The Pre-Snap Read: Michigan State vs Western Michigan
By Jim Comparoni
Publisher, SpartanMag.com
EAST LANSING - Michigan State already seems to be feeling the pinch.
The Spartans shuffled their offensive staff after last year’s terrible production on that side of the ball. Head coach Mark Dantonio defended his decision to stay with his staff of assistants, in revised roles, and took some criticism for it. He was fine with the criticism. He wanted to retain staff members who had prospered in the past, knew the program, knew the players, knew the culture.
Dantonio still believes that was the right direction. But there was no evidence to support him after one week of football. Michigan State’s offense lacked physicality and precision last week while beating Tulsa, 28-7.
Quarterback Brian Lewerke completed 21 of 37 passes for 192 yards, mostly staying short against Tulsa’s blend of blitzes and five-deep coverages. He was victimized by two or three dropped passes, didn’t have much of a run game to lean on, and didn’t come close to making a game-changing mistake. He managed the game.
“You feel like Brian’s back,” said new offensive coordinator Brad Salem. “I thought Brian played well. The ball had zip on it. He threw it with accuracy, had good movement skills in the pocket. He had a comfort in the pocket. He used his legs when he needed to. You feel like he’s got some confidence back. He played aggressively. He gives you a chance.”
But MSU’s run game was stale - from its offensive line play, to tight end blocking, to wide receiver blocking, to running back vision. Short-sighted reactionaries blame “play calling.” The real answers lay under the hood. Blaming play calling for last week’s run game problems is like blaming the tires when your car runs out of gas.
Dantonio was purposefully terse during Tuesday’s weekly press conference, and throughout the practice week. The screws of accountability are being tightened. New offensive line coach Jim Bollman, a proven professor in this area over the decades, needs his troops to show the progress he was enlisted to deliver.
Dantonio and Bollman are believers in attention to detail, mandates they’ve observed and carried out in the past under Jim Tressel, Nick Saban, and Jim Tressel again. They’re good at it. They need to be good at it again this week, and they feel the pinch to do so.
Salem never promised a revolutionary change in MSU’s offensive approach, although tooth fairy believers were hoping or expecting the use of flying reindeer.
Salem, with Dantonio’s blessing, introduced the use of mainstream elements such as a no-huddle offense, the pistol formation, and RPOs (run pass options). Michigan State dabbled in those things for last season’s bowl game and the Green-White Game. The flavor of MSU’s offense against Tulsa was similar to those two games. That’s what SpartanMag.com forecasted all spring and summer for the 2019 season. Anyone who listened to SpartanMag.com wasn’t surprised by the style of offense they saw Friday night, although there were understandable expectations of more success.
In changing MSU’s offense, Michigan State is not changing the importance it places on being able to run the ball. Aside from Washington State and maybe a small handful of others, every practitioner of today’s spread offenses agree that running the ball is still of paramount importance - if not the chief building block. No less than the high flying offenses of Clemson and Oklahoma ran the ball more frequently (percentage wise) last year than Michigan State.
Michigan State wanted to establish the run last week against Tulsa, but never quite achieved that objective - aside from a brief flurry of success during a 17-play, 73-yard field goal drive in the third quarter. Michigan State opted to pass on first down on five of its 15 first-down plays in the first half. The pass game wasn’t ultra successful, so Michigan State continued to try to pry out some success on the ground in the second half, both as a means of managing a three-TD lead, preventing major errors and testing its sputtering elements.
A few fans turned to boos - the verbal kind, and likely the liquid kind as well. Dantonio, Salem and Lewerke heard it. All three were diplomatic and presidential when asked, basically, how the boos made them feel.
Salem’s answers during media briefings have grown shorter since his promotion. He has more of a firm exterior now. I’ve noticed this with coordinators from various programs in past years, too. Maybe it’s part of the unwritten rules of college football that with promotion and greater responsibility and pressure also comes the need to take on a CIA level of distrust and paranoia.
