Mostly expletives. That was the initial reaction.
Let me set a scene for you. I have allergies. They always flare up at night. That means, depending on the severity of symptoms, every night I take either a Benadryl or Xyzal tablet to help ease my face so I can sleep. Tuesday night was a Benadryl night. The pill goes down and the countdown clock to my brain seizing to a crawl begins.
I also love to decompress with Scott Van Pelt’s Sportscenter. It’s a perfect pre-bed sports show. Last night Matt Sheehan and I recorded a rollicking podcast reacting to Michigan State’s win over Illinois. I edited that sucker, got it scheduled to publish and shut my laptop for the night just as the Benadryl was hitting the spot. Perfect. Time to lie down on the couch and let SVP take me home.
Then a text.
“I’ve got the tucker news.”
It’s always alarming to receive work texts after 1:00 AM (I record SVP and had just flipped it on). This one was from the SpartansWire editor Andrew Brewster. He’s out on the west coast, so thankfully he was still awake. And for the life of me, my Bendryl-infused brain could not come up with a single person named “Tucker” that I should be aware of.
“Who the hell is Tucker?” I thought for a full minute. I finally realized I should probably check Twitter to see what was going on. I open up the app on my phone and the first thing I see is a tweet from The Athletic’s Colton Pouncy.
“HELLO.”
It clicked. Oh, [bleep]. Michigan State just hired Mel Tucker. From there it was a race to gather as much information as was available, reconvene with Sheehan to record *another* podcast, all while my brain slowed to the point of idling. If you listen to that podcast, and you should and subscribe to Locked On Spartans while you’re at it, you’ll slowly hear me deteriorate through the episode. By the end I couldn’t even make words. What a wild night.
Instead of bombing a coke and some green tea to get my brain back on, I thought better of it; retreating to bed upon completion of the podcast. No matter how much caffeine I took in, anything I wrote last night would have been a disaster. That’s where this piece comes in.
Michigan State hiring Mel Tucker is significant for a number of reasons. Not only are they getting a coach that checks off a ton of the boxes, the program has announced that financially they’re ready to take the jump into the next tier.
Let’s start with Tucker.
Some fans might look at Mel Tucker’s single season as Colorado head coach and be unimpressed with the 5-7 record. I get the reaction, but it’s very important to build the context around that. Colorado has had a rough go of it in football lately. They’ve been an after thought in the PAC-12 since they joined the conference. It’s not a big money program and the tradition of winning their is getting further in the rearview with each passing year. That said, Tucker was certainly building something there. Just go find a tweet from anyone that covers Colorado football and look at the fan reaction to this news. They are furious and devastated.
Part of that is what Tucker had already brought to the table from his past. He’s a defensive mind whose earliest days in coaching were in rooms with Nick Saban and Mark Dantonio. He was a GA on Saban’s Michigan State staff, with Mark Dantonio as defensive backs coach. When Saban left for LSU, he brought Tucker with him to coach the DBs. Tucker then left LSU for Ohio State to be the defensive backs coach for Dantonio’s OSU defense. There he won a national title with the team in 2002. After a long NFL stint–which we will get back to–Tucker re-entered the college game as an associate head coach and defensive backs coach with Saban at Alabama where the Tide won a national championship. Alabama DC Kirby Smart took the head man job at Georgia and brought Tucker with him as defensive coordinator. There Tucker helped lead the team to the national championship game in 2017. From there he went to Colorado for a year and that brings you up to date.
Suffice to say, the man has been an integral part of some of the most successful college programs of the last two decades.
Tucker is also regarded as an ace recruiter. His 2020 Colorado class is ranked No. 35 in the country and No. 7 in the PAC-12. That’s the highest Colorado has been in the rankings since they joined the conference. He was also rated as one of the best recruiters in the country during his time at Georgia.
For all of the great things Mark Dantonio did at Michigan State, recruiting top-flight talent wasn’t one of them and it’s partially what made sustaining success difficult. It’ll be very interesting to see what Tucker, a guy who has had recruiting success all over the country, can do as head man at Michigan State.
