Should We Throw a Flag on the Fans?

After eight years of defying the odds to resurrect Spartan Football into national title contention once again, Mark Dantonio has earned a good bit of capital when it comes to addressing Spartan Nation. He spent a little of that immediately after the Nebraska win up by addressing the thousands of fans that left the weathered Spartan Stadium with plenty of time left on the clock.

“The fans that left, that’s just not right,” Dantonio said with those eight years of perspective leading the program and a couple decades worth overall. Dantonio had made a special request for Spartan fans to show up and be heard as early as the post game press conferences after Wyoming last weekend. Fans showed up early for Nebraska in the deteriorating weather, got loud during MSU’s beat down of Nebraska early on, but then bailed for dry warmth out as soon as the game should have been decided for good. The key word there of course being “should.” When they hit the exits, they took a lot more energy out of the place than they probably could’ve imagined.

“Appreciated the ones that stayed,” Dantonio re-emphasized before ending initial discussion of the fans mass exodus on his post game radio show. To be fair, Coach D has always said that and lived it in his time at MSU. When some wondered out loud why more fans didn’t show, or didn’t bother to stay the whole way, Dantonio shifted the focus to those that did. But did he have much of a choice when the stadium cleared out by a third or more with that much time left and then a scary result?

Of course it should’ve been “garbage time,” by the time fans left, but it wasn’t. A quick check of the math would’ve showed MSU led by only 24 at the max. That’s only 3-scores worth, aka right on the borderline comeback range. As we learned later, that three score number is right at the edge of a possible comeback range. MSU should’ve been up 4-scores or more, as in 33-points at least, but they weren’t. Many fans actually reacted to MSU being ahead that much in taking off, and their void was ultimately felt cold by the team.

I would never criticize fans for leaving a game early, coming late, etc. They are customers and own the right to come and go as they please. But I have no problem with Dantonio laying it out as he did after the game in a rather reasoned and logical way. Especially when you consider the rollercoaster his stomach and brain must have gone through during the final 20 plus minutes. He basically made a valid point and described the specific request he’d made to fans and their specific response to it Saturday night. Any fan that has a big issue with that, who accurately understood what the Head Coach said, probably has something to hide or is just being unreasonable on this one.

As this program has matured to an extent, so have its fans. Yet, as we saw against Nebraska over 60 full minutes, there’s still some large steps this program has to take from here to get closer to the top. So do some of their fans. Fair enough?

PS. Let the Students sit wherever they want inside the confines of the Student Section. It looks awful on TV and maybe worse in person when a big chunk of the stands is left completely empty. It never should. In the past when MSU didn’t have an overly restrictive voucher system, Students naturally spread out within the section and it never looked as awful as it does on a regular basis now. Let Students line up and earn a chance to sit wherever they want inside the entire assigned section. They might just stay a little longer and even move around to see the action from another view as the game winds down.