counting for a week last November and multiplying.

He is the person who handed Mansour the ball on the day it happened, and he has never once pretended otherwise, which people find surprising, and which he finds irritating that they find surprising.

"I handed him the ball. Everybody talks about that spring like it happened to me. It happened because of me. And I'd do it again, which is the part that really messes people up."

Four interceptions last year. The most by a Fenton defensive back since 2018. Two Division III programs have written to him about safety, which is more actual college contact than the quarterback has received, and which nobody in this county has written a word about until this sentence.

Why the sixty-one-year-old is still a coordinator

Paul Shaffer has been offered a head coaching job twice, once in this league. He turned both down and is unusually direct about why.

"I'd be bad at it. I'd let a period run twenty minutes because a kid was almost getting it, and we'd lose because we never practised the punt team." He was not joking, or not only joking. "Jeff is good at the thing I'm bad at. That's not modesty. Watch a practice."

Asked whether he minds that the county credits Setzke for the quarterback, he thought about it longer than any other question I asked him.

"A little. Less than I'd have expected." Then: "The kid knows. That's the only version of the credit that means anything and I've got it."

"Nobody's called"

Ten days ago, on the school's own student broadcast, a seventeen-year-old asked Paul Shaffer whether college coaches were going to work out how good his quarterback is. Shaffer laughed, and then said plainly, on camera, into a school-wide broadcast, that nobody has called.

He knew what he was doing.

"I've sent his film to six people I know personally. Two Division II guys, a fella at Wayne State, a buddy who coaches at Alma. Nothing." Then: "So yeah, I said it on television. If somebody in this county with a connection hears it and picks up a phone, that's worth being embarrassed about."

Setzke's view of the same broadcast, when I put it to him, was two sentences long.

"Paul can say what he wants. I've got a football game Friday."

The person who isn't in this article

Nick Mansour declined to be interviewed for this piece.

He did it politely, by email, at 11:40 on a Tuesday night, and the reason he gave is the reason I have put it at the bottom instead of leaving it out.

"I'd rather you write about them. They've both been doing this a long time and nobody ever asks them anything that isn't about me. If you want to ask me something after Friday I'll answer anything."

Both coaches were told he had said that. Setzke said, "That sounds like him," and went back to a call sheet.

Shaffer read it twice on my phone and then handed it back and did not say anything for a while, and then said, "Yeah. Okay." And then, after another few seconds: "Put that in."

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