How Jim Harbaugh Wrecked Spartan Football
To understand the origins of Michigan's gridiron dominance over its instate rival the past two years, to the tune of a combined score of 65-17, you actually have to go back to the offseason of 2015.
Mark Dantonio was riding high. Guiding Michigan State to 11 wins or more in four of the last five seasons. The Spartans had just won the Rose and Cotton Bowls in consecutive seasons, finishing each year in the final top five. Michigan State would go on to have a special year in 2015, too, including Dantonio's third Big Ten title and a spot in the College Football Playoff.
Yet despite all that success, Dantonio and the Spartans were being overshadowed by the new head coach hired by their hated nemesis --Michigan. Everywhere Jim Harbaugh went he was a story. Whether it was Oakland As spring training, or summertime satellite camps down South. Harbaugh wasn't just a football coach that offseason. He was a force of nature. Watching Harbaugh's magical mystery tour was like watching what would happen if Andy Kaufman and Bo Schembechler had a son.
Right on cue, the media couldn't get enough of the prodigal son's return to his alma mater. And at the same time it also seemed to struggle remembering who the very successful Dantonio even was, often hilariously (for Michigan fans) confusing him with NBA Coach Mike D'Antoni.
However, that's the exact sort of slight Dantonio had used to keep the Death Star-sized chip on his shoulder that fueled so much of his program's ascendancy. Especially because two years prior Dantonio made a coaching hire of his own that was about to pay off big-time -- Curtis Blackwell.
Even though he wasn't a big-time name outside the state of Michigan, as the architect of the Sound Mind Sound Body football camp, Blackwell had his finger on the pulse of the Detroit prep football scene. The college football media may not have known who Blackwell was, but any high school prospect in Michigan capable of playing in the Big Ten most certainly did. The addition of Blackwell, timed alongside Dantonio's program reaching its apex, seemed poised to perhaps make Michigan State the dominant player with instate recruiting for the first time ever. Harbaugh's arrival be damned.
And it didn't take long for the Blackwell-Dantonio marriage to produce some offspring.
The first full recruiting cycle of their collaboration in 2015 produced the Spartans' highest-ranked recruiting class in five years. The following year, 2016, was even better. The highest-ranked Michigan State recruiting class in 15 years, including an impressive eight prospects ranked among the top 250 overall players in the country.
Throw in he beat Harbaugh in their first meeting, improbable as that ending was, and from afar it appeared Dantonio was in position to defy the odds once more. Not only was he able to make Michigan State the superior instate program for the first time in a half century, while the Wolverines were down, it seemed reports of his looming demise with Harbaugh now here were greatly exaggerated.
But what we didn't know was what was happening beneath the surface.
Star quarterback Connor Cook was savaged by NFL teams over questions about his "intangibles" (scout code for leadership and character) since he wasn't vote a captain as a senior. Star running back L.J. Scott seemed to think East Lansing traffic laws didn't apply to him. At the time, these stories were little more than mocking tropes for opposing fans. Now, though, we know they were harbingers. Early tectonic shifts setting the stage for the earthquake to come.
With the 2016 season now here, Michigan was surging in Harbaugh's second year. Soaring as high as No.2 in the country, and in the playoff conversation until the very end. Meanwhile, the Spartans were preseason No.12 and looked poised to be good again after dismantling Notre Dame in South Bend in primetime.
Little did anyone know when Michigan State left the field that night, it would lose its next seven games in a row. A stunning implosion nobody saw coming. The Spartans' 9-game win regression was the worst one-season decline in modern college football history.
Folks were scurrying for answers, but when the Spartans bounced back to go 10-3 the following year, it seemed like an anomaly. Except what we now know is the bounce-back was the anomaly.
Michigan State is just 24-25 since winning the 2015 Big Ten Championship Game, with 10 of those losses by two touchdowns or more. That night in Indianapolis after winning the title, a jubilant Dantonio proclaimed on national television his program "had God's favor."
Yet in a scene right out of the televangelist scandals of the 1980s, shortly after making such an audacious claim Dantonio's skeletons have come out of the closet. Funny how that works.
We now know about a senior team captain linebacker getting busted for PEDs (as his predecessor at the position was in the NFL). That decorated 2016 class that was going to cement Dantonio's foundation has been its undoing. Decimated by attrition that has mortally wounded the program's depth. With too much of that attrition because of sexual assault allegations.
Which brings us to a messy divorce with Blackwell, who apparently didn't get the memo he was supposed to be the fall guy here for a recruiting class he played a huge hand in assembling. But Blackwell is not only not going quietly, he's got a deposition with Dantonio scheduled for after the season, with his attorneys able to ask the Michigan State coach any question they want under oath. What could possibly go wrong?
It all adds up to this: while Dantonio publicly seemed unimpressed with Harbaugh coming home, the way he managed his program in response to it says otherwise. He looked the other way, let things slide, took chances on the recruiting trail, and lost his way while trying to stay ahead of a more formidable new challenge.
Dantonio built his entire program on hatred for, and the beating of, Michigan. But now Michigan wasn't going to be as easy to beat anymore. He wasn't going to have Brady Hoke emasculating himself with public apologies for daring to treat this like a rivalry anymore. He wasn't going to be able to get away with trying to decapitate Michigan quarterbacks anymore.
The so-called "dean of Big Ten discipline" has become Nurse Ratched from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." All because desperation is the mother of compromise. And the source of that desperation is Jim Harbaugh.
