East Lansing, Mich. - Michigan State was one of only two teams in the Big Ten last year to rank in the top four in the conference in rushing yards per attempt (4.8) and passing yards per attempt (8.2).
Ohio State, not surprisingly, was the other.
It translated to Michigan State having the No. 3 scoring offense in the conference.
With Doak Walker Award running back Kenneth Walker III headed to the NFL, questions arise as to whether the Spartans can maintain the type of run game explosiveness and offensive balance that they enjoyed last year.
Meanwhile, with Payton Thorne returning as an experienced, effective quarterback, and nice nix of established and blossoming talent at the receiver positions, might we see the Spartans change to become more pass-centric in 2022?
“I think it’s a little early for me to tell that, yet,” Michigan State offensive coordinator Jay Johnson said on Thursday, after Michigan State completed five of 15 practices for the spring. “We’re still going to base things starting with the run game. That’s what our program is, the physicality that Coach Tuck wants, that relentless approach, that nonstop high velocity is what he is looking for and I think it still starts there. I think it comes with the brand of football, the physicality.
“So it will still start there, but now you have a more experienced quarterback. You have some receivers with Jayden Reed coming back that obviously bring some things to the table. I’m hoping that we can continue to evolve there and become even better.”
Last year, Walker led the Power Five conferences in rushing with 1,636 yards.
“We were balanced with Ken and everything he brought to the table,” Johnson said. “Balance doesn’t really bother me because I need to win the game.
“With everything that we’re doing, we’re trying to mesh things together a little bit better, looking at things that can help us to do that. We have to do everything a little bit better.
“We need to be better in situational ball. We were solid in the red zone but we need to increase our touchdown percentage there and we need to do better on third down, particularly on some of the shorter distances. That needs to get corrected that fixed. So that will be more of the focus as we move forward.”
That’s high ambition for an Michigan State team that led the Big Ten in red zone touchdown percentage last year at .645 (just ahead of Ohio State’s .644).
“We did take a big step from the previous year,” Johnson said.
“I told the staff in the last staff meeting before the bowl game that we got the most out of this particular team that we could get,” said Michigan State head football coach Mel Tucker. “I said we haven’t left anything on the table. They gave us everything they had and we gave them everything we had and I thought we got the most out of that group.”
Michigan State’s 31-21 victory over Pittsburgh in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl gave the Spartans a chance to run its offense without Walker. It wasn’t ideal at the time, but did it serve as a rehearsal for life without Walker in 2022? Johnson didn’t necessarily look at it that way.
“We didn’t really use the Peach Bowl in that way per se, just because we felt where we were at offensively we needed to continue to do what we did to get there and that’s what our guys executed best,” Johnson said. “Obviously it was different with Ken not being there, but that was our approach and now we are trying to experiment a little bit more in the spring.
“This spring we do use it to look at some things differently, to look at some things we want to add, maybe some things we want to delete. That’s part of spring football, too, as you transition from the fall.”
The biggest experimentation involves the simple rotation of running back candidates.
THE RUNNING BACK PICTURE
Elijah Collins and Jordon Simmons have each started at running back for Michigan State.
Collins led Michigan State in rushing in 2019 and Simmons led the team in 2020 as a true freshman, albeit with only 219 yards on 56 carries.
Collins, who rushed for 988 yards as a redshirt freshman in 2019, was slowed by COVID in 2020. In 2021, he was looking good in September before being lost for six games due to a lower leg injury.
He returned for the last four games of the year and served as MSU’s No. 2 running back against Penn State, rushing five times for 19 yards.
Simmons was slowed by injuries late in the season but reemerged as the starter for the Peach Bowl.
Neither tailback was successful against Pitt’s excellent run defense. Simmons carried 16 times for 23 yards, his most work since rushing 16 times for 121 yards against Youngstown State last fall.
Collins rushed six times for 15 yards against the Panthers.
Harold Joiner, a transfer from Auburn, had 13 carries on the year, for just 43 yards.
Donovan Eaglin had six rushes for 33 yards on the year.
All four are still in the picture this spring. Meanwhile, Michigan State hit the transfer portal for two more candidates.
Jalen Berger transferred to Michigan State from Wisconsin in January. He led the Badgers in rushing as a true freshman in 2020 with 301 yards despite missing three of the team’s seven games due to injury. However he was dismissed from the team in 2021 in early October as he became disgruntled due to decreasing playing time.
Berger is practicing with the Spartans this spring and looking for a new beginning.
“Jalen is a good guy,” Thorne said. “It’s been fun working with him so far. He’s a quiet guy. He’s not a big rah-rah dude. He’s been doing a good job in the weight room, he looks good running the ball and on the field. He has some speed and quickness to him. There are definitely some good signs out of Jalen.”
Johnson didn’t mention Berger during his Thursday press conference, but brought up the name of true freshman Davion Primm, who was at the tail end of the depth chart last fall during his rookie year.
“One guy who is a bit of a newcomer that I’ve been very pleased with is Davion Primm,” Johnson said. “He really has done some good things for us early in the spring campaign.”
Michigan State is awaiting the post-spring arrival of Jarek Broussard, who announced in late January that he will be transferring to Michigan State.
Broussard was Pac-12 Offensive Player of the Year in a six-game, shortened-season COVID year of 2020. He rushed for 896 yards that year.
Broussard (5-9, 185) led Colorado with 661 yards rushing in 2021 with two touchdowns (4.7 yards per carry).
Broussard spent the 2019 season with Tucker and Johnson at Colorado when Tucker was head coach of the Buffs. However, he injured his knee in September of 2019 and missed the entire season.
In March of 2019, during Tucker’s first year in Boulder, Broussard led the team with 32 yards on seven rushes in the first scrimmage of the spring. He rushed for 26 yards, with a TD, in the Colorado spring game.
He redshirted in 2018 after being listed as injured in the first three games of the season.
When Broussard finally became part of the active Colorado roster in 2020 after undergoing two ACL surgeries, he became just the fourth FBS running back since 1996 to rush for more than 100 yards in four straight games to start a career, joining Adrian Peterson (Oklahoma, nine games in 2004), Rudi Johnson (Auburn, five in 2000) and Anthony Davis (Wisconsin, four in 2001).
After four games in 2020, Broussard’s rushing total was 733 yards, the most in Colorado history after four games, and six yards ahead of Rashaan Salaam’s total in 1994 when he won the Heisman Trophy.
In those four games, Broussard rushed for 187 yards against UCLA, 121 against Stanford, 124 against San Diego State and 301 against Arizona.
Tucker and Johnson aren’t able to comment on Broussard until he enrolls at Michigan State.
For now, the others are doing what they can to impress the coaches before Broussard arrives.
“It’s a ton of competition right now,” Johnson said. “Elijah has been here for some time, and Jordon. Those guys are busting it. It’s a very competitive situation. They are all getting a bunch reps. And then you add Jalen in the mix.
“Not many answers have been decided in that world yet. I think it’s going to take some time. It’s probably going to take some time even into fall camp. But it’s going to be a highly competitive situation and those guys are doing solid for us. It’s good.”