That leads perfectly into the next bit of information we need to get into. The money. According to multiple reports Tucker is set to get a substantial raise, more than doubling the $2.7 million he was slated to make at Colorado. That’s definitely a positive sign, knowing the school is willing and able to back up the Brinks truck. But more important, and I think mist exciting about this whole thing, is what MSU is prepared to do around Tucker. According to reports, Michigan State is giving Tucker a $6.4 million salary pool to hire assistants. That is big time. Last year Ohio State led the Big Ten with a $7.3 million salary pool. After that was Michigan at $6 million.
Last year MSU’s assistants had the third-highest reported salary pool (reported because Penn State doesn’t have to report their salaries). However, that was a $4.9 million pool that was out of whack due to MSU’s coaching shuffle. Jim Bollman and Dave Warner did not lose pay despite getting demoted, so Michigan State essentially had three offensive coordinator salaries on their books. Mike Tressel was their highest-paid assistant and he ranked 16th in the Big Ten. Due to longevity, eight of MSU’s assistants made between $400,000 and $600,000, which isn’t how a typical salary pool would be structured.
Having the second-highest salary pool for assistants in the conference is big time. It’s what will allow Tucker to make aggressive runs at coaches like Kentucky’s Vince Marrow, who has been dubbed “The Big Ten Killer” for his ability to poach top prospects away from Michigan and Ohio State. In college football, having a robust and well-paid staff is key to sustaining success and Michigan State has announced they are ready to spend with the big boys.
In addition to that, Tucker secured guarantees to grow the strength and conditioning program at MSU. Anybody who follows the program knows injuries have been a major factor for Spartan football and that needs improving. A financial push to improve the strength program is hugely important. There is also word that Tucker pushed for guarantees in facility improvements, the current ammunition of choice in recruiting warfare. If this all pans out, it will take Michigan State from a competitive program that spends at a decent rate, to a big time player with coaching and facilities that rival anyone in the country.
As for Tucker himself, he seems like a coach players absolutely love. This video recent signee Darius Snow posted on Twitter does a pretty good job of showing that.
He’s a high-energy guy, but is also tough and demanding. Those last two things aren’t a surprise given the college football coaches he learned under.
However, it isn’t all sunshine and daisies with Tucker’s football career. Just ask any MSU fan that hails from Chicago and roots for the Bears. Tucker had a less-than-stellar run in the NFL. He was a defensive coordinator for three different teams over a seven-year span, with mixed-to-poor results. Most recently he was defensive coordinator for the Chicago Bears in 2013 and 2014. Those Bears teams finished 25th and 28th in defensive DVOA. Before that he was in the same position at Jacksonville and had smilier results. Although he did help the 2011 defense improve from dead last in DVOA during the 2010 season to fifth for 2011. He also served as defensive coordinator for the Cleveland Browns in 2008.
Here’s my take on all of that. In the NFL, the talent you have really matters. It’s a different world than college because of the salary cap. Tucker certainly did not succeed in the NFL. There’s no arguing that. But, he also was a part of two bad organizations in Cleveland and Jacksonville. The Jaguars teams he coordinated were flatly terrible. There’s only so much coordinating one can do. The Chicago stint is tough, given the Bears history as a defensive juggernaut in the NFL. And while his Bears defenses were bad, they weren’t historically awful. They just didn’t live up to the really high standards Chicago has.
There’s no doubt about it, the NFL provided a host of negative years on his resume. But again, the NFL is a totally different animal. While it’s not quite apples to oranges, it is very different. The player are professionals. Everybody has a crapload of money. The general manager dictates the roster. The margins between good and bad are incredibly slim. I’m not going to totally ignore Tucker’s NFL career, but he has enough successes in college to make me believe that his NFL years are more of an exception than a rule.
We’ll have to wait and see how the Mel Tucker era plays out at Michigan State, but the school has made a statement with the hire. They are ready to do what it takes financially to compete with the biggest programs in the conference and the country. That is an exciting development. The coming weeks will be huge as Tucker begins to allocate that money while trying to take Michigan State from a competitive program that can on occasion punch above their weight, to one that is consistently battling for conference titles.
Back up the Brinks truck.
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