Or maybe Dantonio and Salem are so disappointed with the players and lieutenants below them that they are biting their tongues rather than telling us how they really feel.
Well, Dantonio didn’t hold back much on Tuesday. He basically challenged the manhood of players on the offensive side of the ball.
“We've predicated ourselves on being tough here, any way you cut it,” Dantonio said. “We lacked in terms of physicality. We have a long season ahead of us. We can play much better than that.”
Bravo to Dantonio for seeing things the way most of us saw it. He’s fixed leaks in the past. He’s a trusted steward. Now will the old theory that the most improvement comes between week one and week two - an axiom, I think, was popularized by Duffy Daugherty - apply to the 2019 Michigan State Spartans?
If so, the Spartans will achieve it while feeling the pinch of expectation and short-term disappointment - or perhaps by being fueled by it.
THE LATEST ON Michigan State
* Rumors were confirmed yesterday that sophomore wide receiver Jalen Nailor is out with a foot injury. Sources to SpartanMag.com it’s a metatarsal break.
Michigan State is low on speed and explosiveness on offense. Nailor, who is nick-named “Speedy,” embodies much of what Michigan State is lacking. He had some game-breaking moments last year in a true freshman season that was interrupted for a month by an injury.
We don’t know exactly how much Nailor could have, or would have, helped MSU’s offense. But I’m sure Lewerke wasn’t happy with the news.
* So who must step up with Nailor out? Laress Nelson and freshman Julian Barnett are the immediate names who come to mind. Barnett’s ceiling of potential as a rookie is unknown. Nelson is a quality slot receiver.
Senior Cam Chambers has had some decent moments in his career but didn’t get on the field last week. I saw him warming up prior to the game and he seemed fine. True freshman Tre Mosley also might need to get activated too. Walk-on Jahz Watts has always looked pretty good to me.
There are names and candidates, but there was only one “Speedy” on the roster. Michigan State hasn’t used him a ton during his short time here, partly because he missed a quarter of last season with an injury.
He had three catches for short gains last week. Whether or not he would have become a greater spoke in the offense this year, we will never know. Will Michigan State miss him in terms of potential productivity and game planning, and as a punt returner? Absolutely.
* I love Lewerke as a competitor, a tough person trying hard to do and say the right thing. I also feel bad for him when the run game fails, blocking fails, receivers drop passes, receivers don’t run the right routes and teammates commit penalties. He isn’t perfect, so he won’t blame anyone. But if I’m not mistaken, I see him deflate just a little bit when the errors pile up. And I suspect he deflated a bit when the Nailor news hit the team.
So Lewerke has to spruce up and try to wring some excellence out of the players around him.
The big questions rest up front, along the offensive line.
After last week, I began to wonder if the problems on the o-line are due to physical limitations. Are these guys not capable of being as physically imposing as Dantonio is calling for? I talked myself out of that notion, for now. They have size, experience, they should have vast knowledge of the game and system, even the new system.
Now I’m wondering about an important element that is likely lacking up front - leadership.
During the glory run of 2013 to ’15, there were times when Dantonio crowed about Michigan State having a bell cow at each position group. There were not only two or three great team captains at the top of the chain, there were also distinctly respected leaders in every position room - guys like Jack Allen on the o-line, Connor Cook at QB, Tony Lippett at WR, Shilique Calhoun on the d-line, Max Bullough at linebacker, R.J. Williamson at safety.
There are some good, decent people on this Michigan State o-line, but I don’t see a bell cow. Cole Chewins is a two-time Academic All-American with a degree in finance and is pursuing his masters. He might become a great senator or a mutual fund manager, but I’m not sure he is wired to lead a room of o-linemen, and he’s not able to do much of anything right now while sidelined with a back injury.
