Spartan Football: The Outlook Moving Forward…Minnesota

Coming off an alarming 23-20 loss at home to Northwestern, the Spartans travel to Minnesota to close out the regular season with the Golden Gophers. Offense As

Coming off an alarming 23-20 loss at home to Northwestern, the Spartans travel to Minnesota to close out the regular season with the Golden Gophers.

Offense

As tough a season as it’s been for this unit, you’d still think they’ve got a shot to move the ball on Minnesota somewhat. But then again, you also thought the Spartans would have at least two or three more wins already this year. What’s left to say for the Offense in 2012? They’re off to a cold stadium against a team that’s already become Bowl eligible that just welcomed the type of internal turmoil we really haven’t yet seen explode publicly in this modern social media era.

Le’Veon Bell may be looking at his last game as a Spartan. He shouldn’t, for the record, but he might be thinking it’s time to declare for the NFL after the year. To expect an inspired effort from Bell would be to expect the sun to rise tomorrow, but Bell can’t block for himself. There’s little reason to think the Offensive Line, which hasn’t improved that much since their lineup settled down, will just show up and be able to blow the Gophers off the line. They haven’t blown anyone off the line this year when it’s mattered most, and there’s no magic potion around to make it happen on Saturday.

Andrew Maxwell probably came into 2012 thinking he’d eventually catch the new Offense up to run alongside  the Defense and get the Spartans back to play for another Rose Bowl trip. Instead the final game is to extend the Spartans’ consecutive Bowl streak.  That’s the reality, and the Spartans need Maxwell to approach Minnesota with as much effort and focus as if MSU was playing to lock up the Division title. If people tend to remember what you did first and last more than anything, Maxwell can salvage something of the year by leading the Spartans to a sixth straight Bowl game.

After going for 238 on the ground against the Cornhuskers, MSU only rushed for 122 on the ground against the Wildcats. That kind of stat sounds so traditionally whacky, you might even believe that a founding member of the ACC could join the Big Ten someday too. The Gophers rank 74th in Rushing Defense, Nebraska is now 77th as a point of comparison. The Spartans will have to move it on the ground, at some point, in order to win. They haven’t been able to rush it well when they’ve wanted to most, but they’ve done better when trying to go pass to run, as we’ve discussed in past weeks. If it’s literally below freezing at game time as expected, ball security could become an issue to watch with handoffs.

Dion Sims is probably going to line up for his final game in Green and White, and the Spartans better make the most of it. Sims is an all-time mismatch that MSU has underutilized throughout his three playing years, in part due to injury. Time may be short, but Sims is long and fast. It would be nice to see Sims targeted as much as any other receiver on Saturday. Aaron Burbridge is going to be really good one day, maybe even great. Keith Mumphrey has been MSU’s best all around receiving target this year. But Dion Sims is a once in a generation Tight End talent in a sport that’s featuring and valuing his position at the professional level like never before. Look for MSU to send Sims out on a high note, hopefully with one last Bowl Game ahead to make his final pitch to NFL scouts.

Defense

Never has Spartan Football wasted such a great Defense, and this is a great Defense. They don’t come around very often, especially without much help from an Offense and not much of a significant contribution from the Special Teams. They’ve been asked to win too many games practically on their own, and have understandably started to wear down at times.

Now they’re travelling for the final game of what may seem like largely a wasted effort. As much as this year will be remembered for the Offensive struggle and close losses, it will be also be recalled as a fine Defense stuck on a .500 (or less) team. Minnesota is 101st in scoring, the Spartans now are 110th. That does not bode well if you’re looking for a shootout on Saturday.

Jerry Kill’s built programs from the bottom up, starting with the running game. He’s made progress since taking over, but this is far from his best team as the Gophers are probably a couple years away from regaining the stability they threw out when they (oops!) canned Glenn Mason. The Spartans’ Defense is built to stop the run first, so something’s gotta give here. Given the stats and what we’ve seen from these two units, you’d think the Spartans will have an edge in taking away Minnesota’s prime Offensive threat.

So much has been asked of Max Bullough as a leader, and Saturday brings the next challenge of willing this unit to rise up one last time to carry the Spartans into a Bowl Game. We’re sure MSU wants to shut Minnesota out, but that may not be too realistic in Goldy’s own house. It’s going to be freezing in Minneapolis Saturday, which should help each Defense and potentially leave us with an ugly game to watch while dusting off whatever left of the Thanksgiving Turkey.

This unit should return just about all of its key players for 2013 (including William Gholston) and should be one of the top in the country once again. For all the Defense has done this year and how little they have to show for it, there would be a some measure of satisfaction if they could get the Spartans win to number 6 to start turning the page to 2013.

Special Teams

One of the strangest things about 2012 has been the performance of Dan Conroy. It’s clearly the surprise story of this unit. Last year he slipped from his 2010 All-Conference from, and some began to question his confidence at different points of the year. In the past summer, he spent time with the best kicker in school and football history, Morten Andersen, and supposedly came away with a new confidence and kicking insight.

