EAST LANSING — It feels colder inside Spartan Stadium once the stands start to empty. Warmth leaves with the bodies. A thin chill sets over the field as the Spartan Marching Band keeps playing.
Senior trumpet player Morgan Schwarz noticed it every time, standing through the quiet that followed long after most students and fans decided they had seen enough.
“It really is symbolic,” said Schwarz, a history major.
She is a second-generation band member from DeWitt, 15 minutes from campus. Both of her parents marched at MSU. Her father, John Schwarz, has worked on staff since 1999.
She had experienced full, loud Saturdays in East Lansing, but her four years as a student unfolded in front of dissipating crowds and a run of lopsided home losses dating back to her freshman fall.
The band members, unlike those around them, don’t get to leave early.
The seniors’ relationship with MSU football shifted as the seasons wore on. Week after week, as the results fell into the same pattern, they found themselves focusing less on the score and more on drill, sound and staying in step with each other.
Their band jacket’s left sleeve — the place where postseason bowl patches are sewn — is empty.
MSU went 18-30 over these four seasons, and this senior class will be the program’s first without a bowl trip since 1983. Most home losses turned into early exits for the student section, a pattern that began under Mel Tucker and continued through Jonathan Smith, whose firing was announced Nov. 30.
“The people who are there are there for the love of the game, and the game is not football,” said senior trombone section leader and band president Sydney Kramer.
The NCAA and MSU reached a settlement in November over Level II recruiting violations involving impermissible benefits and ineligible players. The program agreed to vacate all 14 wins from 2022-24, placing the Spartans on three years of probation and erasing what few successes those seasons offered on the field.
MSU named Pat Fitzgerald as its next head coach Dec. 1, turning to a veteran with nearly two decades of Big Ten experience to steady a program that never found firm footing during the seniors’ four years. That uncertainty around the team shaped much of their era, and the stories carry the same themes.
Senior tuba player Holly Bertram, a criminal justice major from St. Johns, is known in the band as “Nike,” a name she got the day she joined the section. The tubas give everyone a name, and the women inherit mythological ones — Nike, Artemis, Pandora, Calliope, Tethys. What begins as a joke or story becomes an identity that follows players through graduation.
She remembers the game that recalibrated her sense of MSU football. It wasn’t a blowout. It was Indiana, the last home game of her freshman year, a frigid November afternoon that slipped into triple overtime. MSU missed a short field goal that would have clinched a bowl appearance, and something in that moment told her how the next few years might play out.
“We have experienced a lot of blowouts and a lot of horrible plays, a lot of really bad games, but nothing compares to the feeling I felt when I watched that ball miss the uprights,” Bertram said.
She still watches every away game, checks injury reports and follows depth-chart changes, but isn’t invested the way she was early on. That shift came slowly, shaped less by frustration than by watching the same outcomes repeat themselves.
“The games become much more enjoyable as a marching band member if you go in not expecting the team to perform,” Bertram said.
Kramer, a native of Bavington, Pennsylvania, didn’t grow up caring much about football. She marched in high school and picked MSU for the band’s reputation. But the campus energy around the sport pulled her in, at least for a moment, before the 2022 season that opened with a No. 15 ranking in the AP poll, but unraveled and pushed the program out of the national conversation.
Her role left little room to linger on any of that. The band’s game days start hours before kickoff, full of tailgate gigs, warm-ups and all of the logistics that keep the group lively.
“Yes, it’s fun to be good, but at the end of the day our job description is, number one, to support the team,” said Kramer, an integrated science-secondary education major. “That’s it. That’s the point of marching band.”
She carried that with her each week, focusing on the people around her more than what was happening on the scoreboard.
Commitment and opportunity cost
Schwarz fractured her shoulder on Oct. 10, the morning of the homecoming parade. She rode an electric scooter and swerved to avoid a pedestrian, hit a curb and went over the bars. The pain made clear something was wrong.
But festivities began that evening and carried into the next day, so she suited up and marched. The trumpet stayed on her shoulder across the downtown route and again in Spartan Stadium. She played every piece, holding posture during the National Anthem even as the strain brought tears.
“I was like, ‘Man, I look really patriotic,’” Schwarz said. “At least I can play it off like that.”
A month later came the diagnosis and the sling, and the episode became a lived example of commitment inside the band. Younger members point to it when they talk about standards — not as an expectation to play through injury, but as an example of how deeply members pour themselves into the work.
Before that, Schwarz had stepped away from other parts of her life. She left organized dance and theater — fixtures from early childhood through high school — once it became clear there wasn’t room for more than one demanding devotion. She still dances around her apartment and keeps in touch with theater friends who hope she returns to it after graduation, but band shaped most weeks in a way that left little space for anything else.
Bertram’s most taxing stretch came during junior year, when her schedule closed in. Classes and work shifts piled up, and rehearsal filled each afternoon. She was a squad leader then, a first look at the leadership she would take on further the next year as the first woman to serve as tuba section leader.
She described nights spent staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out whether she could hold all of it together without losing herself in the process.
“I definitely considered quitting,” Bertram said. “But it was showing up every day and seeing those people that made it all worth it and helped me really get through.”
The sense of cost shows up differently for everyone. Kramer’s days are built around the same group of people she lives and plays with. Time alone is rare.
Coming from out of state meant no Thanksgiving trips home during football seasons. Some years, the calendar made it hard to see family at all. MSU’s bowl drought gave her one thing, though: uninterrupted winter breaks.
“Maybe having room to breathe, and having time to yourself,” said Kramer, regarding the trade-off. “You really don’t get that.”
The work required their unwavering best through seasons in which the football team’s results offered little in return.
The Missing Patch(es)
Bertram meets it with an easy, dry humor. Nothing about this stretch was predictable, and the unmarked fabric on her jacket’s left sleeve feels like a “perfect representation.”
Schwarz spent winters as a kid traveling with her family to MSU bowl games — all but one since 2006, imagining the day she would march in one.
“One day I'm going to be in this band, and one day I'm going to get to go to a bowl game and put a patch on that jacket I will have,” Schwarz remembered telling herself at those games.
Both of her parents earned two bowl patches in the 1990s; the director’s jacket is lined with Rose Bowl and postseason emblems. She expected her own to join that lineage, an expectation that faded over time.
After the program’s upheaval in 2023, she and her younger brother were talking through the 4-8 season when he rested a hand on her shoulder and said, “You’re not going to a bowl game.” She had a gut feeling he was right.
Kramer doesn’t dwell on what’s missing. She thinks about the patches she did earn — the 50 Years of Women in SMB emblem, the 100 Years of Spartan Stadium badge, the Ford Field game — and the small, odd markers of this era, like finally having bathrooms at Munn Field instead of porta-potties.
Those meant something to her. So did the sense that the band’s identity stayed solid even as the seasons around it didn’t.
“There’s nothing like our band, and there will be nothing like our band,” Kramer said.
The sleeve won’t show the places this senior class hoped to go, but the blank space is a record of a group that kept showing up and held on to the parts of MSU that mattered to it most.
