It ended with a whimper, not a bang. The pit bulls and Lamborghinis had morphed into a native son dying a good soldier's death on the sideline, his audition for the coaching staff emphatically failed, and the remnants of a much-maligned roster getting run over, through and around, to the tune of a 42-0 loss to a Penn State team playing for a spot in a New Year's Six bowl.
I don't think it's a useful exercise to try to divine anything schematic from this particular game. Nor do I think it is overly useful to try to try to make any firm predictions on what the specifics of the scheme of the new regime will look like before coordinators have been named.
As we stand at the dawn of a new day for Michigan State football, the best use of this column is, in my opinion, to take a brief, broader, overarching look at where MSU has been, and where I think it is going.
Players Make Plays
My issues with the schematic framework on both sides of the ball under the Mel Tucker regime are multifarious and well-documented. Offensively, my primary gripe was that the scheme did little to help players who were not transcendent talents. Calling garden variety two-man pass concepts like Mills, Yankee and Smash against the defenses one routinely sees in the Big Ten East, with no attached constraints, is essentially rolling out a "Madden"-style playbook. Tellingly, when playing the "Madden" video game, one does not improve by leveling up more complex versions of the in-game playbooks, one gets better players, that are able to dominate individual matchups.
There is nothing inherently wrong with being a zone-run-based, play-action shot-dependent team. While people (myself included) may contend that said scheme is intellectually lazy and beneath the institution the play-caller serves, it is an extant offensive philosophy (albeit one that could be done by any number of offensive coordinators much more cheaply than Jay Johnson). As offensive coordinator, Johnson's scheme was workable at getting players in one-on-one scenarios where they were expected to beat the man across from them. However, it did little to help affect the end result of the play.
As a thought exercise, think of the iconic plays of the Jay Johnson offensive tenure. A few come to mind: Ricky White's touchdowns against Michigan in 2020, Kenneth Walker III's fifth touchdown against Michigan, Jayden Reed's fourth-down conversion in the second half of the same Michigan game, Reed's game-winning touchdown against Penn State in 2021, and Keon Coleman's touchdown catches against Wisconsin and Michigan in 2022.
I cover Walker's touchdown here, and Jayden Reed's plays are seen here. Both Reed plays are no-play action fades, one from the Z and one from the slot, in which Reed simply beats future NFL players. The same is the case for the aforementioned White and Coleman plays. Walker's touchdown was the result of a lineman insert blocking into a zone-run surface: a fine concept to be sure, but something your local high school's junior varsity team probably does on Thursday nights. This isn't to say that simple concepts can't be effective. However, when one tries a T-insert against Michigan with Ethan Boyd and Harold Joiner instead of A.J. Arcuri and Walker, a 340-pound defensive tackle who runs a sub 5.0 40-yard dash (seriously) eats the run concept alive.
The fact that so much of Tucker's success was because of Walker, called "the eraser" by some former staff members proves the fact that so many play calls only worked because of his transcendent talent. At a school like Michigan State, where the talent is generally always "good," but rarely "transcendent," calling the same base concepts that worked for my fantasy football starter at running back for a (genuinely solid, but not a superstar talent) transfer from UConn and expecting the same results is malfeasance. There are tweaks that can be made to help players get into advantageous situations even within the constraints of a shot-play-focused offense. One such way was described in one of the above linked pieces, where Jalen Nailor bluff blocked a corner, and then released for a huge conversion.
Johnson did have wrinkles, in almost every film room piece I wrote, I made it a point to say that X concept was a genuinely good twist off of a base play. Some examples that come to mind are a solid split flow series that saw run in 2022, a bluff speed option quarterback run with a lead blocker, and a well-contrived rollout/half-field read series, but these are the exception, not the rule. Also, the lack of in-game adjustments was troubling. When Michigan put a safety over Keon Coleman in the second half of the 2022 game, MSU had absolutely no response, and Coleman had two catches the rest of the game after dominating in the first half.
Defensively, MSU ran a spot drop, cover-2/3/4 defense, that rarely pattern matched. Like Johnson's architecture, running a spot drop defense is in no way reprehensible. Michigan is on their way to a third consecutive Big Ten title with a defense that favors spot-dropping, but advances the concept by mixing it with multiple downright DEVIOUS, unbelievably complex twists.
