Where does Michigan State football go from here? (2024)

EAST LANSING, Mich. — The Spartans said they were tougher! The Spartans said they wouldn’t flinch! And they didn’t!

When cornerback Charles Brantley’s last-minute interception secured a dramatic 37-33 Michigan State win against Michigan on Oct. 30, 2021, with play-by-play announcer Gus Johnson and Fox’s top broadcast team in town, it marked the official arrival of the Mel Tucker era. Michigan State was back.

The first top-10 matchup in the rivalry since 1964 had lived up to the hype. Amid the celebration on the field at Spartan Stadium, former coach Mark Dantonio stood back and watched with a smile, enjoying the work of his successor. The 8-0 Spartans would debut at No. 3 in the College Football Playoff rankings.

Almost two years to the day, on Oct. 21, Michigan pounded Michigan State 49-0 in the most lopsided loss in the 100-year history of Spartan Stadium. The Spartans are 12-16 since that win against the Wolverines in 2021.

How did one of the Big Ten’s best programs over the last decade fall so far, so fast? Michigan State fired Tucker for cause on Sept. 27, two weeks after a sexual misconduct complaint against the coach that the school had been investigating for months was made public in a report by USA Today.

But even before Tucker’s exit, it wasn’t clear whether the Spartans were headed back in the direction of a top-10 program, recapturing the momentum of that 11-2 season that made Tucker one of the highest-paid coaches in the country. The Spartans posted a 5-7 record in 2022 (which included a loss to Michigan, marred by a postgame fight in the tunnel to the locker rooms), saw star receiver Keon Coleman transfer to Florida State this spring and now will miss bowls in consecutive seasons for the first time since 2005-06.

The search for a new football coach is expected to conclude within the next week or two, an effort that has prioritized candidates with head coaching experience. Among the names believed to still be in the mix are Oregon State’s Jonathan Smith, Kansas’ Lance Leipold, Arizona’s Jedd Fisch and Toledo’s Jason Candle, per industry sources. The school always planned to hire a new president first, and that process appears to be wrapping up, with North Carolina chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz the last remaining finalist.

The university has been criticized for its handling of the Larry Nassar sex abuse scandal and the complaint against Tucker. It has a long history of infighting among leaders. It’s also a school still recovering and healing from the on-campus shooting in February that left three students dead. The next coach will be taking a very public role in a community where those events linger.

Academically, MSU has reached a new high in the U.S. News & World Report rankings (No. 60). Athletically, it has a national championship contender in men’s basketball and a top-10 hockey team. Over the past decade, the football program has four BCS/CFP/NY6 appearances and two Big Ten titles. There’s a lot to like about the job. This is an opportunity for a hard reset from top to bottom. Can MSU get this right? With a new 18-team Big Ten coming next year, it can’t afford not to.

That 2021 football season came out of nowhere. Tucker had taken the job in February 2020, right before COVID-19 lockdowns, and the Spartans went 2-5 in his debut season. When transfer running back Kenneth Walker III couldn’t be tackled in 2021 spring practices, some coaches chalked it up to poor defense.

Not quite.

Walker finished second in the FBS with 1,636 rushing yards, including 197 yards and five touchdowns against Michigan. He finished sixth in the Heisman Trophy voting. He’s now the starting running back for the Seattle Seahawks.

But Walker also covered up holes elsewhere on the roster. He averaged just 1.8 yards before contact per rush, 140th in the country according to TruMedia, meaning he did most of it himself. The Spartans’ defense finished 71st in yards per play allowed.

“Kenneth Walker deserves half of that contract Tuck got,” joked a former staffer who spent multiple years in the program, granted anonymity to discuss a former employer.

Amid a 9-2 start and interest from LSU, Tucker received a 10-year, $95 million guaranteed contract extension, pushed and aided by donors, two months after Alan Haller became athletic director. The success of a Black head coach with a Black AD at a school that pioneered college football integration in the 1950s and ’60s was a statement. Tucker hoped to build a pipeline of Black coaches.

