For rebuilding Michigan State, Jonathan Smith is the man of the hour
It's hard to imagine a better choice for the Spartans, both in the crisis they're facing today and for the success they hope to find tomorrow.
Note: rankings for this series are set by the final 2023 rankings from TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings.
Content warning: this article briefly discusses sexual harassment allegations in its second paragraph, as well as both sexual harassment allegations and a sexual assault scandal in its second footnote.
For a long time, Michigan State under Mark Dantonio was a model of stability. The Spartans had a few down years during his thirteen-year tenure, but they missed a bowl just once during his time leading the team. Between those occasional dips to the 7-6 floor, MSU soared incredibly high, with Dantonio leading them to their first five eleven-win seasons ever, as well as a remarkable seven-year streak of appearances in the AP top ten—their first such streak since 1960-671. While by no means a bad program, Michigan State had never had such an impressive and consistent era in the modern day, and any new hire would be well positioned to continue it after Dantonio retired as the Spartans’ winningest coach ever in 2019.
It’s remarkable how quickly a program can lose that reputation for stability. Four years, one coach, a Peach Bowl, three miserable losing seasons, and a sexual harassment scandal later, MSU is starting over after one of the most bewildering and disastrous coaching tenures they’ve ever had. It remains inexplicable that (a) the Spartans poached an HC who went 5-7 in his one and only season at Colorado, (b) he somehow led them to a New Year’s Six bowl and battled for a playoff spot deep into the 2021 season, and (c) he received a whopping ten-year, $95 million contract extension for that single winning campaign. About the only unsurprising thing, between the obviously catastrophic trend of his tenure after that 11-2 year and the scandal he was embroiled in last September, is that he’s gone.
We discussed regional ties at length last week in examining Houston’s hire of Willie Fritz, so I won’t dwell on them too long here, but it’s noteworthy that MSU already went pretty far afield with their first post-Dantonio coach. While Tucker had an extensive history in the midwest—born in Ohio, a player at Wisconsin, even a grad assistant at MSU itself in his first coaching role—he largely shifted his focus to the southeast over the first two decades of his career. From 2009 to 2018, he worked jobs for the Jacksonville Jaguars, as well as Alabama and Georgia, only returning to his original stomping grounds for a two-year stint as the Chicago Bears’ DC in 2013-14. It was, of course, even more surprising that Colorado would hire him, but it was a bit of an odd move in terms of local favor for Michigan State, too.
This move, though, is a rather fascinating rejection of regionality altogether. Jonathan Smith’s entire career prior to taking this job has been confined to the West: originally from southern California, a player at Oregon State, and a coach at OSU, Idaho, Montana, Boise State, and Washington before returning to his alma mater for his first HC gig. While not altogether unexpected that Smith would leave Corvallis, given the Beavers’ departure from the power conferences after 2023, it’s surprising that he departed the region altogether. You’ve got to wonder, if he’d stuck around a little later in the coaching cycle, whether he would’ve been the first choice at Washington, a program in his region of expertise where he found success as an offensive coordinator.
Smith was already settled in at Michigan State by the time the Alabama-Washington-Arizona hiring cascade started, though, and the fact that both sides were quick to strike a deal at the start of the offseason is evidence of how strong a fit they feel this is. You couldn’t blame this program for seeing potentially rough recruiting as a dealbreaker—when your long-term goals are to beat the likes of Michigan and Ohio State, you’ve gotta have serious talent—but it’s not the priority right now. That’s an important (and surprisingly savvy) sacrifice to make in exchange for landing a candidate who makes such a perfect match for MSU in other ways.
Athletic director Alan Haller, who took the role in 2021 and handed out that $95 million extension during the first three months of his tenure, is well aware of how ugly things have gotten very quickly. It’s clear Michigan State sees Tucker’s exit as a poor reflection on the school as a whole2, and the top priority in this hiring cycle was finding a person who would represent the university well while cleaning up this messy situation.
More than anything else—even more than being a great football coach, which he undoubtedly is—that defines Jonathan Smith. Oregon State was in chaos when he took over there in 2018, following on the heels of Gary Andersen’s ruinous three-year tenure that culminated in a 1-11 season, and Smith appealed as a replacement in part because he simply seemed like the kind of guy to steady the ship. The Athletic’s Chris Vannini described him as “the most normal dude” he’d met in the P5 coaching ranks, and that’s no accident.
