Mark Dantonio is helping Michigan State football in time of crisis. Bob Stoops knows this burden

Bob Stoops decided to give an old coaching buddy a call Monday morning.

“Where you at?” Stoops, the former Oklahoma bigwig, blurted as soon as Mark Dantonio answered.

“I’m driving to work,” he replied.

Then he started chuckling.

“It’s hard to make this stuff up,” Dantonio continued. “But I’m on my way in.”

Dantonio, 67, had just been pulled out of retirement to help Michigan State football in a time of crisis after the university suspended head coach Mel Tucker last weekend following the publication of a USA TODAY investigation that detailed a sexual harassment claim against the 51-year-old head coach. He not only returned to stabilize the program he once transformed into a Big Ten power but also to assist his good friend and former aide, Harlon Barnett, the Spartans’ new acting head coach.

“Coach D,” Barnett said, before pausing. “That’s my guy. … We were together 14 years.”

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It was a fruitful partnership. Dantonio won nearly two-thirds of the time at Cincinnati and Michigan State with Barnett, his trusted assistant, supervising a secondary that was often the strength of his teams. In lockstep, they helped usher MSU into a golden age, when the Spartans reached heights untouched in decades. But now the reunion of Dantonio and Barnett comes at a perilous moment, when the future of MSU football hangs in the balance and the Spartans enter the maw of a schedule considered among the toughest in the nation.

First, a rematch with No. 8 Washington awaits on Saturday. Down the line, they'll encounter Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State — all Big Ten teams currently ranked in the top 10 of both polls.

Even before Tucker was suspended and his program thrown into turmoil, MSU’s outlook entering this season was dim. The Spartans’ projected win total of 5 by BetMGM was the fourth-lowest in the Big Ten. The sudden departures of starting quarterback Payton Thorne and star receiver Keon Coleman in the spring left major questions on offense. The defense, meanwhile, remained a bit of a mystery as well.

Although there were some encouraging developments in MSU’s first two victories, neither Central Michigan nor Richmond of the Football Championship Subdivision was good enough to threaten the Spartans over four quarters. The quality of competition tempered the buzz around the promising performance of Noah Kim, Thorne's replacement. It also muted the surprise that MSU, of all teams, has conceded the fifth-fewest yards at college football's top level. Nothing was all that conclusive, after all.

That left Barnett and Dantonio to clarify a picture muddied further when the Tucker news dropped.

“I wanted to be the head coach at Michigan State, but not in this way,” Barnett said.

Barnett will audition for the job he always coveted with a pile of challenges in front of him. It’s no surprise then, that he will lean on Dantonio for guidance. In a reverential tone, Barnett called his former boss a “calm presence." Once known for his scowl and gruff demeanor, Dantonio will try to lift the mood and provide tranquility under his new title of “associate head coach.” He will also be involved in "all aspects of the operation," according to Barnett.

“Mark’s a great sounding board,” Stoops told the Free Press. “Not that Harlon can’t handle it all, but he and Harlon have worked together so long, that’ll be easy for the two of them.”

Almost everything else will be difficult, however. Both Barnett and Dantonio will try to hold together the roster during an era of great volatility, when player movement has been greenlit with the advent of the NCAA's one-time free transfer policy and the expanded redshirt rule that allows a year of eligibility to be preserved if participation is limited to four or fewer games. So far, Barnett said, no one has approached him with a request to shut it down mid-season and begin the process of leaving the program before the portal opens Dec. 4. But the threat of that possibility, of course, remains.

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Stoops knows it all too well. Following Lincoln Riley’s sudden, unexpected move to Southern Cal in November 2021, he came out of retirement to coach Oklahoma for one month. Stoops saw it as a call of duty after spending 19 years as the face of the Sooners. His goal was to restore confidence among the players at a time of great shock and keep the guts of the roster intact.

“The strength of the program isn’t one person,” he remembers telling the team. “You’re the program. I’ve never seen a coach make a play. The program is bigger than any of us.”

Thirty-one days after he took over, Stoops led Oklahoma to a win in the Alamo Bowl. He also helped prevent a mass exodus, limiting the transfers to eight during the changeover between regimes. His efforts helped ease the transition for the new coach and Stoops’ former defensive coordinator, Brent Venables. Whether Dantonio and Barnett can create the same soothing effect for MSU as it enters a new age of the Big Ten is unclear. The conference expands to 18 teams and eliminates divisions in 2024, leaving the Spartans uncertain of their position in a future landscape at a time when they're already standing on shaky ground. The circumstances are daunting, which Barnett acknowledges. But he’s not fearful of what lies ahead.

“We will push through this,” he said. “We’re tough. We’re Spartans.”

It’s why Dantonio is back on the job, trying to help his friend make the best of this challenging opportunity and navigate his beloved program through troubled waters.

Perhaps more than anyone else, Stoops understands Dantonio’s motivation.

Even before he dialed his buddy’s number Monday, he had an inkling that “Dino,” as he calls him, was already heading to work.

So, when Stoops received confirmation from the man himself, he laughed.

“I thought so,” he told him.

Then Stoops gave his own take on the situation.

“Smart, smart move by Michigan State,” he said.

Contact Rainer Sabin at rsabin@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @RainerSabin.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan State football's blast from the past gets OK from Bob Stoops