Mel Tucker to Michigan State is a case of a career coming full-circle. Mel Tucker’s coaching career began in 1997. Where? At Michigan State. Yes, you can look it up: Tucker was a graduate assistant.
Who was the head coach for the Spartans at the time? Someone you might have heard of: Nick Saban. Yep, Tucker can very legitimately call himself a member of the Saban coaching tree. Before he was Kirby Smart’s defensive coordinator at Georgia, he coached Alabama’s defensive backs in 2015, when the Crimson Tide won one of Saban’s many national championships. A full 15 years earlier, in the 2000 season, Tucker coached defensive backs for Saban at LSU.
Mel Tucker isn’t just returning to Michigan State. A Saban disciple is returning to a school where Saban was once head coach.
The fascinating plot nuance of Tucker coming to East Lansing is that Nick Saban never won big at Michigan State. Saban had to figure out a few things (or, if you prefer an alternative viewpoint, move to the SEC) before he won big and became one of the greatest college football head coaches of all time. Tucker has been on the sideline with Saban in moments of prosperity, yes, but also in the seasons when Saban did not rule college football with imposing totality.
We can only speculate now. As we have noted in other articles, Tucker comes to Michigan State as a mystery man. He could turn out to be great, but his portfolio as a head coach is incomplete. We don’t know he will be bad, but we don’t know he will be good, either. We have to wait and see. Michigan State did not hire a proven head coach here.
Yet, with all that having been acknowledged, there certainly is a powerful human drama to be found in the Mel Tucker story. Imagine how great a name he could make for himself if he leads the Spartans to a lofty place. He would be able to say he did something Nick Saban, his foremost teacher in college football alongside Jim Tressel (for whom Tucker coached at Ohio State in the early 2000s), never achieved.
Whether a coach succeeds or not is a constant source of drama in sport. When a coach has a story as intriguing as Mel Tucker’s, that drama is magnified to a considerable degree.