In 2016, former offensive line coach Mark Staten pushed and prodded Brian Allen to try to become a leader. Allen did his best, and became a darn good college player, an NFL draft pick and a pretty good leader. But it took years to get that out of him. I suspect they were working on Matt Allen, or others, to follow a similar track but as Tom Izzo has said over the years, it’s hard, and sometimes impossible, to turn people into leaders. There’s no magic wand for it. And I suspect that MSU’s o-line needs one in the leadership department, and I wonder if the lack of a positive tail-kicker in the o-line room has led to some of the stale inconsistencies we see up front.
KICK IT OFF: Michigan State vs WMU
What you need to know: Western Michigan is 1-0 after beating Monmouth 48-13 last week.
(Monmouth is a quality FCS team. They went 8-3 last year. They made the FCS Playoffs two years ago. Their 26h-year head coach, Kevin Callahan, has won 152 games. Their senior QB threw for 2600 yards last year but their defense was awful last year, allowing a school-record 49 TDs.)
Western Michigan went 7-6 last year, but they were 6-2 when QB Jon Wassink was lost for the year in week nine against Toledo to an ankle injury. The two losses were to Michigan and Syracuse.
WMU lost four of its last five last year without Wassink, including a 49-17 loss to BYU in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl.
He’s a fine quarterback. WMU is 7-1 against MAC opponents when he starts and finishes a game (he was lost to a collar bone injury as a sophomore in 2017).
FINAL ANALYSIS FIRST
Western Michigan has reloaded with excellent young wide receivers. Wassink does a good job finding them and putting them in position to flash talent.
WMU has a good running back in 5-foot-9, 190-pound speedy pinball LeVante Bellamy.
WMU’s RB, QB and WRs are Big Ten players.
They have two tight ends that would easily rank in MSU’s three-deep. The Spartans would love to have Giovanni Ricci and Brett Borske.
WMU’s offensive line is functional, not great. They are going to have a miserable time against one of the best defensive fronts in the country.
Wassink can do some decent things on the run, but he might be on the run a lot in this game. Wassink is being coached by Tim Lester this week, and all weeks, to make quick decisions. Lester says Wassink is excellent in this area, and I believe him.
By Jim Comparoni
Publisher, SpartanMag.com
EAST LANSING - Michigan State already seems to be feeling the pinch.
The Spartans shuffled their offensive staff after last year’s terrible production on that side of the ball. Head coach Mark Dantonio defended his decision to stay with his staff of assistants, in revised roles, and took some criticism for it. He was fine with the criticism. He wanted to retain staff members who had prospered in the past, knew the program, knew the players, knew the culture.
Dantonio still believes that was the right direction. But there was no evidence to support him after one week of football. Michigan State’s offense lacked physicality and precision last week while beating Tulsa, 28-7.
Quarterback Brian Lewerke completed 21 of 37 passes for 192 yards, mostly staying short against Tulsa’s blend of blitzes and five-deep coverages. He was victimized by two or three dropped passes, didn’t have much of a run game to lean on, and didn’t come close to making a game-changing mistake. He managed the game.
“You feel like Brian’s back,” said new offensive coordinator Brad Salem. “I thought Brian played well. The ball had zip on it. He threw it with accuracy, had good movement skills in the pocket. He had a comfort in the pocket. He used his legs when he needed to. You feel like he’s got some confidence back. He played aggressively. He gives you a chance.”
But MSU’s run game was stale - from its offensive line play, to tight end blocking, to wide receiver blocking, to running back vision. Short-sighted reactionaries blame “play calling.” The real answers lay under the hood. Blaming play calling for last week’s run game problems is like blaming the tires when your car runs out of gas.
Dantonio was purposefully terse during Tuesday’s weekly press conference, and throughout the practice week. The screws of accountability are being tightened. New offensive line coach Jim Bollman, a proven professor in this area over the decades, needs his troops to show the progress he was enlisted to deliver.
Dantonio and Bollman are believers in attention to detail, mandates they’ve observed and carried out in the past under Jim Tressel, Nick Saban, and Jim Tressel again. They’re good at it. They need to be good at it again this week, and they feel the pinch to do so.
Salem never promised a revolutionary change in MSU’s offensive approach, although tooth fairy believers were hoping or expecting the use of flying reindeer.
Salem, with Dantonio’s blessing, introduced the use of mainstream elements such as a no-huddle offense, the pistol formation, and RPOs (run pass options). Michigan State dabbled in those things for last season’s bowl game and the Green-White Game. The flavor of MSU’s offense against Tulsa was similar to those two games. That’s what SpartanMag.com forecasted all spring and summer for the 2019 season. Anyone who listened to SpartanMag.com wasn’t surprised by the style of offense they saw Friday night, although there were understandable expectations of more success.
In changing MSU’s offense, Michigan State is not changing the importance it places on being able to run the ball. Aside from Washington State and maybe a small handful of others, every practitioner of today’s spread offenses agree that running the ball is still of paramount importance - if not the chief building block. No less than the high flying offenses of Clemson and Oklahoma ran the ball more frequently (percentage wise) last year than Michigan State.
Michigan State wanted to establish the run last week against Tulsa, but never quite achieved that objective - aside from a brief flurry of success during a 17-play, 73-yard field goal drive in the third quarter. Michigan State opted to pass on first down on five of its 15 first-down plays in the first half. The pass game wasn’t ultra successful, so Michigan State continued to try to pry out some success on the ground in the second half, both as a means of managing a three-TD lead, preventing major errors and testing its sputtering elements.
A few fans turned to boos - the verbal kind, and likely the liquid kind as well. Dantonio, Salem and Lewerke heard it. All three were diplomatic and presidential when asked, basically, how the boos made them feel.
Salem’s answers during media briefings have grown shorter since his promotion. He has more of a firm exterior now. I’ve noticed this with coordinators from various programs in past years, too. Maybe it’s part of the unwritten rules of college football that with promotion and greater responsibility and pressure also comes the need to take on a CIA level of distrust and paranoia.
Or maybe Dantonio and Salem are so disappointed with the players and lieutenants below them that they are biting their tongues rather than telling us how they really feel.
Well, Dantonio didn’t hold back much on Tuesday. He basically challenged the manhood of players on the offensive side of the ball.
“We've predicated ourselves on being tough here, any way you cut it,” Dantonio said. “We lacked in terms of physicality. We have a long season ahead of us. We can play much better than that.”
Bravo to Dantonio for seeing things the way most of us saw it. He’s fixed leaks in the past. He’s a trusted steward. Now will the old theory that the most improvement comes between week one and week two - an axiom, I think, was popularized by Duffy Daugherty - apply to the 2019 Michigan State Spartans?
If so, the Spartans will achieve it while feeling the pinch of expectation and short-term disappointment - or perhaps by being fueled by it.
THE LATEST ON Michigan State
* Rumors were confirmed yesterday that sophomore wide receiver Jalen Nailor is out with a foot injury. Sources to SpartanMag.com it’s a metatarsal break.
Michigan State is low on speed and explosiveness on offense. Nailor, who is nick-named “Speedy,” embodies much of what Michigan State is lacking. He had some game-breaking moments last year in a true freshman season that was interrupted for a month by an injury.
We don’t know exactly how much Nailor could have, or would have, helped MSU’s offense. But I’m sure Lewerke wasn’t happy with the news.
* So who must step up with Nailor out? Laress Nelson and freshman Julian Barnett are the immediate names who come to mind. Barnett’s ceiling of potential as a rookie is unknown. Nelson is a quality slot receiver.
Senior Cam Chambers has had some decent moments in his career but didn’t get on the field last week. I saw him warming up prior to the game and he seemed fine. True freshman Tre Mosley also might need to get activated too. Walk-on Jahz Watts has always looked pretty good to me.
There are names and candidates, but there was only one “Speedy” on the roster. Michigan State hasn’t used him a ton during his short time here, partly because he missed a quarter of last season with an injury.
He had three catches for short gains last week. Whether or not he would have become a greater spoke in the offense this year, we will never know. Will Michigan State miss him in terms of potential productivity and game planning, and as a punt returner? Absolutely.
* I love Lewerke as a competitor, a tough person trying hard to do and say the right thing. I also feel bad for him when the run game fails, blocking fails, receivers drop passes, receivers don’t run the right routes and teammates commit penalties. He isn’t perfect, so he won’t blame anyone. But if I’m not mistaken, I see him deflate just a little bit when the errors pile up. And I suspect he deflated a bit when the Nailor news hit the team.
So Lewerke has to spruce up and try to wring some excellence out of the players around him.
The big questions rest up front, along the offensive line.
After last week, I began to wonder if the problems on the o-line are due to physical limitations. Are these guys not capable of being as physically imposing as Dantonio is calling for? I talked myself out of that notion, for now. They have size, experience, they should have vast knowledge of the game and system, even the new system.
Now I’m wondering about an important element that is likely lacking up front - leadership.
During the glory run of 2013 to ’15, there were times when Dantonio crowed about Michigan State having a bell cow at each position group. There were not only two or three great team captains at the top of the chain, there were also distinctly respected leaders in every position room - guys like Jack Allen on the o-line, Connor Cook at QB, Tony Lippett at WR, Shilique Calhoun on the d-line, Max Bullough at linebacker, R.J. Williamson at safety.
There are some good, decent people on this Michigan State o-line, but I don’t see a bell cow. Cole Chewins is a two-time Academic All-American with a degree in finance and is pursuing his masters. He might become a great senator or a mutual fund manager, but I’m not sure he is wired to lead a room of o-linemen, and he’s not able to do much of anything right now while sidelined with a back injury.
In 2016, former offensive line coach Mark Staten pushed and prodded Brian Allen to try to become a leader. Allen did his best, and became a darn good college player, an NFL draft pick and a pretty good leader. But it took years to get that out of him. I suspect they were working on Matt Allen, or others, to follow a similar track but as Tom Izzo has said over the years, it’s hard, and sometimes impossible, to turn people into leaders. There’s no magic wand for it. And I suspect that MSU’s o-line needs one in the leadership department, and I wonder if the lack of a positive tail-kicker in the o-line room has led to some of the stale inconsistencies we see up front.
KICK IT OFF: Michigan State vs WMU
What you need to know: Western Michigan is 1-0 after beating Monmouth 48-13 last week.
(Monmouth is a quality FCS team. They went 8-3 last year. They made the FCS Playoffs two years ago. Their 26h-year head coach, Kevin Callahan, has won 152 games. Their senior QB threw for 2600 yards last year but their defense was awful last year, allowing a school-record 49 TDs.)
Western Michigan went 7-6 last year, but they were 6-2 when QB Jon Wassink was lost for the year in week nine against Toledo to an ankle injury. The two losses were to Michigan and Syracuse.
WMU lost four of its last five last year without Wassink, including a 49-17 loss to BYU in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl.
He’s a fine quarterback. WMU is 7-1 against MAC opponents when he starts and finishes a game (he was lost to a collar bone injury as a sophomore in 2017).
FINAL ANALYSIS FIRST
Western Michigan has reloaded with excellent young wide receivers. Wassink does a good job finding them and putting them in position to flash talent.
WMU has a good running back in 5-foot-9, 190-pound speedy pinball LeVante Bellamy.
WMU’s RB, QB and WRs are Big Ten players.
They have two tight ends that would easily rank in MSU’s three-deep. The Spartans would love to have Giovanni Ricci and Brett Borske.
WMU’s offensive line is functional, not great. They are going to have a miserable time against one of the best defensive fronts in the country.
Wassink can do some decent things on the run, but he might be on the run a lot in this game. Wassink is being coached by Tim Lester this week, and all weeks, to make quick decisions. Lester says Wassink is excellent in this area, and I believe him.
