East Lansing, Mich. - Michigan State has a spiffy two-game win streak, but a trend of a different kind is on Mel Tucker’s mind.

The Spartans have allowed a 100-yard individual rusher for seven straight games. Most recently, Rutgers running back Kyle Monangai rushed for a career-high 164 yards on 24 carries (6.8) per attempt against Michigan State. Rutgers rushed for 224 yards overall, although Michigan State held on for a 27-21 victory in improving to 5-5 on the season.

Indiana, MSU’s next opponent, ranks dead last in the Big Ten in yards per carry (2.8). The Hoosiers aren’t expected to be capable of capitalizing on MSU’s recent problems with run defense, but Rutgers’ Monangai wasn’t regarded as a positive force prior to last Saturday’s game, either.

“Our tackling has not been consistent,” Tucker said. “A lot of yards after contact. We were making contact, but we weren’t wrapping up and they were doing a really good job of running hard.”

By SpartanMag.com’s count, Michigan State missed 11 tackles in run defense on Saturday, with 78 yards accumulated after contact on those plays.

Cal Haladay was the surest of Michigan State’s tacklers on Saturday. Haladay amassed 19 tackles against Rutgers, but he wasn’t perfect, either.

“He (Monangai) is a hard runner,” Haladay said. “He is downhill. He was just hitting gaps, hitting creases.

“There’s just things we have to tighten up - missing tackles, wrapping up, squeezing. Things we practice every day, we have to focus on that this week. We can’t let that happen. Leaky yards from missing tackles or leaky arm tackles and things like that.”

The problems went beyond missed tackles.

PROBLEMS ON THE EDGE

Tucker pointed out that Michigan State had problems with leverage and containment on the perimeter.

“Everyone has to do their job in the run game,” Tucker said. “Perimeter force was an issue in the last game, from the C-gap out. So we just have to do a better job with that.”

Our of necessity, due to decreasing numbers, Michigan State surprised Illinois by starting four burly defensive tackles on the defensive line. That matched up well with Illinois’ brawny approach to the run game.

Rutgers had a week to prepare for what the Knights expected to be a foursome of bigger and slowing defensive linemen. Rutgers made things a little more finesse oriented on the edge by leaving defensive lineman Jalen Hunt unblocked at times and optioning him on zone read plays. Hunt is a good, solid defensive tackle, and served a functional purpose at Illinois. But Rutgers put him in space a bit more, and made it hard for the 305-pounder to close down on the C-gap when defending the zone read mesh.

Meanwhile, Dashaun Mallory’s absence was a factor. The former defensive tackle has become a functional defensive end this season, in helping replace unavailable defensive ends such as Jeff Pietrowski, Khris Bogle, Zion Young and Brandon Wright. With Mallory out due to an undisclosed ailment, Michigan State re-activated Michael Fletcher, who missed the Illinois game with an injury.

Hunt, Fletcher and Avery Dunn served as an unlikely three-man rotation at defensive end against Rutgers. They were third-stringers two months ago, and Hunt is playing out of position.

Those three played hard, and did what they could. But at some point, the duct tape runs out and player absences catch up to a defense.

Further out on the perimeter, Michigan State had problems with Rutgers’ crack-replace blocking. That’s when a wide receiver stalks inside to crack block a linebacker for an outside run. In the crack-replace, the cornerback is supposed to let that crack-blocking receiver go, stay home, and leverage the run back to the defensive help.

“They kind of got us on our edges a little bit,” Tucker said. “It became a perimeter support game. They take the receiver and crack our primary run force guy. So we need to do a better job of replacing with the corner.”

Example: Early in the second quarter, after a Bryce Baringer punt was downed at the 4-yard line, Michigan State cornerback Ronald Williams failed on a crack-replace assignment. The receiver he was covering went inside to block a linebacker. Williams went with him, rather than reading the play and staying home as the replace men. This allowed Monangai to bounce outside and down the sideline for a gain of 31, igniting a 96-yard touchdown drive.

Williams replaced Ameer Speed in the starting lineup for the first time this season, on Saturday. Speed failed to play physical, leveraged run support as a starter. But by the fourth quarter of the Rutgers game, Speed was back on the field and Williams was sitting.

OVERZEALOUS IN PURSUIT

Later in the game, linebacker Aaron Brulé charged too hard from the backside in pursuing a wildcat QB sweep. When the wildcat QB pitched to WR Aron Cruickshank on a reverse, Brulé instantly realized he had been baited into over-pursuing and should have stayed home. He had no chance to reverse field and catch Cruickshank.

That was a tough read for Brulé, as he was assigned to blitz off the edge on that play. If a blitz hadn’t been called, he likely would have been more apt to stay home and foil the play. Rutgers happened to have a perfect play called for a field-side blitz, and Rutgers had set up that play with successful wildcat QB keepers.

