Michigan State head football coach Mark Dantonio spoke Tuesday morning at media day, outlining expectations for his fourth season at the helm of the Spartans. Even though his team is coming off a 6-7 season — marred after the fact by the distraction of an off-campus altercation involving his players — Dantonio likes the chemistry of this year's squad, and has no problems with his team dreaming of roses.

In his heart of hearts, Mark Dantonio’s preferred style is to get a lead, then take the air out of the ball, and play keep-away.
It’s his modus operandi, on the field and off.

You can see that from the way the Michigan State coaching staff attacked recruiting this year— they gathered in a bunch of early commitments from big-time players, then slowed everything down to a crawl, and held on to those recruits for dear life.

It’s how the Spartans have scored classes in the upper echelon of the Big Ten each of the past two recruiting cycles.

And it’s why — despite all the speculation that losing ace recruiter Dan Enos to the head coaching job at Central Michigan — there was barely a hiccup in the Spartans’ recruiting efforts: Two-thirds of MSU’s 21-member class were already committed weeks before last season’s fall camp even started, and months before Enos’ January hiring at CMU.

In a two-week span in June alone, the Spartans picked up commitments from four players — led by five-star stud DE/LB William Gholston — who’d make or break a recruiting class for any Big Ten team.

From there on out, it was just addition without subtraction.

“None of them decommitted, and none of them went on visits to other schools. In a day and age where you see people flip-flopping a lot, that’s a statement in itself,” Dantonio said at Wednesday’s National Signing Day news conference at MSU’s Skandalaris Center. “William and Max (Bullough) committed last summer, and I think it showed a certain amount of maturity to stay a Spartan.”

Of specific importance was holding onto Gholston, the consensus best player in the state, and one of the most coveted prizes in the nation. For his part, the 6-foot-7, 235-pound Julian Peterson clone committed to the Spartans on June 16 — a day after four-star corner Mylan Hicks — and never wavered.

“He had opportunities, for sure. But I think he looked at the impact he could have on this state in general, as a young man, not just as a football player, and I think he always returned to where he started. What I do with all recruits — why we don’t have a lot of decommits — I let them look into their hearts, and if you have something in your heart, it grows,” Dantonio said.

“When he did make the decision, it was without pressure and without coercion. When you sell yourself on something, he began to sell other people. Every time he’d be here, he’d be talking to other recruits about coming to Michigan State, and he’d be answering his own questions there.”

Grabbing Gholston and Hicks, along with the state’s best drop-back quarterback for the second year in a row — this time Saline’s Joe Boisture, on the heels of Midland’s Andrew Maxwell a year ago — combined with Bullough, the legacy linebacker, and Chelsea scoring machine Nick Hill, allowed the Spartans to win the offseason in-state battle for Michigan again in 2010.
Couple that with back-to-back wins over Michigan on the field for the first time more than 40 years, and everything should be coming up roses for the Spartans, right?

Well, there was that messy little fight the day after the season-ending banquet, one that’s seen charges or inquiries into 14 different MSU players, and forced several of them to leave the program.

Couple that with a 6-7 season that included an embarrassing loss to a Mid-American Conference team, and a continual inability to carry out Dantonio’s game-plan of running the ball and playing stout defense — it’s no surprise that the Spartans’ recruits were inordinately slanted toward certain areas. No one could have been unhappier with last year’s pass-happy offense and porous defense than Dantonio.

By recruiting four defensive backs (to replace five graduated DBs), three linebackers, two defensive ends and a defensive tackle, the Spartans brought in almost an entire starting defensive unit to fix the latter of those flaws.

Don’t be surprised if a lot of those defenders see the field early and often.

“There’s a learning curve, but looking at the film, watching them play, I can tell you they have an opportunity to play at this level,” Dantonio admitted. “Every class, we’ve had six or seven players play as true freshmen.”

The Spartans also addressed the running game, adding three powerful offensive linemen from Dantonio’s native land of Ohio, a 230-pound power running back (Le’Veon Bell), a true fullback (Novi Detroit Catholic Central’s Niko Palazeti) and a slew of other athletes who can — and will — run the ball.

“There are opportunities. We have young freshmen (Larry Caper and Oak Park’s Edwin Baker) there right now. I really don’t care who we hand the ball to, as long as they hold onto it, and move forward,” Dantonio admitted.

Recruiting season over, it remains to be seen if the Spartans will take the momentum from back to back solid recruiting classes, and back-to-back wins over rival Michigan, and continue to move forward.

Or if they fail to hold onto the ball.

