Not sure if Lynn Henning's Detroit News Article was posted here previously. Lynn is a great writer. And a friend to MSU. Only problem is, he doesn't write enough about MSU.
While it is a bit of recreated history, it poses a good question: What the hell happened to MSU Football for 40 years? See below
Thoughts?
East Lansing — Anyone acquainted with Michigan State would have appreciated Tuesday’s campus portrait.
It was a humid summer day in East Lansing, the kind that so often marks early September. Various flavors of tree leaves were tinged with yellow. And although the sun was hot and heavy, its rays had begun to bend as summer wanes and autumn draws near.
Walking along Shaw Lane’s sidewalks were college kids in shorts and T-shirts. Dormitories and apartments were filling. Books were being purchased.
Classes — and football — are about to commence.
Mark Dantonio, dressed semi-formally and wearing a sharp silver-gray sport coat, stood at a podium inside Spartan Stadium’s north end. He talked about his football team, by all accounts a good one, as Michigan State says goodbye to three weeks of steamy practices and begins playing real games, Friday at Western Michigan.
“No guarantees,” said Dantonio, whose squad is ranked among the land’s top six college teams heading into the 2015 season. “But we’ve got talent here. We’ve got good players.”
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He isn't Captain Cook at Michigan State, but that's OK
Frustrating times
Dantonio, brick by brick, year by year, carefully and tactically, has crafted an astonishingly sound football team in East Lansing since he arrived in 2006.
His 2015 gang in terms of skill and depth looks a great deal like two teams of 50 years ago at Michigan State — two teams that won — or played for, depending upon your view of polls — a pair of national championships.
What happened in between at East Lansing is what doesn’t make sense. Those decades of frustration, of cruel seasons and defeats interspersed by too few autumns of glory, either bewildered or vexed Michigan State’s galaxy ahead of these new and glorious times engineered by Dantonio.
And why was that? Dantonio was asked, not for the first time, that very question Tuesday.
He, of course, knew all about Michigan State when he was hired following John L. Smith’s departure nine years ago. He knew of the struggles. But he was aware, most of all, he said Tuesday, about Michigan State’s resources.
“I’d been here before and knew the landscape,” he said, a reference to his days during the late 1990s as an assistant under Nick Saban.
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Michigan State to test depth of its defense
He talked about the people in East Lansing — at all levels of authority and community — and about the comfort level a head coach required in working within a university’s culture. He talked also about national profile.
“I knew we could walk in the door and sell Michigan State,” he said. “I felt the coaches could do good recruiting.”
It never quite made sense to Michigan State’s faithful, those years in between. There was never a single answer for why others failed at what Duffy Daugherty, and now Dantonio, had and have been able to do over successive seasons.
Years of errors
But look closely at each interceding era and answers are self-evident.
What might have happened during Denny Stolz’s reign, immediately after Daugherty retired, had an assistant and brilliant recruiter not gotten so far out of bounds that he helped bring the NCAA and its guilty-till-proven-innocent investigators to East Lansing for what became three years of devastating probation?
What if a president different from Cecil Mackey, who had little use for athletics, had not driven off then-athletic director Joe Kearney and a coach, Darryl Rogers, who helped bring about an NFL-grade passing game and Michigan State’s Big Ten co-championship in 1978?
What if the completely bizarre hiring of Muddy Waters had not been an answer to the “carpetbaggers” — Kearney and Rogers — Michigan State’s wounded fans falsely indicted after they left in 1980?
What if the man wisely hired three years after he had been passed over — George Perles — had not gotten distracted by the NFL and by a co-athletic director’s post immediately after he sent the Spartans to the 1988 Rose Bowl?
And what if another president unfamiliar with sports, M. Peter McPherson, a man who hadn’t been to a college football game since his student days, had not been so cavalier with Saban that Saban saw no option but to leave in 1999? How many of those national championships he subsequently handed LSU and Alabama would have belonged to Michigan State?
Questions abound
Why, for that matter, was Bobby Williams shot-gunned into Saban’s vacant seat afterward, except to protect a recruiting season? Above all, why, after Williams’ firing, was John L. Smith the computer-printout answer when Michigan State compiled wish-list data that led to an ill-fitting appointment in 2002?
Those are questions for which there are no good answers. It was all so unnecessary at a university that begged for a football steward who simply would align all of a school’s attributes, as well as its passion, to produce what Dantonio has constructed in East Lansing.