Cruickshank turned that error on third-and-five into a 25-yard run to the 1-yard line.

THE SPLIT SAFETY QUESTION

Some of Rutgers’ chunk runs came when Michigan State played with two deep safeties, protecting against the pass first. This was a case of Michigan State believing it could stop the run with a standard number in the box, leaving a safety responsible for an interior gap while playing deep.

Michigan State had reason to believe it could play this way. MSU’s run defense had been respectable against Illinois, Wisconsin and even Michigan in recent games, despite giving up big numbers. Michigan State played with sound leverage, contact and gap integrity in those games and did a good job in containing the run and not getting stampeded by quality running attacks.

Michigan put up big numbers on the ground against Michigan State, but Michigan is putting up big numbers against everyone. Michigan State did a solid job in that game of preventing the home run ball on the ground and managed to stay competitive on the scoreboard with good run defense in the red zone.

Meanwhile, Rutgers’ run offense had been weak for the past month and a half. Michigan State believed it could play softer against the run, with split safeties deep, and still stop the Rutgers ground game. But that proved to be wrong.

On two notable occasions, Kendell Brooks was responsible for an interior gap while playing in two-deep pass defense. This put Brooks in a difficult predicament of hustling down toward the box to meet Monangai in space at the linebacker level after Monangai had already pressed through the unhosted gap.

Brooks missed tackles on two occasions as the late man into an un-hosted gap, resulting in gains of 23 and 19.

That’s the price a defense pays if it wishes to go with two deep safeties to protect against the pass first, while deploying less and late traffic in run defense.

Brooks has been a reliable, hard tackler all year. But he missed portions of the Illinois game with an undisclosed injury. Against Rutgers, he didn’t seem to be his physical hard-tackling self. He seemed a bit foggy in pass defense, for the first time all year, too, making errors on Illinois’ two touchdown passes.

Brooks has been a plus through most of the year, and Michigan State will need him to regain that level of play for the final two games of the regular season against Indiana and Penn State.

“The scheme is sound,” Tucker said. “We don’t really have schemes that aren’t sound. It’s gap-sound whether we are in base defense or there is some type of movement or some type of pressure. Everything on paper is pretty much sound and solid. It comes down to execution.”

For instance, the scheme was gap-sound on the plays when Brooks missed tackles in the hole, and when Brulé over-pursed when transitioning from a blitzer to a wildcat pursuer. And when Mike linebacker Ben VanSumeren was a beat slow to host his gap on an inside run play with 5:53 to play.

On that play, with VanSumeren slow to read and react, he was crack-blocked, outside-in, by a tight end 5 yards downfield when VanSumeren should have met the ball carrier in the hole, 1 yard downfield. Those delays led to Chester Kimbrough getting knocked out of the game by a head butt at 7 yards from the ball carrier, and an eventual 13-yard gain.

“There’s a lot there,” Tucker said. “All of that stuff is fixable. And we need to get more guys ready to play. We started to get thin up there. And if we can get off the field on third down, then we will be exposed to less plays as well.”

STILL SEARCHING AT ILB

Michigan State played three defensive series with Brulé teaming up with Haladay as the two inside linebackers, rather than VanSumeren and Haladay.

Haladay normally plays weak inside linebacker while VanSumeren plays Mike linebacker. But Haladay moved to Mike linebacker when he was joined by Brulé.

It will be interesting to see if Michigan State goes with this grouping more often in the final two games as the coaches continue to try to find the right combination with the players they have available.

STILL SEARCHING AT NICKEL

Michigan State played four different players at nickel back on Saturday: Kimbrough started. Xavier Henderson played some snaps at nickel as well, as did freshman Malik Spencer. And when Spencer went down briefly with an ailment late in the game, redshirt freshman walk-on Khalil Majeed played nickel in the first snaps of his college career and his first snaps of football since his sophomore year of high school in 2018.

If Kimbrough is unavailable this week, there is a possibility Spencer could move into the starting lineup. He would be the 27th different player to start on defense for the injury- and suspension-riddled Spartan defense this year.

Despite giving up a lot of yardage, Michigan State’s defense hasn’t been gashed on the scoreboard. Michigan State’s defense held a terrific, balanced, bruising Michigan offense to 22 points before a bad snap on the punt team gifted the Wolverines a touchdown. Wisconsin had 21 points in regulation. Michigan State held Illinois to 15 points, and held Rutgers to 14 points through 59 minutes, before a Hail Mary pass on fourth down pushed their Knights’ total to 21.

“We know what we have to do,” Tucker said. “It’s just preparation and execution, but I feel good about the scheme and putting guys in position to make plays.”

“As we prepare this week, we know we are going to be tested and we have to be better in the run game,” Tucker added. “We just have to do that.”