Spring is an important time for college football depth charts. Practices in March and April set the stage for fall camp battles that may or may not happen as athletes jockey for starting positions. At programs with brand new coaching staffs–like Michigan State–that time is doubly important. Establishing the depth chart of a Mel Tucker’s new regime without the luxury of reports from spring practice or a spring game seems like a fool’s errand.
But I am a fool and these days I’m searching hard for any errand I can find.
The fall practices, training camps, or whatever we end up getting as a resolution from college football returning during the COVID-19 pandemic will go a long way into shaping who is actually taking snaps once snaps are there to be taken. Mel Tucker has said himself that everybody has a clean slate with him. At some point that slate will have to start to dirty up a bit, as the time for evaluation shrinks by the day and the need for game preparation grows. We’ll see how it shakes out.
With that said, with the help of what we know from previous seasons and reading into press availabilities from assistant coaches, we can start to piece together what the Michigan State football depth chart probably looks like right now.
Today we will start with the offensive side of the ball and get to the defense and special teams later in the week.
Quarterback
- Rocky Lombardi or Theo Day or Payton Thorne
This is a totally wide open competition. Yes, Lombardi has the most experience of the bunch and it’s not close. But in the fall it will be almost two years since Lombardi has taken a meaningful snap as a starting college quarterback. And it’s not as if his run in 2018 was something that cemented his future as the starting quarterback. Sure, there were some good moments. But there were plenty of bad ones too. Plus, all three are learning a brand new offense. Lombardi’s advantage of being in the old scheme for three-plus years is out the window. Theo Day has almost no real game experience and his one shot against Penn State in 2019 was cut short when he called the wrong play just a few snaps in. Payton Thorne has yet to take the field at MSU. Had Mark Dantonio never left I would have picked Lombardi as the favorite to start, followed by Day and Thorne. With Tucker, I really don’t know. I’d probably just barely give the teeniest of edges to Lomardi with Day and Thorne in a dead heat for backup. Notice how many qualifiers I put in that sentence.