East Lansing, Mich. - Everyone knew Ohio State was going to find a way to score at least 40 points and that Michigan State would have a hard time scoring more than 21. The question was what would be revealed during the journey.

The list isn’t pretty:

* Continued horrific numbers in pass defense.

* Continued propensity to commit assignment busts in pass defense.

* Continued ineffectiveness of the run game, due in part to a big second quarter deficit for the third time in four games.

* Continued ineffectiveness of the pass rush.

* And the continuation of a recent trend that has seen Payton Thorne fall short of making plays that seemingly would have been second nature to him a few weeks or months ago.

On the positive side, I give credit to Michigan State for showing up and landing some blows on Ohio State. Charles Brantley’s pick-six was a veteran play. That’s the first time I’ve used that word to describe the talented little sophomore.

Early in the second quarter when Michigan State cut the lead to 21-13 with an 80-yard touchdown drive, we saw signs of last year’s Thorne-to-Jayden Reed brilliance. Thorne hooked up with Reed for a 26-yard gain on third-and-four earlier in the drive. And Thorne ended the drive with a back-shoulder fade to Reed for an 18-yard score.

Mel Tucker said during his radio show on Thursday that the old Reed was back, and ready to make an impact again.

Reed, MSU’s best player, had been a diminished version of himself since injuring his back against Akron. He didn’t play against Washington, and struggled to make an impact against Minnesota and Maryland, playing through pain.

In this game, he was quick, shifty, talented. He was the one skill player on MSU’s offense who belonged on the field against Ohio State. Michigan State is going to need that version of Reed in these last six games of the season. And these six games are important.

Stock in Tucker trust will tip one way or another in the last half of this season. Not for eternity. But for now.

Sometimes in college football, “now” can seem like an eternity. Kind of like this four-game losing streak.

Tucker has been a cultural hit with huge portions of the Michigan State fanbase. They want to believe he’s still comin’. He would love to ensure them that the program is in fact still comin’. But like I said after the Minnesota game, there is only so much he can do with this collection of talent. And he’s responsible for a large portion of this roster.

I am not a subscriber to the belief that he inherited a terrible roster of players. Maybe the players Tucker inherited weren’t the right guys to do things Tucker wants from a college football player. But I do think the roster was set for Mark Dantonio to continue to win and lose at the clip he established from 2016 to 2019. That’s three bowl appearances in four years. You can say that’s bad football. But if you’re 50-years-old or older, you know that bowl games are not on the schedule. You’ve lived through enough bowl-less years and failed rebuilds to know that three bowl games in four years at Michigan State isn’t bad football. It’s not great. It’s not the apex. It’s not the goal. But it’s not bad. Not here.

Bowl games have been taken for granted at Michigan State since 2007, and that’s what’s making this year’s 180-degree fall from last season so difficult to process. It’s creating a little bit of panic.

Tucker isn’t panicking. He knows what he has. He knows there are limitations. The failure to this point is that he and his staff haven’t been able to reduce the level of mistakes to something more digestible for the portion of the fanbase that wants to believe. Michigan State hasn’t just been losing. Michigan State has been losing sloppy, and convincingly.

Injuries have had something to do with it. But there has been enough continuity of healthy bodies in the secondary since the Western Michigan game to begin garnering a level of consistent competence there. But it hasn’t happened.

The busted coverage on the 69-yard TD pass from CJ Stroud to Emeka Egbuka midway through the first quarter was the imperfect example.

Michigan State had just tied the game with Brantley’s pick-six. The fine Spartan fans who didn’t put their tickets on StubHub for Buckeyes to purchase cheered smilingly in the deliciously chilly, 54-degree, sunny, Octoberfest weather. Football was fun again, for a little while.

On Ohio State’s first snap of the next series, Simeon Barrow was schemed to surprise the Buckeye offensive front with a one-gapping move (Michigan State usually plays a two-gapping scheme). On this play, the change-up helped him bust into the backfield for a TFL.

On second-and-11, a toss play was held for a gain of seven. Small victory, but it worked.

The stadium grew loud. Third-and-four. Michigan State had a chance to get off the field with momentum in a 7-7 game. Spartan fans were celebrating a moment in Spartan Stadium for the first time since Akron.

On third-and-four Michigan State’s embattled defensive coordinator Scottie Hazelton dialed up an “exotic.”

