Mark Dantonio looks at past to turn around present
EAST LANSING – An introspective Mark Dantonio talked to some of his veterans one-on-one Monday and harbored no reservations about where Michigan State’s football team is right now at the season’s midpoint.
“You're checking the pulse of our football team,” Dantonio said Tuesday. “Thus far, I would say, hey, we’re hanging. … I think you got to be a rock. You have to be. Bad things are going to happen. That's going to be a part of your life. Everybody goes through struggles.”
Dantonio, unlike a number of predecessors, has not had to deal with anything like this before.
MSU sits 2-4 overall, winless in three conference games headed into Saturday’s contest at Maryland (7:30 p.m./Big Ten Network). It’s a far cry from last year’s College Football Playoff berth, as well as the two Big Ten titles and Rose Bowl and Cotton Bowl wins of the past three years.
It’s the first four-game losing streak of Dantonio’s 10-year tenure, and the Spartans are in serious jeopardy of not making a bowl game for the first time a decade.
“At the end of the day, we want to get the ‘W’ – we want to win,” current senior R.J. Shelton said. “And that’s how it’s been ever since I’ve been here. … Everyone in here has to believe that we have to go 6-0. I think everyone in this building, in this bubble, knows that we can do that.”
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MSU hadn’t lost four in a row since doing it twice in 2006 during John L. Smith’s final season. That season included also had an 0-4 Big Ten start. The Spartans haven’t had a 2-4 record since 1994, George Perles’ final season.
Dantonio’s worst season was a 6-7 finish in 2009, his only sub-.500 record since arriving in East Lansing. The low point for his program came with the dormitory fight after the team banquet that November that resulted in 15 players either being criminally charged, kicked off the team, forced out of MSU or suspended for a period of time.
The Spartans won at least a share of three Big Ten titles and had a 55-16 record between 2010 and last season. No coach in MSU history has been to more bowl games than Dantonio’s nine, and no coach has won more than his four.
“It’s something we've done every year,” Dantonio said of the bowl streak. “We’ve sort of taken it for granted. I don't think you can obviously take things for granted right now.”
Smith began his career at MSU with an 8-5 record, losing to Nebraska in the Alamo Bowl and never again reached .500. He went from winning five Big Ten games to four to two to one before being fired in 2006.
Williams’ three-year stint included one 7-5 season and Silicon Valley Bowl win in 2001 sandwiched between a pair of losing seasons before he was fired during the 2002 season. The final straw was a 49-3 blowout loss at Michigan, after which he admitted he didn’t know if he had lost control of his team.
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Nick Saban struggled with mediocrity until his final year in 1999 (10-2) before leaving on his own accord. He was 0-3 in bowl games, with Williams coaching the 2000 Citrus Bowl victory after Saban headed to LSU.
Perles went 3-7 in 1991 after a Big Ten title in 1990. It nearly cost him his coaching job – and did end up ending his term as MSU’s athletic director.
“I’ve never been in this position in 33 years of coaching,” Perles told the Free Press in late 1991. A few months later, before the 1992 season, he said, “I think we'll be very much improved.”
Perles won just 16 more games (five of which were stripped by the NCAA) over his final three seasons before he, too, was fired.
Even the revered Duffy Daugherty fell from the glory years of MSU’s 1965 and ’66 teams to a 3-7 season in 1967.
“We’re not out of the wilderness yet,” he told The Associated Press after that season about expectations for 1968, “but I can see a little daylight.”
Daugherty was a sub-.500 coach in his final five seasons (27-34-1) before retiring in 1972.
Dantonio knows the history. He learned during his time as an assistant coach on the staffs of both Saban and Williams from 1995-2000. And Monday, Dantonio took a stroll down the hallways of the Duffy Daugherty Football Building, looking at the jerseys of the players’ past and the bowl games the Spartans have played in.
It was a reminder about his success. It also served as a stark moment to reflect on the challenge ahead, and the difficulty of getting back to that point.
“In some ways a lot of you guys – media, people around – have said we always play with a chip on our shoulder,” Dantonio said. “We need to assume that that chip is not there and put it there, I guess, if that's the case. Always sort of thought that we challenged each other, challenged ourselves individually to be our very best at game time.
“That needs to come out again.”
Contact Chris Solari:csolari@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter@chrissolari.
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