Scope of Spartan Football: Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself
Scope of the Spartans: Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself
As the final month of 2019 begins the Spartans’ season is on the edge of slipping into the kind of abyss not seen since Mark Dantonio took over the program in late 2006. Just like Ice Cube explained in the creative heat of the early 90s, it’s time for Dantonio’s Spartans to check themselves before they wreck the fine program they’ve built. October was more brutal than any Michigan State has weathered for at least a half-decade. MSU didn’t just come up short against Ohio State, Wisconsin, and Penn State, they got beat up and exposed in three separate blowouts.
No game last month was competitive for close to 60 minutes. There was no “wouldah-couldah-shouldah” type that MSU had a real shot to pull out, and all three were thoroughly convincing beat-downs. Admittedly, those were the key games of the season that were circled on calendars across the Spartan Nation from the time winter conditioning began. The 2019 litmus test for Spartan Football produced painfully sour results as MSU lost each game by at least 21-points. They type of reality isn’t always easy to digest for proud organizations. Spartan Football was forced to chew through it because they failed to accurately grasp their reality in the recent past. Reality does indeed bite sometimes, and we got a glimpse from Mark Dantonio after the Wisconsin shutout, it doesn’t always go down too well.
Some cautioned the Spartans prospects before the October losses, both in public and in private, but that’s a discussion better fit for after the season. The current truth of the matter is that MSU can’t compete at the top of the Big Ten. Worse, there are signs of cracks in the program’s foundation, and red flags that the core stability of Mark Dantonio’s program needs immediate attention and a longer-term plan to avoid further deterioration. This is not a drill, this is the real thing.
The troubles begin with the continued failings of the Offense. Their struggle has been so severe that it has bled over to affect the other two units. The Spartan Defense has been overextended and worn down, and the Special Teams unit has been overstressed to its detriment as well. You can make a good argument that most of the problems in the Spartan Defense and Special Teams this season can be traced back to the underperforming and demoralizing production from the Spartan Offense. As a whole, the team has not done a good job of consistently executing the fundamentals with an attention to detail, and thus finds themselves in a fight better than six and six instead of hunting for the division and looking to bank ten-wins.
So many of the program's broader issues flow from long term mismanagement and neglect of the Spartan Offense. Other than that promising stretch towards the end of 2017 when it finally looked like the days of a dysfunctional Offense was gone for good, MSU’s serious struggles on that side of the ball go back to 2015. Yes, in that championship season the first signs of trouble for the Offense popped up. For years now a variety of voices have pleaded for the Spartan Offense to get out of its own way. They emphatically chose not to, and now it’s caught up with them to the point that bad outcomes and negative consequences are spewing out all over the place. Let’s look at some cringe-worthy facts to get real about how things look for the MSU Offense right now.
The Spartans rank 110th in Scoring Offense, 108th in Total Offense, 118th in Rushing Offense, and 89th in 3rd Down Conversion percentage. No program in the country can realistically compete to win their conference with those numbers, regardless of how good the other two units play. There no easy fixes out there and no short-term solutions for this Offense. If there were, wouldn’t they have been completed exhausted by now? Spartan Nation has little choice but to accept the Offense for what it has become: an incredibly discombobulated and underperforming mess. As you already know, a bulk of those issues begin upfront.
Many (including this writer) thought the return to Jim Bollman’s leadership would produce a playing group that would quickly get back towards accomplishing big things. Man, we’re we wrong. The Spartans continue to have a hard time blocking anyone consistently, they cannot control the point of attack when the need to, and they continue to be outplayed by the better programs in the Big 10 for a few years now. In order to get back to competing with the best of the Big 10, MSU needs a solid and stable Offensive Line. That will not happen without a clear commitment from Michigan State Football to build a culture and tradition of competing to be the best Offensive Line in the Big Ten East. That level of commitment, not just talk, is the minimum it will take for MSU line to compete for that title on a year-in-year-out basis.
Unlike the weaker Big Ten West, there will not be a single program that has the best O-Line on an annual basis in the East. There will be a small group of schools battling for that top spot though, and Michigan State isn’t even in that fight these days. Spartan Football has serious work ahead of them to get back in that race again, and it even expands beyond that position group.
The Spartans need Running Backs that complete blocking assignments when called for, Tight Ends that can play their part in protection, and a return to better blocking out wide. MSU is lacking across the board in those complimentary blocking areas right now relative to their competition, and the recent veteran attrition did not help. To be clear, MSU doesn’t need the best Offensive Line in the Big Ten East to compete for championships, but they do need a consistently reliable playing group that can match up with the big boys in the division to have a shot to win another conference championship. Other major programs (see Oregon as a recent example) have fixed their line play in pretty short order. While there are some signs that the future looks better than the present for the Spartans Offensive Line, it’s time this program sharpens their focus even more on this side of the ball.
For too long the Spartans have not made fixing the Offensive Line enough of a priority. That only served to amplify MSU’s repeated efforts to “jam a square peg into a round hole,” which made things look even worse. It’s gone on for so long now that it’s jeopardized the best parts of this program’s foundation, which is honestly an unnecessary shame. If you want to look at the polar opposite approach to the Spartans delay in fixing their O-Line issues, look at what Brett Bielema did at Wisconsin in 2012.
Bielema replaced his new Offensive Line Coach at after just two games of the 2012 season because their play so poorly measured up to the Badgers’ standard. That was not an easy move. At the time Bielema talked about the position group needing a significant change in a short period of time and compared the situation to some he had previously been around where a struggling staff member was allowed to stay on through the end of a season, to the detriment of that team’s performance. He successfully applied that valuable lesson, and the Badgers righted the ship.