An “exotic” in today’s football parlance is a crafty, aggressive coverage and/or pressure that differs from your base scheme.

Michigan State, to that point, had stayed vanilla on defense. Smartly dumbing things down. Trying to get everybody on the same page, down after down. Don’t give up the deep ball. Give up the underneath and intermediates, if you must, but be there for the tackle.

Sounds good in the gameplan room, but when you actually take the field against this Ohio State roster filled with 60-plus four star recruits, they are a little harder to tackle than the scout team guys you see on Tuesdays.

The keep-it-simple approach of playing two-deep zone defenses didn’t work well on Ohio State’s opening drive. But the second drive yielded Brantley’s pick-six, with Brantley showing press man-to-man, but bailing into zone while keeping a tight relationship to the WR and an eye on the QB. With good feet and an improving feel, he was able to pounce on an errant throw.

Despite getting knifed on the opening drive, Michigan State had scored a defensive TD to tie the game. The Spartans were playing with house money. In a loud house. Seven minutes into the game, and still standing. That’s an improvement over last year, kind of. And it’s better than Wisconsin did against Ohio State, if we’re making comparisons to miserable company.

Then came this third-and-four, and an attempt to go with an “exotic.”

I don’t blame Michigan State for reaching for an “exotic.” The blame came in MSU’s failure to execute.

Michigan State pressed all of its defenders up near the line of scrimmage on this play, threatening a wholesale blitz.

Surely Michigan State wasn’t going to bring the entire house and play a zero coverage. Joe Lee Dunn isn’t walking through that door. Thankfully. (Google him).

So Michigan State faked a wholesale blitz, and then attempted to bail out of it with a three-deep coverage.

Two-thirds of that coverage was carried out correctly, in the persons of Ameer Speed and Jaden Mangham. Whoever was supposed to make up the third prong of that three deep, whether it was Brantley or Angelo Grose, failed to do so.

Prior to the snap, Grose looked at Brantley. And then looked at him again. I don’t have to be an expert in body language to know that Grose was confused as to what was called and what he was supposed to do.

At the snap, Brantley and Grose took the outside receiver. Neither of them went with the inside receiver, who went deep, wide open for an embarrassing 69-yard TD.

It was another assignment bust, like many of those in the last half of last season, and too many of them this season.

The running joke in Gainesville, Florida among former Gators is that when a player made a mistake and came to the sideline and apologized to the coaches, Steve Spurrier would tell them, “It’s not your fault, son. It’s my fault for putting you in the game.”

At some point, I wonder if or when some of the Michigan State coaches will arrive at the same feeling about some of these guys.

But then I stop and wonder about some of the external evaluation, internal evaluation and player development that is taking place. There are players such as Ronald Williams, Chester Kimbrough and Marqui Lowery who came to Michigan State from the transfer portal and have started in the past but have disappeared from the playing group. They haven’t learned enough in two years to help?

I’m not saying any of them were great or even good in the past, but they have winning starts on their resumés. It’s strange that they were good enough to be first-stringers at one point, but are no longer good enough to be in the playing group.

Kimbrough was regarded as being good enough to be the starting nickel back throughout spring practice, and fall camp, and for two and a half games this season. Then he gets picked on a little bit at Washington, with no help from MSU’s lack of answers for switch release concepts on that day, and he gets benched, never to be heard from again. He played a little bit on special teams last week, and a little bit at the end of this game. So health isn’t the problem with Kimbrough.

Again, I’m not saying he should be playing. I’m just saying it’s uncommon for a program to invest that many spring practice and fall camp practice reps, and game reps in September, and get nothing out of that teaching, while reshuffling the secondary. It can’t help the quest for continuity with this type of revolving door.

Tucker said after the Washington game that there would be changes. I respect that. Changes in the starting lineup make sense.

It made sense to give Justin White a try at nickel after Kimbrough failed at Washington.

It made sense to move Grose from safety to nickel after he continued to make mistakes at safety through the first four games.

But it seems like those discoveries and decisions should have taken place in March, April or August, before the problem lands on the field in the fall. That’s quality control.

With Grose moving to nickel to replace White, that opened the door for true freshman Mangham to make his debut as a starter. Youth movement. Everyone can respect that.

But then when Mangham went down with a harrowing upper body injury, they went with White - the former nickel - at safety? I realize that the Grose project had been scrapped. And I assume White had been cross-training at safety to manufacture some depth.