But although Tucker became known as a portal master because of Walker, most of the other top contributors to that team were Dantonio additions, including quarterback Payton Thorne (now at Auburn), receiver Jayden Reed (now in the NFL), receiver Jalen Nailor (also in the NFL) and defensive end Jacub Panasiuk.

Over the next two years, MSU didn’t adequately replace that top talent, whether through recruiting, the transfer portal or development. Walker is still MSU’s only first- or second-team All-Big Ten player acquired by Tucker. It may not have one this season.

The former staffer and another staffer no longer with the program also noted a change in Tucker’s persona after the 2021 season and the big contract. He hired a public relations firm and went on a marketing blitz. Michigan State jumped on the ill-fated NFT digital token craze and sold “NFTucks.”

The Washington Post reported Tucker had a 51-page booklet about his personal brand. One page read, “The Mel Tucker Brand is a story brand driven by an omni-channel strategy. This approach fits the brand as it reflects Mel as a person and a professional: authentic, dynamic, multi-faceted, high impact and resilient.

“Everything felt superficial,” the first staffer said.

Tucker constantly expressed interest in social media narratives about him and his team, the two staffers said. One questioned whether it was worth the time. But the other said that focus is more common at top programs than fans may think.

“People don’t understand the Nick Saban system of propaganda that his disciples create,” the second former staffer said. “Kirby Smart is a master of it, like their players in the national championship talking about how they were underdogs. … As much as coaches say they don’t read Twitter, they actually do, and so do the players. So creating the narrative that stuff is on point in your program, players are reading that all day long and you’re creating multiple layers of buy-in.”

The staffers also pointed to the loss of Geoff Martzen right before the 2021 season as a change that set MSU up for issues later. Martzen was Tucker’s right-hand man and followed him from Colorado. The staffers said Martzen simply wanted to get out of the grind of college football. Martzen declined comment but said he had nothing but positive experiences with Tucker.

Tucker replaced Martzen’s contributions in part with Saaed Khalif, who had arrived from Wisconsin as director of player personnel and later became general manager. While Tucker’s on-field coaching staff did not change during his tenure, the recruiting staff went through considerable turnover under Khalif.

Much was made of the number of five-star prospects who visited MSU under Tucker, but he never signed one. MSU’s recruiting classes under Tucker ranked 46th, 26th and 22nd, encompassing high school players and transfers. The finishes were respectable but in line with most classes of the Dantonio tenure.

“(Tucker) was building something, he was on the verge of it,” said former All-Big Ten center and current MSU radio color commentator Jason Strayhorn.

The Spartans did sign numerous four-star prospects, but expectations had been raised beyond that after the kinds of five-star visitors MSU got in summer 2022. When MSU missed on some big swings, they weren’t in position to sign some Plan B targets. 247Sports reported that MSU had 36 official visits in June 2022 but only signed six from the group. The recruiting board was poorly organized, leaving critical gaps in planning and evaluations, the staffers said. Khalif’s contract was not renewed this spring. He declined comment for this story.

“Tuck was losing his identity of being a Saban disciple that was about being great at defense, tough as s—, big, nasty, all that stuff,” the second former staffer said. “Geoff knew where Tuck was coming from and knew how to get it done.”

But Tucker had a long guaranteed contract. He had time to figure it out. That was until USA Today reported of an ongoing investigation into the complaint against Tucker filed by sexual assault activist Brenda Tracy, who traveled to the school multiple times on Tucker’s invitation to do advocacy work with the football program. Tucker was suspended after the story in September and fired for cause two weeks later. Tucker has threatened legal action against the school. In October, an MSU hearing officer determined he violated the school’s sexual harassment policy. A message left for Tucker’s agent for this story was not returned.

“The decision is fraught with countless factual and legal errors, all of which will be the subject of an immediate appeal and subsequent lawsuit if necessary,” an October statement on behalf of Tucker read.

