MICHIGAN STATE FOOTBALL: The Outlook Moving Forward, Air Force!

Coming off their 31-28 win Saturday night over Oregon, the Spartans host the Air Force Falcons this Saturday at 12:00 on ABC.

Offense

Coming into last week’s redemption effort Connor Cook reflected on the disappointment of the 2014 game. Cook felt the Spartan Offense played well in the 1st Half at Autzen Stadium, but faltered in the 2nd as the wheels fell off the Spartans’ 3rd Quarter lead and ended in a 28-point defeat. He vowed 2015 would be different, and led the Offense Saturday night when it needed him most.

Cook converted two 4th Downs, first running the ball straight up the gut in the 2nd Quarter when momentum was sorely needed. Two plays later he found Aaron Burbridge to put MSU up 14-7. Then in the 3rd Quarter facing 4th and 6, when he found Burbridge for 28 yards, which set up L.J. Scott’s Touchdown run to make the game 21-14. As he’s done before, Cook saved his best for when the Spartans needed it most. It’s something quite rare, and completely intangible.

Cook’s first Touchdown pass was caught by Tight End Josiah Price. For Price, that makes three straight games catching a Touchdown. Tight End production in the passing game has not come about by accident during the Spartans' current 26-3 run. “He’s (Co-Coordinator and Tight Ends Coach Jim Bollman) really built that unit into a position of strength for us,” Mark Dantonio told Spartan Nation earlier this week. Perhaps they’re just getting started.

It appears MSU will play three Tight Ends for the bulk of 2015. “They all had about 30-plus plays (against Oregon),” Dantonio noted. Price had another effective night, Jamal Lyles flashed his significant athleticism and caught a ball for 18 yards, and Paul Lang saw time as well, contributing mostly as a blocker. Each Tight End is capable of making impact plays.

As we discussed last week and saw during the Oregon game, MSU can find mismatches in the passing game because teams have trouble consistently lining up well against the Spartan Tight Ends. It’s not just Price or Lyles or Lang, is the combination and multiple looks MSU can throw out there that should keep opposing Defensive Coordinators looking for answers all year. “We have a couple more guys that are very good players, that have not played yet,” Dantonio added.

As the season progresses, we should see more big things from the Spartan Tight Ends. With the options available, we probably “ain’t seen nothing yet” in terms of all the different things they can do. The position looks stock piled for the future too, but all that potential can go unmet if the Spartans don’t make enough of an effort to keep Tight Ends involved at the requisite level.

Many did not like the play calling from MSU last Saturday, which has been very good overall during the past couple seasons. But looking just at the Oregon game, they may have a point. It was odd that Connor Cook didn’t run the ball until the start of the 2nd Quarter after Dantonio confirmed earlier this season that Cook needed to run more. When Damion Terry lined up under center it seemed completely telegraphed that we’d see a running-option type play. Had Terry dropped back to the throw a pass, MSU might have caught Oregon off guard.  And though Spartans scored 30 points again, the Offense did not manage 200 yards of either rushing or passing against a Defense that should give up pretty big numbers this year.

This week look for Spartan Football to “pound, green, pound,” but hopefully their primary interest will be to get into rhythm and score however possible. A stubborn approach of too much running or too much passing could leave Spartan Nation frustrated and staring at a lower point total than they expected to see on the board. If something like that happens, expect to hear more grumbling about the Oregon game and slow start on Offense so far. It’s not that this unit has anything big to prove on Saturday, but they should find a higher gear and look better than they have the first two weeks.

Defense

Saturday night the new era of Spartan Dawgs faced their biggest test to date and performed pretty well. They gave up 432 yards to Oregon, but we’re talking about Oregon. More importantly, the Defense gave up just 21 points, forced 2 turnovers, and got off the field on 3rd and 4th Down like a champ. Oregon is not used to going 4-13 on 3rd Down, or just 2-6 on 4th Downs.

Many players did solid work for MSU, led by Defensive Player of the week Riley Bullough, but perhaps the most effective playing group was again the Defensive Line. “We’ve always played a lot of defensive linemen here,” Dantonio told Spartan Nation earlier this week when discussing the 8 Spartans up front that stayed fresh shuffling in and out of the lineup. “If you’re good enough to play, you’re going to play.”