But basically, White is a former walk-on and a rookie at the position. And Ohio State made him look that way with a musical chairs mishap which resulted in a 51-yard TD pass to Julian Fleming and a 21-7 lead in the second quarter.

Michigan State was in two-deep/man-under coverage for that play. White was one of the deep safeties. Brantley was in man-to-man on Fleming, underneath. Brantley was supposed to get safety help to the inside from White. But White was influenced out of position by a run fake and Brantley didn’t receive his help. Bust. Touchdown.

With Michigan State having finished last in the nation in pass yardage allowed last year, and on course to retaining the title belt this year, Tucker was asked how much of the damage from Stroud’s 361 yards of passing offense in just three quarters of football was due to assignment errors and how much was due to personnel limitations.

“The one third down when they scored a touchdown was a complete bust on one guy,” Tucker said, in reference to the 69-yarder with Grose and Brantley at the scene of the crime.

“One of the other big plays was another bust on the guy that was pressed into duty (White).

“Also, they made some plays on some contested balls.”

Translation: There were times when Ohio State passed for big chunks of yardage and touchdowns against good coverage, but the receivers made excellent plays on perfectly-thrown passes.

“So it was a little bit of both,” Tucker said.

We can understand getting out-talented a few times by a team that had seven players in the starting lineup who were five-star recruits. I think Michigan State has only had one five-star recruit in the last 12 years.

When you have a shortage of talent, it adds to the urgency of playing square, solid, assignment-sound football. And Michigan State just can’t seem to get there, especially on defense. That’s where Michigan State needs to show progress to its fans and constituents. Losses always hurt. But it might be more digestible if there was more apparent progress.

Tucker rolled the dice in investing heavily into this new transfer portal thing. That might give you some good looking, athletic frames, the type that he knows he needs to take this program to the Top 10. But maybe it’s harder to get a roster full of those guys to be assignment-sound. I know Bill Snyder used to work miracles with a revolving door of junior college players at Kansas State back in the 1990s and early 2000s. But he was a one-of-a-kind Hudini.

After last year, portal watchers were wondering if Tucker had a similar touch. It doesn’t look that way, and Tucker never promised that would be the case.

Hitting the transfer portal was a stopgap experiment. Tucker would rather get those good looking, athletic frames via old fashioned high school recruiting. Bring them in as freshman. Teach the system for two or three years, and give them the full process. And that’s what he is planning to do from this point forward.

The quick re-shuffling of the roster yielded magic last year. But this year has been a big step backward thus far, with danger of a steeper fall in the final six games.

Are the Spartans any closer to competing with super powers such as Ohio State than they were a year ago when Michigan State finished as the No. 8-ranked team in the country, but trailed the Buckeyes 49-0 at halftime?

No. That’s a dumb question. The 2-4 record is answer enough.

Michigan State was more competitive, for longer, this year against the Buckeyes, for what that’s worth.

Ohio State is the measuring standard in the Big Ten. Michigan State remains many laps down.

“I definitely understand it,” Tucker said. “I’ve coached there. I’ve been at Georgia and Alabama. So I know what that type of program looks like. I know what it feels like, I know what goes into it. We’re not there yet but we’ll get there.

“I have some ideas on how to close the gap, but now is not the time to talk about it.”

Now is not the time, because that would mean telling the truth about the limitations of his players. Despite those limitations, at some point, even teams of mediocre talent have to get on the same page.

I felt there was progress toward same-pageness on defense in the second half last week against Maryland. And it’s dangerous to judge anything when playing a juggernaut like Ohio State. The Buckeyes can put up 500 yards of offense on pretty much anyone outside of a few Top 10 teams.

“The matchups are a challenge, obviously,” Tucker said of Ohio State. “That’s the biggest thing, the one-on-one matchups. They put pressure on you at every position and they have a very good quarterback who is very, very accurate with the ball. He can put the ball where a lot of guys can’t put it. He doesn’t need a lot of room. You have to be perfect.”

But matchups had nothing to do with two of Ohio State’s first three touchdowns. When Michigan State fell behind 21-7 in this game, with 14 of those Buckeye points coming on pure assignment errors, it was such a gut punch to what was shaping up to be an otherwise decent opening 20 minutes of football from the Spartans.