There's no mistaking the weird little love-hate triangle between the football programs at Michigan State, Cincinnati and Central Michigan.

It started with Mark Dantonio leaving Cincy to coach at MSU. Spurned by MSU in its coaching search, Brian Kelly went from CMU to replace Dantonio at Cincinnati. When Kelly left Cincy for Notre Dame before the Bearcats' bowl game this year, the Cincinnati hierarchy again robbed CMU, grabbing Butch Jones as Kelly's replacement. CMU, in turn, took Dan Enos — who'd been a Dantonio assistant at Cincy, then MSU — as its new head coach.

And it hasn't stopped with just coaches.

First there was the whole tiff about Trevor Anderson's transfer from Cincy to MSU, to follow Dantonio, when Kelly showed his stubborn side, to get even with MSU.

Now defensive end Jibreel Black, a Cincinnati native, has started the triangle spinning again. He initially committed to his hometown Bearcats, then re-opened his recruitment when Kelly left to coach in South Bend. Black took a recruiting visit to MSU two weekends ago, appeared to recommit to UC, then took a visit to Ann Arbor this past weekend, giving a verbal to the Wolverines after the weekend. Since Black had initially given a verbal to Indiana, then switched to Cincinnati, and now U-M, it's fair to say it's probably not a done deal until he actually inks a National Letter of Intent on Feb. 3.

While the numbers for U-M's class went up with the addition of the three-star recruit, CMU's went down over the weekend, when one of its key commits — Montague QB Cody Kater — decided to renege on his earlier statements that he'd stick with CMU. Instead, he chose to follow Jones to Cincinnati, giving the Bearcats a verbal commitment on Sunday.

He'll hardly be the lone Michigander on the Bearcats' roster next year. After leaving CMU, Kelly kept the pipelines open to Southeast Michigan (much to the chagrin of Cincinnati-area prep coaches), nabbing players like Marine City QB Brendon Kay by continuing to work the contacts he'd made over the years as he built Grand Valley and then Central.

Last year's roster had a dozen players from Michigan on it, including a slew from suburban Detroit. Safety Aaron Webster (Birmingham Groves) was the lone returning starter on defense to start the historic season, while Southfield-Lathrup grad Chris Jurek was the starting center. A year earlier, John Goebel (Milford/Birmingham Brother Rice) led the Bearcats in rushing TDs. It's almost a given that Jones will continue to pillage Michigan to supplement to the fertile recruiting ground he now finds himself in.

Outside the drama, Michigan State also added to its strong recruiting class, nabbing three-star DT Anthony White from Fort Scott, Kan., while Western Michigan continued to add Florida players, with West Palm Beach safety Johnnie Simon.

The nine current and former Michigan State football players charged with assault in the much-publicized November dormitory fight were scheduled to appear in court in East Lansing on Thursday.

Only Ashton Leggett, who has since transferred to Illinois State, got his time before the judge, entering a guilty plea to two charges of assault and battery. Under a plea agreement with the Ingham County prosecutor, Leggett likely won't get jail time (he could have gotten up to 93 days in jail), and will be placed in a sentencing program that would allow him to emerge without a record.

“It was a very stupid act,” The Lansing State Journal reported Leggett having said to 54B District Judge David Jordon, during a pretrial hearing, “and, as a group, we weren’t thinking. We didn’t fully understand and know that we would jeopardize our future like this.”

Read the full LSJ story here.

In Wednesday's news conference — held to announce All-American LB Greg Jones staying in school — MSU head coach Mark Dantonio let slip that the players who remained with the program were no longer barred from team facilities. That group of five players — including starting CB Chris L. Rucker, wideouts Mark Dell, Fred Smith and B.J. Cunning ham and OT J'Michael Deane — were suspended through MSU's Alamo Bowl trip.

Two others, Roderick Jenrette and Glenn Winston, were dismissed from the team, while Leggett and Jamiihr Williams chose to transfer from the program.

As disappointing as the slap on the wrist for Leggett is the fact that Dantonio continued to deal with the incident as much ado about nothing. Several times in his news conference, he chastised reporters for questions, asking them to "Keep it positive. This is supposed to be positive."

A day after the Michigan State football coaching staff lost its ace recruiter in running backs coach Dan Enos, the Spartans called a news conference Wednesday to announce that Greg Jones will stay in school for his senior season.

Jones was the Big Ten's only first-team All-American, finishing third in the nation in tackles. The Big Ten's Defensive Player of the Year apparently dipped his toe into the NFL Draft discussion, soliciting feedback on his potential draft status, and when he found out he'd likely not be a first-round pick, decided to come back to MSU for one more season.

