Mark Dantonio asks, “Who was the Cotton Bowl MVP?” Hungry Michigan State Football Looks for More!

Mark Dantonio asks, “Who was the Cotton Bowl MVP?” As Michigan State Football Looks for More! When the offensive and defensive MVP awards were handed out

Mark Dantonio asks, “Who was the Cotton Bowl MVP?” As Michigan State Football Looks for More!

When the offensive and defensive MVP awards were handed out at the Cotton Bowl both winners were from Baylor. You can’t argue that the winners had great games, but that is highly unusual considering Baylor LOST the game. It almost never happens.

So when I caught up with MSU Head football coach Mark Dantonio earlier this week I asked him about that. Was it fitting considering his Spartans really played so well as a team? His answer might surprise you.

He said, “You know, that's unusual to say that, but I've been wondering who's been the MVP of that game because it really didn't matter. I've been wondering for about three or four days, who was the MVP? But you look at Tony Lippett playing both sides of the ball, you want to count up his plays, he probably played 80 snaps, and every time I turned around he was ready to go back in on defense and he made plays. You look at the play that Marcus Rush made, you know, big sack at the end of the game, I believe, and then also his blocked kick is huge. He'll be right there with the hit on fourth down of the Rose Bowl. You look at his play. You look at the play of Keith Mumphery. You look at Cook coming down the stretch, Jeremy Langford. We had a lot of guys make a lot of plays in this football game. Trae Waynes made plays. So we had a lot of guys making plays. I thought Taiwan Jones played extraordinarily well. They couldn't run the ball. They ended up with minus-20 yards rushing. Even though that's combined with sacks, they probably had legitimately 20-plus yards rushing. Difficult in a game like that down the stretch because you've got to take the clock. You've got to run the ball to take more time off the clock. They weren't able to do that.”

For Dantonio the name of the game isn’t MVP awards or coaching awards. It’s championships. It’s real hardware and he thinks his Spartans are here to stay. I agree with him.

“I think we've developed continuity here, not just in what we're doing but in how we're doing it and in terms of productivity, in terms of wins. We've won 24 games and lost three (the past two seasons), and two of them are two of the people that are playing in the championship game, and one of them was to Notre Dame the year before that was coming off the championship game. So I think we can be in the national conversation. I think we're a football team that can and will play up. I think we're looking at inches in terms of how far away are we from being in the game that everybody's anticipating this weekend. You know, things can fall either way. Now, it can fall the other way, too. As you could see last week, we could have lost that game. But you deal with what you have. And we've done a good job here, a great job here of being able to remain resilient after a tough loss and be able to rebound and respond, and I think that's the key to coaching. That's why I'm so impressed with our coaching staff and our players and our team chemistry because we've always been able to rally around things. But you look at what we did on offense this past year, we set a lot of records and we're the most prolific offense in the history of Michigan State football. That's a huge statement. Looking at some stats here, we had 70 touchdowns and ran for 44. When you look at our defense, we end up No. 1 in the nation again against the run. We're the only team to rank in the top 10 in total defense since 2011. That's the only team in the country. So we've won on the road here, we've won here. Everything's going sort of according to plan. We're getting better. We're not fading away, we're getting better as we move forward. And the challenges are getting bigger and I think it's important that we understand this is how -- it's how we handle success. I'll say it again, how do we handle success, and we've got to get ourselves ready to play a tough 2015 schedule, very tough.”

Dantonio thinks that it wasn’t just a Rose Bowl in or a Cotton Bowl classic that wins, it is something bigger than one season. It’s more. It’s sustaining the success. He explained, “First of all, we're the only team in the nation to win a BCS game in '13 and then follow it up to New Year's Day, the power 6 game this year. So we're the only team in the nation that's done that, so that's one positive. The second thing is, though, the question that you asked, I felt last year's team really paralleled a little bit Ohio State's team right now. They were a football team that had their doubters early in the season and they gained momentum and they gained ground as they moved through the process. And coming out the back end, I'm not sure who could have beaten us last year, I'm really not, because we were playing at an extremely high confidence level and we had a lot of good players as evidenced by 10 guys, whether they were drafted or not, going into the NFL and then what we're having this year. So we had a lot of good football players. So the confidence, we were moving forward, we were gaining ground.”

He went on to add, “This year, this was about holding ground a little bit more. This was about being the favorite team going into the Ohio State game maybe, or about being a team that had to go to Oregon and it was maybe a toss-up, and it was about handling success. So we had to get up off the mat a couple times this year and be able to respond. So our players did that. We persevered. I think we handled success. I think coming into the Cotton Bowl was another situation we were in a little bit of a proving ground, and however it sorted itself out, we won the football game and that's the bottom line. At the end of the day, did you win, did you lose. That's how you're -- I could point to a lot of football games we played extremely well and we lost the game. So that's the bottom line and we were able to do that. So I would say that we accomplished our goal of handling success. Did we get as far as we wanted to be? No. You know, in both those games, the Oregon game and the Ohio State game, we were winning the football game. You know, all of a sudden things sort of went the other way and we lost it. And we've got to play better and we've got to understand that that's a part of this. But I do think this Cotton Bowl game, like you said, I think this Cotton Bowl game will go down in our history, in our recent history here as a game that was a program game. It was a game that we beat the number 5 team and we moved forward with a national reputation and a national brand.”

Dantonio has big plans. He wants more. There is no doubt he thinks more is in store. As he addressed the fans at halftime of the MSU vs IU basketball game Monday night he told the crowd, “2015 is going to be special.” No doubt Spartan Nation has learned Dantonio is not fluent in coach speak. For him to say that tells you a lot. Remember he was the coach who went to the Rose Bowl before the season started and shot a video telling his 2013 team that they would, “Be the ones” to get the Spartan Nation to Pasadena and the Rose Bowl.

Enough said.