Those 1,200 come from a wide variety of different organizations, with tasks as varied as keeping tailgaters safe, filming the game for national television and all of their activities must be coordinated to make sure that everything runs smoothly. 

The work to prepare for football season begins early August, when representatives from all of the different groups of making a home game possible come together for a roundtable meeting.

“In early August, we bring all these different constituent groups together who have something to do with putting on a game on a football Saturday,” MSU’s Deputy Athletics Director and event manager Greg Ianni said. “We’ve been doing this so long that everybody kind of knows what the drill is. People go away from that first meeting, they all have responsibilities.”

That meeting, like much of the preparation for game days, is coordinated by Ianni.

After the initial meeting, members of the many groups involved get to work on preparing for game day.

“You have a lot of planning that goes into this, and you have to think about this well in advance of just the weekend before,” MSU police Sgt. Florene McGlothian-Taylor said.

The whole group reconvenes the Tuesday before each game to update Ianni and other groups on their plans and needs for that specific game. Any unique elements to the game are covered at this meeting. It is Ianni’s job to coordinate each entity’s separate plans, and make sure that those plans do not come in conflict with one another.

“Our equipment staff is huge,” Ianni said. “Getting (equipment) in (the locker room), when the visiting team truck is going to arrive, when they’re going to unload their equipment, when they’re coming in on game day. They handle the specifics, but all that information comes to that Tuesday meeting, so everybody knows. Because that impacts, for example, my stadium staff. 'When do I have to have gates open? When do they need access to this space?' So everybody has to know what’s going on, you can’t do it in a vacuum.”

Since MSU is a prominent Big Ten team, there is usually a TV crew that comes to East Lansing to broadcast the game. Depending on what network the TV crew is from and what time the game is, they may be looking for a different camera setup.

“(Rick Church, the MSU Director of Broadcast Technology) will talk to the producer during the week,” Ianni said. “We get what their setup is, what they need from us, when they’re going to arrive, and those are all things we go through in that Tuesday meeting.”

Visiting teams and the TV staff are responsible for making their own arrangements to stay overnight in town if need be. However, MSU is responsible for finding a place for referees to stay.

“We book hotel rooms for the year for our officials,” Ianni said. “We have an individual who just handles the officials. His job is, he gets in touch with the referees on Monday, they plot out when they’re going to get here, he handles their parking passes, (then) takes care of them from the time they get here on Friday until the time they leave.”

Friday is the day when the preparation for a game the next day kicks into high gear.

“Friday the television will show up, so they’ve got to set up in the stadium, visiting team equipment shows up, we have to determine whether we’re going to cover the field or not,” Ianni said. “So this thing starts on Friday, and actually, when we have a night game where we need lights, it starts on Thursday, because Musco (Lighting) brings the portable lights in on Thursday.”

When it finally comes time for game day, most of the event management responsibilities have been taken care of. The focus then shifts to ensuring the safety of the thousands of students and many more thousands of visitors on campus.

The responsibility for keeping students and visitors safe on campus is left up to the MSU Police Department. Game days are staffed by a group of special event security employees called “greencoats,” a mixture of students and non-students who total 140 in all. 

Greencoats work in different capacities from securing locked campus buildings, to watching for disturbances at tailgates, to helping guard the television equipment held in the tower lot. MSUPD officer Britten Riggs supervises the greencoat force.

“(Greencoats are) kind of part of the athletic event staff,” Riggs said. “(Students) enjoy working it because you’re there and you can get paid and be part of the whole — it’s kind of being on the inside. The seven football games are our only mandatory shifts out of the year, and people want to come and work them. It’s exciting.”

By the time the gates are open and the game is about to begin, many tailgaters have cleared out to watch off campus. Yet many thousands of fans are still packed into Spartan Stadium, and the East Lansing Police Department is put in charge of security inside the stadium.

“With 80,000 people in the MSU football stadium on a game day, it’s like a city,” ELPD Lt. Scott Wriggelsworth said.

Wriggelsworth said the ELPD has 15 officers each assigned to different parts of the stadium. They watch for fights breaking out and other possible threats to the safety of fans.

It is easy to forget that all this preparation takes place to facilitate 60 minutes of football action. It is the product on the field that is the focus of the final meeting Ianni coordinates.

“We have what’s called a 100 minute meeting before the game,” Ianni said. “That’s the two team representatives, our Sports Information Director, my field security, the referee, the TV folks and me. We go through the schedule and what goes on prior to and up to the game. The game belongs to us up to kickoff. At kickoff the game belongs to the referee — it’s his game.”

When the ball is kicked off, all of the work that Ianni and the rest of those 1,200 have been doing for months finally comes to fruition.

“This whole thing is like a big dance, and it all kind of falls into place,” Ianni said.