The announcement was part of head coach Mark Dantonio's postseason wrap-up news conference. For more on the Spartans, check Thursday's edition of The Oakland Press, and check back on here for more updates.

If you were one of the many Michigan State fans who saw the interminable coverage of the Mike Leach saga this week, culminating in the quirky Texas Tech coach getting canned just days before Saturday's Alamo Bowl match-up with the Spartans, and you thought "Hmmm, maybe that will help," don't worry. You weren't alone.

But you also aren't truly thinking it through. Yes, the glare of the spotlight has been squarely turned on the Red Raiders this week — and off the Spartans and their own off-the-field, suspension-filled fiasco. And yes, that can't be comfortable for Tech players and faithful, any more than it was for State fans a month ago.

Even throwing out the obvious assertion that teams in the midst of a coaching upheaval tend to rally around an interim coach — hello, Bobby Williams — there's still not a whole lot of logic to say that the Spartans now have a better chance to beat the pass-happy Red Raiders.

Leach's firing won't make the Spartans be able to tackle any better. It won't make MSU able to rush the passer any better. And, more than likely, it won't make MSU's defense able to create turnovers any better.

In short, Leach's firing really doesn't do anything to change all — or any — of the negatives that made MSU an underdog in this game in the first place.

Sophomore safety Trenton Robinson, who started all 12 games at safety for the Spartans, was asked Monday about the biggest challenge facing Texas Tech.

"Definitely the passing game. The defensive backs are going to have to step up this week because they throw the ball all the time," the sophomore said. "We haven't played a team that passes the ball this much. It will give us a chance to make plays on the ball. Every defensive back in the country loves to face a team that throws because you get a chance to make plays."

The Spartan DBs may relish the challenge, but they haven't answered the bell against spread offenses so far this year.

Through the regular season, MSU ranked dead last in the Big Ten in pass defense (251.6 yards per game), red zone efficiency defense and passing TDs allowed (29), and one spot removed from last in pass efficiency defense (139.2). The Spartans were last in the nation in interceptions (5), next-to-last in red zone defense, and 103rd out of 120 Division I teams in pass defense.

Kinda scary numbers when you're going against the nation's No. 2 pass offense, one that rips off 381 pass yards and 37 points per game, despite losing record-setting QB Graham Harrell and first-round pick Michael Crabtree at receiver. Junior Taylor Potts was fourth-best in the nation in yards per game, throwing for 3,068 yards in just 11 games. And lest you think it's just Potts, backup Steven Sheffield threw for 490 yards and seven TDs in a 66-14 demolition of Kansas State when Potts was injured.

And while the Spartans have faced some pretty good quarterbacks already this season, they haven't exactly had stellar games against them. Five players — Central Michigan's Dan LeFevour (328), Notre Dame's Jimmy Clausen (300), Minnesota's Adam Weber (416), Purdue's Joey Elliott (373) and Penn State's Darryl Clark (310) all topped the 300-yard plateau against the Spartan secondary this season.

MSU was 1-4 in those games.

Granted, MSU held opposing QBs below 200 yards four times, as well, but two of those were against overmatched opponents — Montana State and Western Michigan (you could throw Illinois in there, as well, if you wanted). In another of those games, the Spartans held Iowa's Ricky Stanzi to 138 yards and a single score — but that lone score came as time expired in the heart-rending, 15-13 loss in prime time.

"We have to be able to control the football, but more importantly, we have to be able to score," MSU coach Mark Dantonio said. "We have to be able to control the tempo of the game somewhat and limit their opportunities. Texas Tech has a very explosive offense, averaging 380 yards passing per game. It's a team that will take some chances, including going for it on fourth down at times. So it's going to be important for us to keep the time of possession in our favor, but that's easier said than done."

While the Spartans are 5-0 this season when winning the time-of-possession battle (and 15-3 under Dantonio) those wins came against Montana State, Michigan, Illinois, Northwestern and Western Michigan.

Not exactly a who's-who of passing prowess.

Glass-half-full thinking says this could potentially be a shootout, like the 42-34 loss to Minnesota, where Gophers QB Weber went off for a Big Ten season-best 416 yards and 5 TDs. Glass-half-empty says it may be more like the disappointing 42-14 loss to Penn State at the end of the regular season, where Clark got three of his four TD passes in a six-minute span of the third quarter, allowing the Nittany Lions to put the Spartans away early.