Michigan State football's new coordinators determined to create what Mel Tucker couldn't
EAST LANSING — Jay Johnson and Scottie Hazelton always seemed like an odd pairing.
Mel Tucker’s handpicked coordinators looked and sounded completely different. Johnson was clean-shaven with a professorial demeanor. He was exacting and precise with his words. Hazelton, in contrast, had a scraggly ZZ Top beard. He often rambled breathlessly with incomplete thoughts and run-on sentences.
Beyond the press conference room, the incompatibility of the two coordinators revealed itself in other settings, particularly on the field. Johnson couldn’t keep his offense on it and Hazelton couldn’t get his defense off it. It was a recipe for disaster that spelled doom for Michigan State football long before scandal blew apart Tucker’s regime last September.
The irony of it all was that Tucker stressed the importance of playing complementary football, of preserving the alignment between the unit that puts points on the board and the one that tries to stop them from ever being scored.
But he could never create that symbiosis. In each of Tucker’s four years, the Spartans finished among the bottom 30 teams of the Football Bowl Subdivision in time of possession. During that same period, the average number of plays they defended was consistently inflated, which is why MSU ranked in the lower half of the FBS in that category throughout Tucker’s term. The game management failures that persisted under Tucker spawned a vicious cycle that caused the defense to hemorrhage and the offense to sputter.
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Johnson’s unit couldn’t sustain drives, which further exposed the vulnerabilities of Hazelton’s ragtag bunch. When they couldn’t get stops, deficits would grow, which then compromised Johnson’s run-first strategy and caused MSU’s attack to spend even less time on the field as the Spartans tried to pass their way out of trouble. On and on it went until the entire team crumbled.
Now, months later, new coach Jonathan Smith will begin the process of putting the pieces back together. He has two trusted allies, coordinators Brian Lindgren on offense and Joe Rossi on defense, who are determined to develop a smooth operation that avoids the same problems that proved ruinous for their immediate predecessors.
“Playing complementary football is the number one thing,” Rossi said. “It isn't about stats, it isn't about anything other than the W, getting the W and winning football games.”
Smith understands that, Rossi said. More than that he believes it. It’s one of the main reasons why Rossi left the play-caller role he held for the past six years at Minnesota and cast his lot with Smith in December. The risk of leaving the comfort, familiarity and stability he enjoyed in the Twin Cities for a program in transition and a coach he only knew from afar was mitigated when he learned Smith held many of the same philosophical views on football as his previous boss, P.J. Fleck, did.
“I think the one thing that I feel is similar between the two of them is they value winning football games and they value playing complementary football,” Rossi said. “What you'll see in that standpoint is when a head coach values that, the decisions they are making are with the end in mind of winning the game, offense, defense and special teams. Understanding situations, understanding clocks, understanding is it a one-score lead, two-score lead, three-score lead and all the game play that goes into that. Just having conversations with Coach Smith, I know that's really important to him.”
It fits with Smith’s vision for the program he described at his introductory news conference in November.
“Low ego, high output. Selfless,” he said then. “I think football is the ultimate team game.”
During his best season at Oregon State, a 10-win campaign in 2022, Smith was able to cultivate synchronicity between the offense and defense. The Beavers finished in the top 25 nationally in both time of possession and plays defended, creating a winning formula that materialized organically. Lindgren, who has called plays for Smith the past six years, said ball control has never been the main objective when he maps out his plan. Instead, it is just one of the positive byproducts of a pro-style system that leans on its ground attack.
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“We want to run the football,” Lindgren said.
That is probably music to the ears of Rossi. In 2021 and 2022, when the Gophers finished among the top 10 teams in points allowed, Minnesota ranked among the country’s leaders in average rush attempts per game and time of possession. Rossi’s success, in many ways, was directly tied to performance of an offense that drained the clock and limited the exposure of a defense that had to compete for approximately 61 plays per game — one of the lowest volumes in the FBS. Over that period the Gophers went 18-8, equaling the best two-year stretch of Fleck’s tenure.
Among the victories they achieved during that run was a 34-7 massacre of Tucker’s Spartans in 2022. On that dismal afternoon along Shaw Lane, the Gophers held the ball for more than 42 minutes and Michigan State’s offense ran just 45 plays.
Afterwards Tucker wore a downcast expression, bemoaning his fate.
“We're not good enough on either other side of the ball to not play complementary football,” he lamented.
Nearly two years later, it’s become Smith’s charge to fix what Tucker couldn’t. Lindgren and Rossi, working in conjunction, should help him in that effort to create harmony between the offense and defense. From the look and sound of it, they seem rather aligned. As they entered Breslin Center for their first meeting with local reporters, they were in lockstep, wearing the same black three-quarter zip with a white Spartan logo.
It was an encouraging sign.
Contact Rainer Sabin at rsabin@freepress.com. Follow him @RainerSabin.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan State football's new coordinators seek complementary football