It was such an evocative scene Tuesday on a beautiful campus. Maybe, in part, because Michigan State has at last a football program to match.
lynn.henning@detroitnews.com
MORE STORIES:
While it is a bit of recreated history, it poses a good question: What the hell happened to MSU Football for 40 years? See below
Thoughts?
East Lansing — Anyone acquainted with Michigan State would have appreciated Tuesday’s campus portrait.
It was a humid summer day in East Lansing, the kind that so often marks early September. Various flavors of tree leaves were tinged with yellow. And although the sun was hot and heavy, its rays had begun to bend as summer wanes and autumn draws near.
Walking along Shaw Lane’s sidewalks were college kids in shorts and T-shirts. Dormitories and apartments were filling. Books were being purchased.
Classes — and football — are about to commence.
Mark Dantonio, dressed semi-formally and wearing a sharp silver-gray sport coat, stood at a podium inside Spartan Stadium’s north end. He talked about his football team, by all accounts a good one, as Michigan State says goodbye to three weeks of steamy practices and begins playing real games, Friday at Western Michigan.
“No guarantees,” said Dantonio, whose squad is ranked among the land’s top six college teams heading into the 2015 season. “But we’ve got talent here. We’ve got good players.”
DETROIT NEWS
He isn't Captain Cook at Michigan State, but that's OK
Frustrating times
Dantonio, brick by brick, year by year, carefully and tactically, has crafted an astonishingly sound football team in East Lansing since he arrived in 2006.
His 2015 gang in terms of skill and depth looks a great deal like two teams of 50 years ago at Michigan State — two teams that won — or played for, depending upon your view of polls — a pair of national championships.
What happened in between at East Lansing is what doesn’t make sense. Those decades of frustration, of cruel seasons and defeats interspersed by too few autumns of glory, either bewildered or vexed Michigan State’s galaxy ahead of these new and glorious times engineered by Dantonio.
And why was that? Dantonio was asked, not for the first time, that very question Tuesday.
He, of course, knew all about Michigan State when he was hired following John L. Smith’s departure nine years ago. He knew of the struggles. But he was aware, most of all, he said Tuesday, about Michigan State’s resources.
“I’d been here before and knew the landscape,” he said, a reference to his days during the late 1990s as an assistant under Nick Saban.
DETROIT NEWS
Michigan State to test depth of its defense
He talked about the people in East Lansing — at all levels of authority and community — and about the comfort level a head coach required in working within a university’s culture. He talked also about national profile.
“I knew we could walk in the door and sell Michigan State,” he said. “I felt the coaches could do good recruiting.”
It never quite made sense to Michigan State’s faithful, those years in between. There was never a single answer for why others failed at what Duffy Daugherty, and now Dantonio, had and have been able to do over successive seasons.
Years of errors
But look closely at each interceding era and answers are self-evident.
What might have happened during Denny Stolz’s reign, immediately after Daugherty retired, had an assistant and brilliant recruiter not gotten so far out of bounds that he helped bring the NCAA and its guilty-till-proven-innocent investigators to East Lansing for what became three years of devastating probation?
What if a president different from Cecil Mackey, who had little use for athletics, had not driven off then-athletic director Joe Kearney and a coach, Darryl Rogers, who helped bring about an NFL-grade passing game and Michigan State’s Big Ten co-championship in 1978?
What if the completely bizarre hiring of Muddy Waters had not been an answer to the “carpetbaggers” — Kearney and Rogers — Michigan State’s wounded fans falsely indicted after they left in 1980?
What if the man wisely hired three years after he had been passed over — George Perles — had not gotten distracted by the NFL and by a co-athletic director’s post immediately after he sent the Spartans to the 1988 Rose Bowl?
And what if another president unfamiliar with sports, M. Peter McPherson, a man who hadn’t been to a college football game since his student days, had not been so cavalier with Saban that Saban saw no option but to leave in 1999? How many of those national championships he subsequently handed LSU and Alabama would have belonged to Michigan State?
Questions abound
Why, for that matter, was Bobby Williams shot-gunned into Saban’s vacant seat afterward, except to protect a recruiting season? Above all, why, after Williams’ firing, was John L. Smith the computer-printout answer when Michigan State compiled wish-list data that led to an ill-fitting appointment in 2002?
Those are questions for which there are no good answers. It was all so unnecessary at a university that begged for a football steward who simply would align all of a school’s attributes, as well as its passion, to produce what Dantonio has constructed in East Lansing.
It was such an evocative scene Tuesday on a beautiful campus. Maybe, in part, because Michigan State has at last a football program to match.
lynn.henning@detroitnews.com
MORE STORIES:
