Couch: Spartans find new low in Dantonio era, as hope is extinguished

EAST LANSING – Mark Dantonio has been telling his football team, “It can always get worse.”

If a 54-40 home loss to Northwestern ain’t rock bottom, look out.

“It’s stunning to see a 54 on the board,” Michigan State co-defensive coordinator Mike Tressel said Saturday night.

That’s 54 points allowed for the first time in the Dantonio era, and to a team, no less, that earlier this season scored just seven in losing to lower-division foe Illinois State.

MSU is 2-4 for first time since 1994 — that predates Nick Saban, Bobby Williams and John L. Smith. This isn’t just uncharted territory for Dantonio. This is rough even by MSU’s pre-Dantonio standards.

The worst part for MSU’s football team, there are no answers. Not ones it wants to think about anyway. The Spartans pulled out all the stops Saturday for a season they could sense was slipping away. It may have slipped away.

They started redshirt freshman Brian Lewerke at quarterback. Moved Malik McDowell to defensive end. Put freshman Donnie Corley back to return the game’s final kickoff. They tried three separate receiver passes in the fourth quarter, perhaps realizing there might not be a more meaningful opportunity the rest of this season for trickery.

Saturday was the nail in the coffin, so to speak. Not entirely the end of MSU’s postseason hopes — the Spartans could still make a bowl game by not losing again in their four remaining winnable games, against Maryland, Illinois, Rutgers and Penn State. But this was the day the tiny flicker that this team could become something more was extinguished.

Until a team has played every young quarterback, there is always some measure of hope that its problems can be cured by one magic arm. When MSU replaced Lewerke with senior Tyler O’Connor in the third quarter, it was an admission that there will be no easy fixes this season, no magic arm.

O’Connor is the Spartans’ best chance to win right now. But quarterback isn’t the story of this season. It’s become a diversion.

MSU lost its fourth straight game because it couldn’t protect that quarterback. Its offensive line couldn’t create any room for any of the three MSU running backs. Its defense too often, again, couldn’t get off the field on third down or fourth down, allowing 11 of 20 conversions. And just when the Spartans appeared to find the resolve to put Northwestern on its heels, MSU’s kickoff coverage unit gave up the most windpipe-crushing score of the season — a 95-yard touchdown return that seemed to fit the narrative.

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Each blunder seemingly comes with a domino effect for this team. A penalty that negated a promising kick return by MSU’s R.J. Shelton left the Spartans backed up nearly to their own goal line with a 17-14 lead in the second quarter. Lewerke then demonstrated his talented arm, making a throw on the run that nearly got the Spartans out of trouble. Corley, though, was out of bounds when he caught it. On the next play, Northwestern defensive end Joe Gaziano beat MSU right tackle Miguel Machado off the edge and planted Lewerke in the dirt, in the end zone. That safety led to a short field on the free kick, which led to another three points for Northwestern.

MSU avoids the five-point swing if it simply avoids the initial penalty, which it has to learn to do because its margin for error is so small, its vulnerabilities so many. Those vulnerabilities aren’t going anywhere this season. MSU, I think, realized that Saturday.

“It’s a lot of frustrated people,” O’Connor said. “It’s a lot of people who have been beaten mentally just from being stunned. We’re working hard. I feel like we’re putting a nail in everything we need to get better at and then it’s like something else pops up.”

Something always pops up. When Dantonio was asked if he could point to one thing he’d fix, he replied, “Just one?”

“That’s not a good question. There are too many things for me to sit there and say, ‘This should happen.’ There are just a lot of things and they just seemed to be creeping up.”

It might get worse before it gets better.

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.