I’m not sure this needs to be said, because I’m sure Michigan State athletic director Alan Haller knows how absurd the notion is, and because our Bruce Feldman has thrown cold water on it from the Urban Meyer side of things.

But just in case. Or, just for the misguided Michigan State fan. Urban Meyer can’t get that job — especially given the history at hand. His and the school’s. He can’t get an interview. He can’t get an email. He can’t get a serious mention among the people Haller is leaning on to help him with a search that will determine whether “Michigan State football relevance” is a retro 2010s term or a possible reality again. It should be embarrassing for Michigan State fans that so much as a single message board poster floated the idea.

Advertisement

The reasons should be obvious. Also, for different reasons it should be pretty clear he wouldn’t win at a high rate anyway in today’s college football. Not at a place that isn’t advantaged to the max like his last college job. Think Les Miles a decade ago. Think Lou Holtz two decades ago. Big name. Big success in the past. Smudges. Past the expiration date.

GO DEEPER

Tucker will not participate in sexual harassment hearing

What Michigan State needs is Mark Dantonio. Not actual Dantonio, who is 67 years old, retired from coaching and back at MSU helping interim coach and former assistant Harlon Barnett try to navigate a team around the smoldering crater that fired coach Mel Tucker left in his wake. But another Dantonio, active in the coaching realm and well-suited for a job like this. As he was in 2006 when a search committee headed by Mark Hollis and including Haller — then an MSU Police officer — chose him amid limited fanfare.

The hope and talk at the time were of championships, but that’s always the hope and the talk. The need was to stabilize things after years of program erosion under John L. Smith and Bobby Williams. Michigan State was closer to Indiana and Northwestern at the time than it was to Michigan and Ohio State. And that’s true now. And that’s important to recognize.

Stabilize. Get back to what your resources dictate as reasonable performance, which is consistent eight-win seasons. Then see if you can rally back up and challenge those with more advantages than you — those you despise, measure yourself by and will not enjoy getting blown out by as this season advances. Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State are going to remind you with great pleasure that Indiana, Northwestern and Purdue are your peers now.

Dantonio instantly turning terrible football into winning football didn’t mean he’d win a Big Ten championship in his fourth season, and that shared title didn’t mean he’d have a team good enough to win it outright three years after that, to be followed by a Cotton Bowl champion and College Football Playoff semifinalist. There are levels to this. Start with being solid and competent.

Dantonio had coordinated at the highest level, running Jim Tressel’s defense for the 2002 national championship Ohio State Buckeyes. Had he still been in that job, Michigan State fans would have been much more excited about him. But he had demonstrated the ability to be a head coach, an essential trait at the time and one that should be essential now. His 18-17 record in three seasons at Cincinnati was not scintillating but impressed upon closer inspection.

Advertisement

He was an adult with zero integrity concerns. He had been at Michigan State, for Nick Saban’s five seasons and then for one under Williams, and he knew the place. That was more important at the time than it is now, considering the toxicity and incompetence that oozed from that version of Michigan State’s Board of Trustees.

The board ended up not being an issue for him anyway, as with Tom Izzo before and since, because he was good and the meddling among them had few complaints. But also because he had a strong AD in Hollis, a supportive president in Lou Anna Simon and a relationship with them and with Izzo that maximized progress and minimized discord.

You hear that same story, over and over again, good and bad, when it comes to analyzing successful and failed college coaching tenures. Dantonio’s decline — from 87-33 in his first nine seasons to 27-24 in his last four — can be traced in part to getting away from what worked and sacrificing fit and chemistry for blind talent accumulation. And in part to losing his best coach and recruiter, Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi, who should be a serious consideration here.

Narduzzi, Kansas coach Lance Leipold, Marshall coach Charles Huff, Duke coach Mike Elko — this is the sweet spot for Haller’s search. Somewhere in there lies the possibility of another Dantonio.

Michigan State’s in-progress search for a new president will have something to say about the next coach’s success, and that uncertainty should not be comforting for prospective candidates. Izzo’s presence should be. Though before taking the job I’d be asking him for a side contract promising at least another five years on the job.

And Haller’s charge is to find a proven head coach with zero integrity concerns — without a hint or whisper of an issue of any kind — who understands the challenge at Michigan State. That’s easier if you’ve been at Michigan State, but Tucker seemed to have a good handle on things. The outcome of the 2020 search to replace Dantonio, led by then-AD Bill Beekman and deputy athletic directors Haller and Jennifer Smith, was looking fine right up until Tucker’s integrity concerns came tumbling out this fall and got him fired for cause.

Advertisement

Tucker and his lawyers are doing all they can right now to salvage some of the nearly $80 million left on the 10-year, $95 million, fully guaranteed contract he signed amid the 11-win season of 2021, amid fears that LSU was going to steal him away as it did Saban 22 years earlier. None of those efforts will change the fact that he made an unthinkable mistake in attempting to get involved with Brenda Tracy, a sexual assault survivor and victims advocate who has spoken at MSU and many other schools. Unthinkable and untenable, especially at Michigan State.

The Larry Nassar scandal will, and must, always matter. Many still don’t seem to understand the extent to which he fooled people. As someone whose family sat a few rows from his at a church in East Lansing, who wrote about him at the 2012 Olympics and who heard impassioned defenses of him in 2016 from people who trusted him fully and later condemned him, I can attest.

But the way Michigan State handled the aftermath, amid horrific accounts from the girls who were terrorized by this sexual predator, warranted disgust and fundamental changes at the school. It’s part of why Simon resigned amid heavy criticism in 2018 rather than retiring amid a celebration of her tenure. It’s why Michigan State should never again be accused of lacking transparency, yet here it is again, dodging and deflecting in the wake of more controversy.

It’s why Urban Meyer shows Michigan State has learned nothing if his candidacy goes beyond the hopeful transmissions of some misguided fans. I don’t think it will.

(Photo: Matthew Holst / Getty Images)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57k3Jqa3FhaHxzfJFsZmpoX2WDcLnInJ%2Bin5GjerTAwK2cZqWVoXq1wcKknKtlk6SupLSMrJyaqpOdfA%3D%3D