EAST LANSING — It’s the long beginning to the long end of another long season for Michigan State football.
Two games are left. The goal of competing for a Big Ten title vanished months ago. The hope of reaching a bowl for the first time since 2021 disappeared a week ago. All that remains for the Spartans to play for are personal pride, their professional futures and their coaches’ jobs.
All those things are tangible and impactful missions in the real world. But college football is far from everyday work, even though coaches such as Jonathan Smith espouse the values of sport as life lessons. That view still has some merit, but not nearly as much now that everything has become a semiprofessional entity measured 99.999% on wins and losses to the people who now make the decisions of success and failure.
That doesn't cover fans, by the way. Just donors and administrators – in that order.
So as MSU (3-7, 0-7 Big Ten) attempts to end its seven-game losing streak with a game against Iowa on Saturday, Nov. 22 (3:30 p.m., FS1), Smith and his staff stand in a position nearly as uncertain as a college graduate walking the stage for a diploma after barely getting by, without a concrete prospect of what comes next as the real world arrives.
“What we ask of our players, can we model the same in regards to going back to work,” Smith said Monday. “Understanding that, yeah, we’ve come up short. Well, what do you do? Do you start to point the fingers, and that kind of thing? Or do you own what you control?
“We do this thing together. And all of those things we try to model in regards to being a leader of a group of guys that have, they’ve been working really hard. That’s hard to go through. But a lot of times, the best things in life come after hard. And I’m still optimistic on that end.”
Their players? They’re in limbo, too, and looking toward their coaches for guidance, even as they are in flux.
“As long as you come in here and got the right energy, we’re still chasing games. We’re still chasing wins,” cornerback Malcom Bell said Wednesday. “Yeah, it’s not the season that we wanted. But we gotta finish strong.”
Much of the fan vitriol – right or wrong – comes from the product witnessed long before Smith arrived.
They gave Mark Dantonio a pass for his 2016 disaster, a 3-9 crash after reaching the College Football Playoff the previous season as part of winning three Big Ten titles in six years. The Spartans rebounded with a 10-win campaign in 2017, but the Duffy Daugherty-esque fade to 7-6 in each of Dantonio’s final two seasons had MSU fans someone to answer for it – namely Dantonio's entire staff.
They didn’t expect Dantonio to step away into retirement.
Enter Mel Tucker. Then exit Mel Tucker. Enough said.
The manufactured hype for Tucker created unrealistic expectations for a man who had one 5-7 season at Colorado as his résumé when he replaced Dantonio, the winningest coach in Spartans history. Tucker's 11-win season in 2021 – largely due to the talent of transfer running back Kenneth Walker III and future NFL receivers Jayden Reed and Jalen Nailor – proved a mirage. Another losing season followed, and Tucker was removed after two games in 2023 before being fired for illicit non-football reasons. The NCAA violations that emerged this month from Tucker’s tenure – and ensnared an unknowing Smith – added further fuel to a fire that continues.
Beyond being hamstrung from the stain of Tucker’s demise and the frustration of having to vacate games due to the previous staff’s transgressions, Smith and his staff have done little to curry support and rally the fanbase that yearns for the success of a decade ago.
Never mind that Dantonio’s sustained level of winning is an outlier and anomaly among the nearly 60 seasons since MSU last won a national title in 1966 – take away his nigh-unprecedented 114-57 record over his 13 seasons (2007-19), and the Spartans are 256-255-9 in the other 46 seasons since the start of 1967 – barely over a .500 winning percentage. But Smith only needed to achieve what Dantonio laid out before his exit as “the bare minimum” for MSU’s football program – win six games and make a bowl game. Smith has failed to do that twice, regardless of the reasons.
Unlike Dantonio in 2016, Smith will not be graded on a curve that takes into account past success – he doesn’t have any at MSU. Nor will his players, whose performances in the transfer portal era are viewed as stocks and currency to be bartered and traded for the sole purpose of wins and losses.
As Tom Izzo has said on multiple occasions the past few months, he felt like he was going to get fired early in his third season as the Spartans’ basketball coach after losing to UIC and Detroit Mercy during the first month of the 1997-98 season. He turned it around and led MSU to the Sweet 16, emerging from the hotseat as a Hall of Famer and East Lansing icon.
Times – and the money at stake for all parties – have changed dramatically since then. And Smith likely won’t get the same chance Izzo did to take his vision to reality.
Contact Chris Solari: [email protected]. Follow him @chrissolari.
Subscribe to the "Spartan Speak" podcast for new episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan State football fixes need time; Jonathan Smith won't get it