Couch: This MSU football season will be a telling test of Dave Warner's play calling

Lansing State Journal

With a young quarterback (Brian Lewerke, right) and youth at wideout and along the offensive line, MSU needs a great season from co-offensive coordinator and primary play caller Dave Warner, right.

EAST LANSING – When folks clamor for Mark Dantonio to shake up his coaching staff, they’re talking about co-offensive coordinator Dave Warner. If they don’t say it directly, it usually comes with not-so-subtle undertones.

In years when Michigan State’s offense has struggled — be it 2012, early 2013 or last season — the most popular guy is the backup quarterback. The most popular culprit is the offensive coordinator.

Since 2013, that's meant Warner. Forget that he’s the co-coordinator with Jim Bollman. Bollman comes across as old and wise and sure of himself and hard to outwit. Warner calls the plays on game days. He’s the face of the offense. And, like the Tigers’ Brad Ausmus and Lions’ Jim Caldwell, he has a certain easy-to-pounce-on look to him.

With Warner, I find myself more sympathetic. Maybe it’s because he’s rarely defensive. He doesn’t treat criticism as an affront. He doesn’t dismiss questions about his job performance. He sees himself as fallible.

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“You’re asking me if (there are situations last season I’d call differently)? (Heck) yeah,” Warner said. “I can think of a couple right off the top of the head that I kick myself in the butt for.

“I’m not going to lie to you and say I don’t hear what’s going on. Certainly, last year was not a whole lot of fun for any of us, myself included. I hear it. I don’t know that it affects anything that we do.”

If you’ve been critical of Warner, you’ve got nothing on the man himself. MSU’s offensive staff spent the offseason analyzing everything that went wrong — third downs, red-zone scoring, turnovers.

“Beyond that, you look to evaluate each of your plays,” Warner said. “You evaluate each play you ran. Are you doing it right? Is it worth running, worth continuing to run or should we kick it to the curb? It’s a bottom-to-top evaluation.”

This season will be a test of Warner and Co. The Spartans are young offensively everywhere but running back. Even less is expected of the defense. To win, MSU’s offense will sometimes have to score in bunches or come from behind. It’ll have to be able to both control the ball and sling it around. And all that maybe just to get to seven wins.

Warner and Dantonio think they have the backfield and the quarterback to do it. Warner is hopeful about the offensive line and receivers, too.

“I still believe we understand what we’re going to look like come game 3, 4, 5, 6. We have a picture in our mind,” Warner said. “I think we have more weapons at the wide receiver positions. I think our tight ends can be pretty good, as well. I think our wide receivers have the ability to surprise some people. How quickly they do that will be the key.

“Everything begins with being able to run the football. When you can run the football that makes everything fall into place.”

I don’t think Warner is a coordinator who can turn chicken poop into chicken salad. There aren’t many of those guys. Hardly any calling pro-style offenses. But I do think he can make chicken salad into a helluva dish.

The proof of that is 2014, the best offense in program history, setting records for points, yards, first downs and touchdowns. Warner had the parts to work with then. Guys who could put into motion anything he called.

He didn’t have that last year, beginning at QB.

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“There are a thousand reasons (a play doesn’t work),” Warner said. “The bottom line is when you call a play, all 11 guys have to do the right thing to make it work.”

The one-guy-didn’t-do-the-right-thing reasoning was popular among players during last year’s 3-9 season. And when an offense doesn’t have the goods, it’s true that everyone has to be perfect.

But the offense should also be more creative, the play-calling more unexpected. That criticism is starting to have legs beyond fans and local media.

“Creativity is always something I get blamed for,” Warner said. “I mean even during our good years, some of those things come up, so. And I don’t disagree. We need to be a little more creative.”

Creativity is an easy criticism from outside. When something doesn’t work — a rush up the middle on third-and-2 or first-and-10 — the knee-jerk reaction is to look at the person who called the play, instead of the myriad of other factors. But when the 497th jet sweep of the last five seasons goes for a predictable four yards, that knee-jerk reaction is also the right reaction.

If Warner and Co. can’t get it done with this young crew, it’ll be fair to ask if the right person is calling the shots. If he does, though, with so much uncertainty at his disposal, he’ll deserve to be spared the hypercritical venom for a while.

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