This has not been the season many Michigan State football fans were hoping for just one year removed from a season that ended in a New Year’s Six bowl victory, but here we are.
While some may be feeling the doom and gloom, I think the Mel Tucker coaching experience has probably even gone better than expected considering the stellar 2021 season where the team saw success sooner than expected.
Below, I give a few reasons why I think fans should hold off and feeling discouraged after a rough start to the 2022 season.
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Last issues from Dantonio's recruiting downturn
There are a few reasons why Michigan State football parted ways with Mark Dantonio, one of the most successful coaches in program history. But the big one is about recruiting. The cupboards were extremely bare at the end of his tenure with the Spartans and he was not fielding a team on the level with the rest of the Big Ten. It’s been said before that the third year (which this is for Mel Tucker), is the hardest for a new college football coach, because that is when the prior coach’s last recruiting class are now the veteran leaders, and Dantonio’s last class was so subpar, Tucker has had to almost completely remove them from the team and try to replace them with a patchwork of transfers. We are seeing now how difficult that is to do.
Injuries
We knew going into this year that the Spartans had some deficiencies in their defensive backfield, largely for the reasons stated above. That’s a big reason why they moved Darius Snow, a former safety, to linebacker to add a little more speed and coverage ability to that position. That’s also why they were going to lean hard on veteran safety Xavier Henderson. The Spartans lost both players in their opening game, and the defensive backfield has been getting shredded ever since, but that was an unexpected and unfortunate situation, and they won’t have to deal with those deficiencies in the future. Which gets me to my next point…
Recruiting
The cupboards may have been bare at the end of Dantonio’s regime, but they are not for Mel Tucker and his staff. Tucker has some of MSU’s best all-time recruiting classes lined up for the future, but they just need time to mature. We haven’t seen a noticeable dip in recruiting or de-commitments during this poor season, and that’s because everyone can see that Tucker is still building something immense for the future.
