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The Fentonian

The column

Everyone at Fenton knows the story: a sophomore wrote something in the school paper, the head coach read it, and two years later that kid was the starting quarterback. Almost nobody has actually read it. Here it is, in full, exactly as it ran.
Originally publishedOct 18, 2024 PageSix Words900 Author's ageFifteen ReprintedAug 2026
Editor's note, August 2026 This ran in The Fentonian on October 18, 2024, on page 6, under a headline our then-adviser wrote and the author disliked. It is 900 words by a fifteen-year-old with no football background who had never been asked to write about a Fenton game. We are reprinting it without corrections. The stiffness is his. The diagram is his. The em-dashes are his and there are too many of them.

We are not reprinting it because it is a nice piece of trivia. We are reprinting it because Coach Setzke has now told two different reporters that this is the document that made him call the kid into his office, and because a lot of people at this school have spent a year saying "he came out of nowhere." He did not come out of nowhere. He came out of page 6.

— H. Villeneuve, sports editor
The Fentonian · Page 6Friday, October 18, 2024

Why We Keep Losing on Third Down (And It Isn't Ben's Fault)

A look at what Linden actually did to us, and the two changes that would have fixed it.

By Nick Mansour · Class of 2027 · Contributing writer

Fenton lost 27-14 to Linden last Friday. If you were at the game, you probably left thinking our offense could not throw the ball. That is not really what happened. We completed 11 of 21, which is not great but is not a disaster either. What happened is that we went 1 for 11 on third down, and ten of those eleven failures were the same failure.

I want to explain what that failure was, because I think it has been described wrong all week. Several people have told me Ben Haijcar had a bad game. I charted every snap off the film and I do not think that is accurate. I think he was put in a situation that did not have an answer in it.

What Linden did. On first and second down, Linden played a normal four-man rush with two safeties deep. Nothing unusual. On third down and more than five yards, they did something specific eleven times in a row.

They walked their weak-side linebacker — number 44, who is very good — up to the line of scrimmage, outside our right tackle. They did not rush him. On nine of eleven snaps he dropped out and took the flat.

What that does is create a math problem for the offensive line. Our protection rule slides toward the side with the extra threat. So we slid right, every time, because 44 was standing there. The moment we slid right, Linden's three-technique defensive tackle — number 55 — was one-on-one against our left guard with a two-way go and no help.

Number 55 beat our left guard on seven of eleven third downs. Not because our left guard is bad. Because he was left alone against a good player in a situation where he had to guess.

LINDEN 3rd & 6 LOOK (11x) 44 ↓ shows, drops 9/11 E 55 T E █ █ █ █ █ QB ← OL slides RIGHT to 44 ← 55 now 1-on-1 vs LG pressure: 2.4 sec avg

Diagram drawn by the author. The average time is from the film, counted at quarter speed, six times, and I could be off by about a tenth.

Why the throws looked bad. Ben's average time to pressure on those eleven snaps was about 2.4 seconds. Our third-down concept most of the night was a deep dig with a checkdown underneath. The dig breaks at about 3.1 seconds. That route was never going to exist. He was throwing the checkdown into a linebacker who was already standing in the flat, or he was throwing it away, or he was getting hit.

The two interceptions were both on the second one. I do not think either was a bad decision as much as a bad option.

The first fix. Do not slide to a player who is not rushing. If 44 shows and drops nine times out of eleven, then he is not a rusher, he is a decoy, and honoring him is exactly what Linden wants. Slide left toward 55, keep the running back on 44, and if 44 finally does rush, the back has him and we have a free hot throw right where he vacated. That is not a complicated adjustment. It is a check, and it can be made at the line.

The second fix. Change the route, not the protection. If the pressure is coming in 2.4 seconds, we need a concept that gets the ball out in 2.4 seconds. A spacing concept or a shallow cross with a sit route behind it converts six yards without asking anybody to hold a block for three seconds.

I am aware that this is easy to write on a Wednesday and hard to see on a Friday. I am also aware that I have never played football, and that some people are going to read this and think a kid who is in marching band should not be writing about the offensive line. That is a fair thing to think and I do not have a good answer for it except that the film says what it says.

"I do not have a good answer for it except that the film says what it says."

One more thing. Linden did this eleven straight times. They did not disguise it, they did not change it, and they did not need to. That means they were confident that we were not going to fix it during the game. I do not know whether that is a coaching thing or a communication thing or just a hard thing to see live.

But it is fixable, and Holly runs the exact same third-down look on film, and they are on our schedule in two weeks.

Nick Mansour is a sophomore. He also writes for two football sites online. Reach him at n.mansour27@fentonschools.org.
The Fentonian · Vol. 77, No. 26

What happened next

Fenton played Holly two weeks later and did not slide the protection to the decoy. They won 21-17. Nobody wrote about the protection.

Jeff Setzke, asked about the column this month, said he could not remember who put it on his desk. "Somebody printed it out. It might have been a parent. It was in my mailbox." He read it in his truck before a Saturday film session.

"The number that got me was 2.4 seconds," Setzke said. "Because he counted it. He sat there and counted it six times. I've had college assistants send me stuff with less work in it than that."

He did not, that day, think he had found a quarterback. He thought he had found free labor. Both things turned out to be true and only one of them was the plan.

Number 55 for Linden, the three-technique, is a senior this year. He is on the schedule in October.

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