“We’ll keep working on it,” Tucker said. “We’ll go back and see what we can do with the guys that we have.”

Key phrase there. With the guys that we have.

“It’s not an easy fix,” he said. “But we will do whatever we can to make it better.”

In the meantime, he and his staff are trying to plant seeds for the future. Michigan State had six 4-star recruits on campus for visits this weekend, plus a 5-star.

Does a loss like this have a negative effect on MSU’s recruitment of these visitors?

“No, because those guys see the opportunity to come in here and make a difference,” Tucker said. “Obviously we have a really good recruiting class going for the ’23 class.”

Michigan State’s class is ranked No. 15 in the nation by Rivals.com in star average.

“It’s one of the best classes that has been put together so far here and we are going to continue to add to it and have a really good class,” Tucker said. “You always have to fight to hang onto guys because that’s the nature of recruiting. We’re going to add some really good players. We are going to recruit at a really high level in ’23.”

Prior to this game, I felt it was possible that Michigan State could lose by 21 and still show progress. Ohio State is that good, and Michigan State has that much work to do.

When it was 21-13, I thought Michigan State was headed in that direction, despite the two assignment bust touchdowns.

But MSU’s inability to slow down the Stroud express, and Payton Thorne’s continued struggles, leave us in dizzy disarray as we try to make collective sense of these last four losses.

The injuries have played a big hand in them. But injuries are catching up with a lot of teams right now, and Michigan State is the team in the Big Ten that is spinning its wheels the worst, aside from Northwestern.

Tucker was asked if changes to his coaching staff are a possibility in the near future.

“I’m not looking to make any chances from a coaching staff standpoint,” he said. “At all.”

That’s fine with me. Last year, Ohio State demoted its defensive coordinator after a maddening loss to Oregon and clear evidence that the Buckeyes weren’t going to make a run at their National Championship goals with the status quo on the coaching staff. Ohio State got a tiny bit better on defense at mid-season, but still got ripped by Michigan and Utah in its final two games.

In the college game, you’re not going to fix a hole in a ship, this far out at sea. That’s an off-season thing.

Firing the defensive coordinator right now would just take time away from Tucker’s other tasks and areas of focus as head coach. Tucker will revisit and evaluate his staff after the season. Right now, Tucker has to do everything he can to make sure the busts on defense, and the shortcomings on offense, don’t get revisited against Wisconsin.

Nick Saban had a four-game losing streak in his third year at Michigan State. But Michigan State lost two of those games on a pair of blocked field goals and an on-side kick. There were questions about details, but the Spartans were sound in blocking, tackling and assignments. There was reason to believe traction was within grasp.

The following week at Illinois, Saban went around the interview room after his post-game press conference, handing out handshakes in celebration of ending the four-game losing streak. Saban, shaking hands with media, with a smile on his face. Losing streaks can affect a person.

Mark Dantonio had a three-game losing streak in his third year. But those losses were by 2, 3 and 8 points while he tried to decide whether to go with Keith Nichol or Kirk Cousins at quarterback. One of the losses was to Central Michigan. The morning after that game, Dantonio found himself driving to work, looking out at the fields of garbage strewn across campus after a day of happy tailgating turned sour. He felt reminded of the impact he and his team had on the weekends and lives of Spartan fans. He felt a little guilt. Like all coaches, it was impossible to want to win more than he did. But it would take more than want-to. Much was forgiven the following week when he beat Michigan in overtime.

That was the first of a three-game winning streak. That streak ended with a last-second, 15-13 loss to No. 6 Iowa in a night game at Spartan Stadium. I’ve told the story many times, but that was the night, prior to Iowa’s game-winning play, when I thought to myself, win or lose on this last play, we have learned enough about Dantonio and his program to know that the coming years are going to be played with sound, consistent, winning football. I hadn’t felt that about Michigan State football in 10 years.

In some ways, a head coach is still getting established in year three. And with Tucker’s experimental shuffling of the roster, the step backward in 2022 is becoming more severe than the downs Saban and Dantonio felt in year three. But Tucker’s year two was much better than year two for Saban and Dantonio. That’s why spirits were so high in mid-September. And that’s why the lows feel so low this October.

This loss to Ohio State was expected. But if you lose to Wisconsin, a sub-.500 season is almost guaranteed. And if non-competitive losses continue, the trust factor will be tested.