Ron Burton’s bunch has that many players that can play at this level, if not a couple more young Dawgs that we may see up front in the coming weeks. They’re a fast, powerful, and savvy bunch that’s getting better by the week, more disruptive by the snap, and more attention from outside as each week goes by.

“Demetrius Cooper is a guy that doesn’t start, but plays a lot, and has really had two very, very good games,” Dantonio noted. Cooper may be one of a handful of future NFL players in this Defensive Line group right now. If you think that sounds a bit crazy, check the track record of these kinds of statements that have been made in this column before. This is not a piece of puffery.

Cooper, Montez Sweat, Craig Evans, and other newcomers will reaffirm Dantonio’s philosophy that playing a lot of young players early benefits the health and long term success of the program. “It helps you (players) prepare, it makes you understand that you’re one play away from playing.”

Air Force brings with it the Option Offense, arguably the most difficult system to prepare for during the midst of a season. Therefore, MSU started preparing for Air Force, the Option, and cut blocks during the summer. Ron Burton worked at Air Force before joining the Dantonio staff, which should give MSU the needed edge to close the gap as far as preparing the Defense. It’s far from the typical Offense MSU will see, and will look quite different than the Ducks did Saturday night.

Option offenses are made to run from the front and do not typically do a good job of coming from behind. That may give the Defense an extra incentive to play well early in hopes that MSU can get control of Air Force from the start. It should be a long day of work for the Spartan Dawgs Saturday, but as long as they can stay healthy and continue to shut down the run, it should also be a successful one.

Special Teams

There are some real issues with the Spartans’ Special Teams right now. Four kicks have been returned for serious yardage, two of them for Touchdowns, and we’re only two games in. We knew the kick coverage needed immediate attention after Western, and you may have assumed it would’ve been resolved after week one because, if for no other reason, you don’t see teams give up that many huge returns in such a short period of time. It’s a real concern now.

Mark Snyder is the new Special Teams Coordinator for the Spartans. Only three weeks into his first year on the job, he now sits firmly under the microscope. Not only has MSU kick coverage been the biggest blemish on the 2-0 start, the unit has looked less than fully prepared as a whole.

Place Kicker Michael Geiger did not have a great 2014. When he lined up and missed a 27-yard try Saturday night from a friendly hash mark, the Spartan Stadium crowd gasped and many in Spartan Nation let out an “oh boy,” given the rocky start of the unit as a whole. Geiger looked lined up right the whole way, and looked a tad deflated after missing the try. That miss may have encouraged MSU to go for it on a key 4th Down later in the game.

To his credit, however, Geiger bounced back to notch a 36-yarder in the 3rd Quarter. Hopefully that will get him back on track as the weather transitions into Fall and it becomes tougher to kick. As we discussed last week, field goal kicking could play a decisive role in determining MSU’s ultimate fate. Geiger has to make some kicks before Big Ten play to regain the confidence he had in 2013.

On the bright side, Jake Hartbarger can punt the football. Mike Sadler was a better than good punter, and a great trick play maker. Hartbarger looks like he could be a great punter, but we'll have to wait a while until we get an idea for his trick play chops. The explanation offered that Hartbarger may have out kicked his coverage on the Oregon punt return for a Touchdown is something left open for debate, at least for now.

There were some positives for this unit Saturday night though. For anyone that discounts a starter’s role on Special Teams as just an empty, go through the motions type thing, consider R.J. Shelton’s big play. After a bad offensive series where he was stopped cold 1st Down flat pass and dropped a 3rd Down pass that would’ve moved the chains, Shelton showed up on 4th Down punt coverage ready to go. After Hartbarger bombed it, Shelton took off and timed his arrival perfect, getting to the ball right after it was caught and stopping the return for essentially no gain. That may have been one of the best Special Teams play of the year so far.

Overall

Oregon was a game the Spartans wanted for a year. After letting a golden opportunity slip away from them in 2014 via Marcus Mariota, MSU watched Oregon play all the way to the National Title Game. The Spartans seemed to move on from that loss during their flight back home, but at the same time stored Oregon in the back of their minds for the return date in East Lansing, 2015.

