Forty-seven teams received votes in the preseason AP College Football poll. Michigan State wasn’t one of them.
The days of the Spartans beating Michigan eight of 12 seasons, shocking Ohio State in key games, winning the Rose Bowl, reaching the College Football Playoff and being widely admired are over.
The Spartans enter the 2025 season considered a Big Ten bottom-feeder.
It seems as if Kenneth Walker III and the magical 2021 season he keyed was a decade ago. Mark Dantonio and, "pride before the fall," might as well have been a generation back. The Spartans haven’t been bowl-eligible since 2021. They are 8-19 in the Big Ten the past three years.
Mel Tucker was a disaster on every level. Jonathan Smith’s first MSU squad got off to a promising start, but by the end of the season was flatter than a pancake.
In the meantime, the landscape of college football has changed rapidly. Big Ten teams like Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State, Oregon, along with several other programs nationally, are much better equipped to adjust to revenue sharing, NIL and the transfer portal than MSU.
Of course, the Spartans can change the perception in 2025. Smith has eaten more than his share of humble pie since his team imploded late last season.
The Spartans’ success remains dependent primarily on quarterback Aidan Chiles. A gifted four-star recruit with mobility and a rocket arm who came from Oregon State with Smith via the transfer portal, Chiles is reportedly up to 230 pounds after putting on 15 pounds of muscle. He is entering his junior year.
Chiles was among the most highly-regarded players in the portal following his freshman season at Oregon State. He lived up to the billing early last season except for a glaring flaw: his propensity for untimely turnovers grew. By late in the season, he cut down on the turnovers, but was essentially a check-down machine.
This limited the effectiveness of Nick Marsh, a sensationally talented receiver who flashed brilliance early last season.
In fairness to both these players, the Spartans' running game lacked sizzle. The offensive line struggled, but has been augmented by portal additions center Matt Gulbin (Wake Forest) and tackle Connor Moore (South Dakota State). Left tackle Stanton Ramil is a solid player trending upward.
On defense, David Santiago (Air Force) and Issac Smith (Texas Tech) were acquired from the portal to hopefully improve a pass rush that was non-existent last year.
Getting cornerback Chance Rucker back from injury, and transfer Dontavius Nash (East Carolina) should bolster a secondary that, other than safety Malik Spencer, became increasingly overwhelmed last season.
If this doesn’t exactly sound like a formula to throw fear into MSU’s Big Ten opponents, well, that’s because it isn’t. The Spartans are expected to finish in the bottom third of an 18-team conference. Purdue and Northwestern are the only conference teams clearly worse than MSU.
Other than the Dantonio era, MSU hasn’t been a consistent college football power in nearly six decades. But they’d have their moments every decade or so under George Perles, Nick Saban and even, for a year anyway, Mel Tucker. And when the Spartans were not threatening the top tier of their conference, at least they’d land in various fleabag bowl games.
Last season’s finale was an incredible low, a 41-14 home loss to Rutgers with bowl eligibility on the line.
Jason Batt was hired as athletic director at Michigan State mainly to address the changes in college football. However, it’s difficult not to wonder if MSU has fallen behind so far so quickly it may be unrealistic to expect anything other than mediocrity for several years in the future.
It will certainly take all his skills for Smith to get the Spartans back to even a fleabag bowl this fall, let alone the glory they enjoyed not-so-long ago.