Smith made a point in his opening press conference of defining “trust” as the most important thing to build as he takes over this job; on-field accomplishments, as critical as they obviously are, remain a somewhat more distant priority for the time being. Right now, what the Spartans need is a return to the stability and identity that defined them under Dantonio, and there’s no doubt in East Lansing that this is the right guy to rebuild their foundation.
Michigan State is willing to let the wins come along down the road—and the fact that, with a coach who succeeded so completely at his last stop, they very likely will come is just a bonus. Smith is the perfect hire for a program in crisis, and an excellent choice to guide them towards the top of the Big Ten in the long term. What more could you ask for?
The Last Five Years
It takes real skill to fit this much disappointment into a five-year span. In 2019, MSU had solid returns from a 7-6 team that showed spectacular potential on defense and just needed competent offensive play to succeed, but ended up 7-6 again while averaging a 22.5-22.4 loss. Amid the transition from Dantonio to Tucker, they cratered completely with a COVID-shortened 2-5 season in 2020, then soared to that 11-2 mark in 2021 just to set up more letdowns in the following two seasons. Harlon Barnett coached the last ten games of 2023 as the Spartans tumbled to a worse version of where they started the half-decade: decent, though hardly inspiring, defense paired with a god-awful offense that finished third-last in the nation with 15.8 points per game.
You’d figure the end of Tucker’s tenure wouldn’t have left many pieces to work with, but this season might not be a total disaster. The Spartans found something approximating a spark at the end of last year with late wins over Nebraska and Indiana, and the defense that kept them from being a total embarrassment brings back 74% of its production, 16th nationally. The offense will be much more of a work in progress, but there are some interesting weapons to work with—Nate Carter, the only running back with over 100 yards for MSU last year, is back, and Smith brings with him transfer QB Aidan Chiles, who dazzled in scattered appearances for the Beavers during their final Pac-12 campaign. I wouldn’t count on anything sensational, but improvements on 2023 are a reasonable expectation for Smith’s debut at Michigan State.
The Next Five Years
Jonathan Smith is intimately familiar with the way college football programs define themselves by their rivals. He was instrumental in guiding Oregon State to two wins over Oregon in his six years there, battling back after one of the Beavers’ worst stretches in Civil War history (nine losses in ten meetings between 2008 and 2017). And he knows how much those upsets validated his tenure leading OSU, backing up the winning records and AP rankings by performing in the most important game of almost any Oregon State season.
Michigan State, too, finds its identity by looking to its local rivals. There may be games against the likes of USC, Washington, and that same Oregon program on the schedule now, but regardless of conference or division alignment, what happens in Columbus and Ann Arbor will always have an outsize impact on how MSU sees itself. Amid everything else, that’s a part of their identity that many within the program believed the Spartans lost sight of—an understanding of their role as the perennial underdog, fully capable of punching as high as anybody, but not coasting by on talent alone.
Winning at a talent disadvantage is something Smith will likely need to do with some frequency at Michigan State to be successful in the long run. But hey, who knows how to do that better than the man who pulled off a ten-win season at Oregon State? At such a tumultuous time for the Spartans, it’s remarkable that they’ve managed to find a coach who fits the program’s needs so perfectly, both as they recover from the past and aim to contend for titles in the future.
Alright, admittedly, I’m choosing my words carefully here, because this includes the 3-9 Michigan State team from 2016. Remember the severely overrated Notre Dame that gave us “Texas is back!” after their opening-season loss that turned out extremely unimpressive for the Longhorns? MSU was the team that knocked them fully out of the rankings, which was enough to get the Spartans up to #8…right before they kicked off a seven-game losing streak with a 30-6 loss to Wisconsin at home.
Arguably, embarrassment (and the massive amount of money owed to a coach with no future) was the main reason Michigan State fired Tucker. The university is still struggling to recover from the horrific Larry Nassar scandal that came to light in 2016, and prominent figures involved in both that debacle and the one surrounding Tucker have argued that MSU’s delayed handling of this situation demonstrates concern about public disgrace rather than the loathsome actions of its employee. While largely beyond the scope of this story, it’s worth noting in discussing Haller that he became aware of the allegations early in 2023, months before Tucker faced any consequences for his actions.