Then the season kicked off and things never got going very well. It hasn’t been explained yet, and probably won’t make sense around East Lansing for a long time. Somehow an accomplished Senior kicker developed a hole in his game between 30 and 40 yards, and his season started to circle down the drain. There was no better evidence of that than they very makeable kick he missed in that range last Saturday.

Conroy was set up to kick from his “off” hash as a right footer, and appeared to line up poorly. Then there looked like a little trouble with the snap. To complete the miss, Conroy flat came over the top to pull the ball off line to the left. Many golfers in Spartan Nation can relate to what an “over the top” move produces in ball flight. The same applied to that kick. It never had a chance of being good, and again if you look at the final score, the Spartans came up those 3 painful points short.

If you look at the math, you see that the Spartans are less than 20 points from being a 1-loss team, on paper. And you could look back and find where missed Field Goals from Conroy proved to be the difference in more than a few of those games. We talked about Conroy’s expected importance to 2012 in our very first Outlook of the fall. Instead of becoming one of the team’s heroes like Brett Swenson of 2008, it’s become a bitter season to swallow and a sad ending to what looked like it would become another fine Spartan place kicking career.

Overall

After most of the Spartans losses earlier this year, many in Spartan Nation thought “well, they’ll win them all from here,” or “they’ll still end up with 8 or 9 wins by the end.” Now the end is here, and 6 wins is the regular season max. Worse, getting to 6 is no guarantee.

Most looked for a fast and crisp effort on Senior Day, instead they got 5 points at Halftime and more frustrating scoring opportunities wasted. MSU sputtered out of the gates, and then went splat at the end of the game. It didn’t take long to identify which team was interested in playing just well enough to win Saturday. Not their best game of the year, not their best execution of each play, but just enough to get a win. That apparent approach backfired in a painful final collapse of the “Woodshed” version 2.0.

For those of us that remember the original “Woodshed” that Bobby Williams tried to build, it completely crashed and burned in the program explosion at the end of 2002. Hopefully the awful 2012 home results will lead Spartan Football to completely abandon 2.0 and come up with something brand new. It was an admirable effort to try and reconstruct the “Woodshed” concept, but for whatever reason, the Football Gods have no love for the Spartan Stadium “Woodshed.” Spartans historically lived simple and disciplined lives. Maybe they had barracks, or lairs of some type. It’s time for another nickname at Spartan Stadium.

Before we get there, the Spartans have to figure out how they want to end 2012. Do they really want to give their all and put together a complete game for once, or do they want to travel to Minnesota and just show up hoping the turmoil in Minneapolis will cause the Gophers to hibernate early on their Coach. That would be a very risky bet, but Minnesota is likely to go one of two ways. They can either rally behind their embattled Coach, or turn on him completely and give a new definition to the word dysfunction.

If the Spartans are foolish enough to bet on the second option, they set themselves up for perhaps their biggest embarrassment of the Dantonio era, which would quickly erase a lot of the program’s momentum gained in the last two seasons. That either means something to the bulk of the players on this team or it doesn’t. The players will recognize who that does or does not matter to come Saturday evening, as will the entire Spartan Nation. Minnesota is a game the 2012 Spartans should win.

All the way back to Boise St., this team looked to lack the urgency displayed in the recent past. But Coach D told Spartan Nation earlier this week that he feels they “have had a sense of urgency in every game” this year, but at the same time recognize all that this “Program Game” means to Spartan Football. We expected to see more urgency from the Spartans against Northwestern, and instead we saw a team that looked a little content to move on towards 2013 already.

Should they fail to show up with the needed urgency and focus against the Gophers, it will be on to 2013, but not without consequence and damage to Spartan Football as a program. Like we talked about earlier this year, woulda-coulda-shoulda can only get you so far.

P.A.T. (Perhaps Another Thought…)

1. Now that Maryland has pulled off the biggest come from behind victory in conference expansion history, with Rutgers hoping aboard too, the Big Ten needs to act swiftly to get to 16 teams. They should make one final call to Notre Dame, and assuming a final “no,” call Georgia Tech to drop anchor in the home city of College Football. The final addition to the B16 should come from the Piedmont corridor between Atlanta and DC, in the form of Virginia Tech. VT looks to be added to the AAU as soon as 2014, and when you think of what the “Two Techs” would bring to the Big Ten and CIC, it would make for a nice 16 team Super Conference.
2. Since we’re at it, let’s revisit an idea to work the future 16-team Big Ten schedule. It seems best to have four divisions within the Conference with division winners playing a Semi-Final and then Championship game. Each team would annually play the other 3 within their division, plus two teams from each of the other three divisions to total nine Big Ten games. Nine leaves an unbalanced home and away schedule, but also prevents any tiebreakers. Each team could play each other at least every other year, and host each other at least every four.
3. Spartan Stadium stepped up big time in 2012 with the addition of the video board system, but there’s still entertainment work to be done. The audio entertainment (deejay and band) needs major work. It’s beyond stale, lacks an identity, and it does matter to the overall gameday experience. If MSU wants more fans filling up the seats, they’d better look to improve the audio entertainment experience and stop recycling the same old tunes that have evaporated the energy out of the joint for more than a decade now.

Let me hear all about it inside the Phalanx Forum, and @JPSpartan