For MSU, the money, time and personnel invested in Tucker had only left them with additional problems. His personal actions torpedoed the 2023 season and put coaches and players in a difficult position.

While the Texas A&M job is considered better with more resources, MSU might be the next best job on the market in this coaching cycle. Among the perceived finalists of Smith, Leipold, Candle and Fisch, there is a lot of potential.

“There are a lot of qualified coaches on the board,” one coaching agent said. “It’s almost like they’d have to have trouble to miss the free throw.”

What does Michigan State need in the next coach? Former players point to finding another Dantonio, a steady hand who overachieves.

In 2007 Dantonio took over a program that was in disarray and lacked focus. When he arrived, not a single player transferred out. The Spartans went 7-5 to reach a bowl game for the first time in four years. When Michigan running back Mike Hart called MSU a “little brother,” Dantonio responded by declaring, “Pride comes before the fall.” MSU won seven of the next eight against U-M.

“Coach Dantonio always said their goal was to get us to overachieve as players,” said former fullback Todd Anderson, who played from 2007 to ‘11 and has come back to speak to the team. “It wasn’t always about getting the best player. It was about getting the best person for the program.”

Dantonio’s teams constantly outplayed their recruiting rankings, winning Big Ten titles in 2010, 2013 and 2015. Former two-star recruits like Kirk Cousins, Le’Veon Bell, Jack Conklin and Darqueze Dennard won awards and reached the NFL. The Spartans twice knocked Urban Meyer’s Ohio State out of the national championship picture.

“We were always a team where we’re going to have ups and downs, but you were going to leave the game limping,” Anderson said. “I don’t know if we’ve maintained that year over year. That’s important to the ex-players, being a smashmouth type of team regardless of the outcome. I feel we lost a little bit of that.”

Dantonio did land his share of highly rated recruits, like William Gholston and Max Bullough. But after the 2015 CFP appearance, MSU got away from its player profile and took bigger swings, and it backfired. The 2016 class was a disaster on and off the field. Nearly all of its top players left the program. Dantonio couldn’t quite recapture the magic and retired on the eve of 2020 national signing day.

Tucker modernized the program in many ways, bringing organization, staffing and promotion strategies he learned under Saban and Smart. Can the idea of the overachiever work in today’s college football? One former Dantonio assistant noted that a new coach keeping an entire team intact like Dantonio did is impossible in the transfer portal era.

“It would be tremendously harder,” the coach said. “Guys bonded and pushed together. There were older players bringing guys back into the fold. As a coach, you’re trying to find a family feel. I don’t know how you get that these days.”

That’s why others like Strayhorn believe MSU needs a coach who thrives with name, image and likeness and the transfer portal and can bring in better recruits, especially given the influx of relatively new donors like Phoenix Suns owner Mat Ishbia and digital marketing executive Steve St. Andre, both of whom contributed to Tucker’s contract.

“(The next coach) needs to have a lot of energy and be a creative person who connects well with the young players and has the stomach for this college football environment,” Strayhorn said. “It’s here to stay. You need someone who’s embracing that.”

Michigan State’s current NIL situation is a bit disconnected. There are two main collectives. SD4L (Spartan Dawgs 4 Life), with St. Andre and Ishbia, works with football and basketball players. This Is Sparta!, through Charitable Gift America, is led by Tom Dieters and older donors and works with Olympic sports and some football players. They don’t compete with each other, but they’re not on the same page, people on both sides say.

SD4L, which leads as a clothing brand, faced negative headlines when it was reported the night before MSU played at Iowa that many football players had been informed their NIL deals may not be renewed. The discussion came during a time when players were eligible for the transfer portal after losing their head coach. SD4L said in a statement it had secured fewer than 100 subscriptions since launch, far below projections, and it couldn’t be sustained by a few individuals. Both sides expect a reset in line with the next coach. The basketball NIL deals remain intact.