Wisconsin got into the Big Ten title game that year because Ohio State and Penn State were ineligible, and then blew out Nebraska so badly for the conference championship that it probably cost Bo Pelini an easy exit out of Lincoln to another job. It might have also helped Bielema land a new job at Arkansas before the Rose Bowl. Barry Alvarez ended up popping back down to the sideline for the Rose Bowl that the Badgers lost by six to Stanford. None of that success would’ve been possible without the major change after two games. If Bielema decided instead to dig in his heels and keep an Offensive Line Coach that was steering the heart and soul of that program far off course, it would have gotten a lot uglier in Madison that season.
Bielema recognized the fundamental threat Wisconsin Football faced in short order and acted to stop it before it became a crisis. The Badgers not only avoided a further slide in the 2012 season, but they also resolved the deeper issue that could have seriously derailed their entire program. There is, after all, no program in the country that is identified more for its Offensive Line than the Wisconsin Badgers. That’s the core of Bucky’s brand. What lies at the foundational core of the Spartan Offense these days?
Quarterbacks are measured most by two stats: their win-loss record and the number of points put up under their command. Before the season began it was as clear that MSU had to get more out of its signal-caller, regardless of who took the snaps. The Spartans have just not gotten enough out of the Quarterback position so far. The expectations for better Quarterback production were not only based on better individual performance, but they were also built around projections of a better Offensive Line, the new look Spartan Offense, and a return to consistently getting the ball to playmakers in a position to succeed. Not only has all of that not happened enough yet, MSU saw starters and expected contributors bolt for the transfer portal rather early in 2019, practically sounding an alarm on their way out.
The mess this Offense has become could not have been completely avoided by outstanding Quarterback play, but it probably could have possibly been survived with an outstanding year. Before anyone gets too cranky, this is not all on Brian Lewerke. It is, however, on the leadership of this Offense that has let a lot of players down, and has since started to pay a heavy price for it. Though it's hard to play Quarterback behind a limited Offensive Line, it remains incredible that the Spartans continued to refuse to try another option or two under center for meaningful earlier this season. You never know how an Offense might respond to a different signal-caller. Just look back about seven seasons for the best Spartan example of that. When things are going this bad, as they have been since September, you owe it to your team to try all viable options at that position.
Make no mistake, the message sent by many players that left the Offense already suggest serious trust issues are growing between some players and those who lead them. It stings to realize that most players quit their coaching staff far more than either their teammates or the program. That development is so foreign to the culture Mark Dantonio had established, where more players stuck around and accepted a role just to be a part of Spartan Football rather than transferring to look for playing time elsewhere.
It all adds up to a visible gap between the potential of the Spartan Offense and the reality of their performance, again. This is not the first time we’ve seen this plot develop under Mark Dantonio. It isn’t even the second or third time a season has played out this way, but it is different because we are over a dozen years in and this is the second season in a row that Spartan Offense has essentially crushed the hopes and goals of a season. It’s already worse this time because we have seen worrisome consequences begin to play out and there are fast approaching bad outcomes insight. It makes you wonder what a coach like Brett Bielema would really think of the situation Mark Dantonio has put himself in right now, which likely only gets tougher unless a wildcard of a script was seriously flipped in the past bye week.
The 2019 Spartans will not play the type of meaningful games Mark Dantonio teams have enjoyed for many of the past Novembers. Without that type of motivation, Spartan Nation is not sure what kind of football to expect from this team to close it out. It’s hard for teams to keep focused on playing their best football each week when both on and off-field distractions are piling up. Even harder when growing uncertainty exists about whether your position coaches will be back the following year, and whether your Head Coach might decide it’s time to hang up the whistle and retire. Some clarity there would surely help.
Even a win at Ann Arbor this month, on its own, would come too late to repair the damage done to this team. That in itself is a sign of how far this program has come from the murky days of the “same old Spartans,” but the current state of the program is stagnant enough to at least remind you of that infamous era. It should also serve as a reminder of how hard it was for Mark Dantonio and company to break on through to the other side of that hump, and how important it is for Spartan Football to prevent that monster of mediocrity from ever coming back.
This is also not the kind of final month Michigan State wants to see in 2020. The first step to avoiding that, and convincing the College Football world that the foundation of Spartan Football is not starting to show any cracks, is to field a team willing to fight for sixty minutes. A team that looks more passionate, organized and driven to produce than we have seen for the last eight games. Everyone inside the program needs to join together, bench their egos and rifts for the month, stay in the present, and move together in one direction again. That’s an awfully tall task for a Head Coach and staff that haven’t been able to do that too well since the end of 2017. But if they can’t pull that together in the next four games the crowd calling for pretty major wholesale changes will only get louder and louder.
Mark Dantonio was right in his famous press conference the week after the Michigan loss in 2007 when he suggested: “sometimes (Michigan Football) they need to check themselves.” His evaluation of that football program at that point in time was spot on, and it’s been a pretty rough stretch for Michigan Football ever since. Now the time has come for Spartan Football to deliver that same message to itself in a mirror and for those leading the program to point both the finger and the thumb to directly at the issues threatening to bring Michigan State Football down.
Without appropriate checks and balances, even the best of institutions run the risk of falling apart. They end up lacking the efficiency and effectiveness to reach their full potential. Just look around your world for plenty of examples. That’s exactly what Ice Cube was talking about more than twenty-five years ago in that song. It’s about not letting something valuable get too far away from you. Once you do, it’s gone. That message should be ringing very loud and clear to Spartan Football today, but this time they really need to hear it and absorb it. Otherwise, nothing in this program will get properly checked, and Mark Dantonio’s Spartans will not find a healthy balance again.
You can follow me on Twitter @JPSpartan
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