The Spartans did not play a perfect game Saturday night, as Mark Dantonio reminded us shortly after perhaps the biggest win in Spartan Stadium under his tenure. Some in Spartan Nation thought MSU was not as crisp as they expected them to look, but they did enough to take control of the game and make the plays late to hold on over a Top 10 team. They earned the position they’re in heading into Air Force, the possibility of another special season in Green.

Perhaps Mark Dantonio’s biggest accomplishment as Head Coach of Michigan State has been getting his program to play their best for all 60 minutes of a game. Before he arrived, that was far from the case. Going back to the underachieving days of the Nick Saban era, after the Woodshed was blown up during the Bobby Williams era, and all too often in the bowl-less John L. Smith era, Spartan Football didn’t always show up play after play. Before you get too bent out of shape, that’s the norm in College Football. These Dantonio Spartans are exceptional.

There have been aberrations, of course. The infamous “Iowa Flat” game first comes to mind, and the near “come from ahead loss” to Nebraska in 2015 is most recent. Far more often than not, Dantonio’s teams have come to play for 60 minutes, by design. “It’s been critical,” Dantonio explained. The simple focus and message to his program has produced wins in 26 of the past 29 contests. “As easy as it is to say, one play at a time…just give maximum effort…don’t get shook…play with confidence, and usually good things happen after that.”

A lot of very good things can happen if Spartan Football can carry that focus into each of the remaining ten regular season games. But there are disappointments to be had should this team get ahead of itself, receive too many pats on the back around campus, or get caught up in too much kool-aid filled chatter on the ever fickle internet. They need to manage distractions well to avoid getting tripped up.

In the relatively distant past, those kinds of stumbles came around often to let down the Spartan Nation. Too often, for too long, supporters saw their program flash brilliance one week then underachieve soon thereafter. When Dantonio arrived, that poison in the program’s culture had to go, and he got rid of it. No longer are great opportunities left out to spoil.

This is another golden era of Spartan Football. The program’s simple but effective focus that's produced so much in the last 30 games should be on display again early Saturday afternoon. The Oregon win put them in the position to ultimately “Reach Higher,” and their effort against Air Force should show Spartan Nation how much that prospect means to them right now.

@JPSpartan

P. A. T. (Perhaps Another Thought…)

1. Who produced the Oregon game for ABC? They did not show a minute of the Spartans’ field entrance under the lights to AC/DC’s Thunderstruck, the anthem for Spartan Stadium since the 90s. Labor Day night, ESPN did a far too long entrance in Blacksburg for Virginia Tech. Last season Clemson had an even longer entrance that included a bus ride, if you recall. If stiffing MSU on the entrance wasn’t enough, ABC’s audio staff decided to cut up a clip of Dantonio from his famous post-Michigan presser in 2007 and tack it onto some Oregon material from 2014. Who was that supposed to fool? Mark it down as another media slap in the face to Spartan Football. It was not an outstanding production effort Saturday night
2. How about College Football and the NFL do something special this week and get straight what constitutes a catch and what doesn’t. Shouldn’t a catch be ruled as soon as a player has possession of the ball with one foot, two feet (NFL), or its equivalent on the ground? Why did we get into all of this silly “football” move judgment or “he didn’t control the ball through the end of the play even though he’s five yards out of bounds now” kind of insanity. As soon as you’ve secured possession and gotten one or two feet down (depending on the level of play), that should be in, the ball should be ruled as caught. The end.
3. The Spartans first effort at color matching Spartan Stadium went pretty well, but where were the towels? Handing out green and white towels would’ve brought the impact up a notch on TV and in person. Towels flying around in night games look amazing. Hopefully we’ll see them next time.
4. Spartan Stadium Audio Entertainment continues to be a real atmosphere issue. Haven’t Havla Nagila and The Chicken Dance had more than enough air time already? It’s hard to figure if someone’s trying to be humorous at this point or if we’ve just fallen that far out of touch, during a national broadcast! It’s 2015, not 1995 or 2005. As games continue to get better and better to watch on TV, the live product needs to step up.