Together, we will keep moving forward.https://t.co/3eBZJ4cz8K | #SD4L pic.twitter.com/9udGpbe85x

— SD4L (@TheSD4LBrand) September 30, 2023

Those involved say multiple Big Ten schools have faced similar hurdles. MSU’s losing hasn’t helped.

“Spartans want to win, but they don’t want to win bad enough to come out of pocket,” said a person familiar with the situation. “They want to see results first.”

There are concerns from donors at both collectives about the school’s NIL direction, from haphazard planning by Tucker and staff to athletic department leadership. The next coach will have to get everyone aligned.

“In a perfect world, it’d be awesome to get them together,” Strayhorn said of the collectives.

In August, MSU promoted former linebacker Darien Harris to assistant AD of NIL and special advisor to Haller to get things in order. Harris is well-liked throughout the MSU community and is known for bringing sides together. (Disclosure: Harris wrote six articles for The Athletic in 2017.)

“They put Darien in charge and he’s going to fix it, I’m convinced of that,” local radio/TV host and MSU historian Jack Ebling said. “I think Michigan State’s slowly learned. They can fix this and there’s enough money out there.”

What are reasonable expectations at Michigan State? Tucker’s contract and the momentum from 2021 looked like a program taking that next, final step.

Former staffers believe the expectations got too high. Competing for the Big Ten was one thing, but national championships are another level. They pointed to being behind Michigan and Ohio State in facilities and amenities, such as the ability to feed players more frequently.

“This is not a top-15 institution when it comes to football,” the first former staffer said. “It took us three or four years to get one phase of the football facility built. They don’t have the money they think they do.”

Michigan State has never been on the financial level of Michigan and Ohio State and probably never will. But that hasn’t stopped it from winning over the last decade.

“(Tucker’s contract) indicated to me that Michigan State really wants to be good in football,” one coaching agent said. “The roster’s not in great shape for the next person. It’s going to take time to get back to 11 wins, but the expectations from the boots on the ground are reasonable.”

Michigan State has always been able to do more with a little less — as long as everyone is on the same page. Everyone around the school points to Dantonio’s successful run as the first time in decades that MSU was aligned from an administrative, athletic department and coaching perspective, with former president Lou Anna K. Simon, former athletic director Mark Hollis, Dantonio and Izzo. Nick Saban had frequently clashed with administration, one reason he left for LSU in 2000. Under Dantonio, they’d finally gotten it right.

“That was a period to show what Michigan State can be,” Ebling said.

But Simon and Hollis departed amid the Nassar scandal, though neither have ever been found to have had any knowledge of wrongdoing by the school. Since then, MSU has cycled through interim and short-term leaders at AD and president.

The school’s trustees are currently feuding over several issues, including the release of Nassar documents and the leaking of the Tracy investigation. The school also apologized for failing to properly vet a stadium pregame trivia video from YouTube that briefly included an image of Adolf Hitler.

“There’s a real positive story for Michigan State to tell if it would quit stepping in its own s—,” Ebling said.

A new president, a new football coach and a reorganized NIL approach offer the opportunity to reset. Since taking over in September 2021, Haller has made several successful coaching hires, most notably Adam Nightingale with the hockey program and Leah Johnson in volleyball. People familiar with the search say Haller has been entrusted to make the hire without donor interference.

MSU football has a long history of high highs and low lows. Before Dantonio, the Spartans had gone two decades without a Big Ten championship. With Oregon, USC, Washington and UCLA coming in 2024, the Big Ten is about to get a lot tougher. The past decade has shown what’s possible in East Lansing. But it doesn’t win on its own. It needs the right people.

“Any time you meet a lot of turbulence, there’s greatness on the other side of hard,” Strayhorn said. “It’s hard as hell right now. It’s a lot of uncertainty and feels dark at times. I know it doesn’t feel like it for a lot of people, but the sun will come up tomorrow. As bad as things may seem right now, this thing can be turned around in a way that no one would ever believe.

“As long as everyone is together.”

— The Athletic’s Jesse Temple contributed reporting.

(Top photo: Mike Mulholland / Getty Images)