Michigan State football's final loss shows how broken the program is

It was an awkward exchange that captured the inelegant state of Michigan State football during an ultimately uncomfortable season. After Harlon Barnett's Spartans lost 42-0 Friday at Ford Field in a defeat that served as a merciless killshot to a calamitous season, the interim head coach faced a veteran reporter who asked what he would tell the person who will soon be tasked with repairing this broken program.

“Well,” he replied, “I’ll be looking in the mirror.”

Barnett delivered that one-liner with conviction. But it fell on deaf ears among an audience of reporters convinced his days were numbered in the temporary post he occupied. Their reaction wasn’t so much an indictment of Barnett’s 10-game audition, underwhelming as it was. Instead, it was an acknowledgement of the reality confronting MSU eight weeks after it fired Mel Tucker for cause.

In no uncertain terms: The Spartans are in rough shape, and it’s unclear when they will contend again in a Big Ten welcoming four new teams in 2024.

“I think it can be fairly quick,” Barnett said.

The good times, Barnett continued, aren’t “as far away as others may think.”

Perhaps Barnett, a self-proclaimed optimist, is right.

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After all, it was only 16 months ago when the Spartans openly talked about winning the Big Ten and competing for a national title. Both Tucker and athletic director Alan Haller had grand ambitions back then. MSU had completed a dizzying ascent in Tucker's second season, climbing into the top 10 of both polls. But the 2021 rise proved illusory, as Wake Forest import Kenneth Walker III supplied jet fuel to a sputtering ground attack and provided cover for a shambolic defense that couldn’t stop a competent quarterback.

As soon as Walker departed East Lansing, the cracks in Tucker’s program started to show, even before his off-field actions delivered another blow to the program.

By the time the final whistle sounded Friday night and their 4-8 record was etched in stone, the Spartans had been completely shattered — all that was left was a pile of rubble.

“Obviously, no one expected what we went through to happen,” running back Nathan Carter said.

Not even the most diabolical mind could have conceived MSU’s 2023 season.

The public revelation of a sexual harassment claim against Tucker on Sept. 10 triggered his eventual ouster and sent MSU toward the gutter. Over the next 2½ months, the Spartans endured mind-boggling collapses and extraordinary defeats — a blowout at home by Washington featuring a program-record 713 yards allowed, frittered-away leads on the road vs. Iowa and Rutgers and a 49-point loss to Michigan that marked the worst loss in 100 years at Spartan Stadium — prolonging a losing streak that hit six games. After a brief respite — an improbable road victory over Indiana last week — the hits continued in MSU's finale on national TV Friday, as Penn State held Michigan State to 53 yards, its lowest total ever.

Over four torturous quarters, the Nittany Lions toyed with the hapless Spartans at Ford Field. Penn State's offense, less than two weeks removed from the dismissal of coordinator Mike Yurcich, looked like it was NFL-ready. Once the Nittany Lions got going, they faced little resistance, rolling up 586 yards and controlling the ball for nearly 36 minutes.

As head coach James Franklin’s squad administered an old-fashioned butt-whipping, the recurring problems of Tucker’s tenure revealed themselves again: A pass defense that finished in the bottom three of the Big Ten in three of Tucker’s four seasons was singed by quarterback Drew Allar, who threw for 292 yards — a career high against a conference opponent. A running game that has often looked lost without Walker in the backfield was bottled up by Penn State’s ferocious front, losing 35 yards on 27 attempts.

“I was hoping to compete and finish better than we did, but it is what it is,” Barnett said.

There was no sense in belaboring the obvious.

This kind of wretched performance has come to be expected from a program in its consecutive losing seasons, while qualifying for only one bowl since Mark Dantonio's final game, the Pinstripe Bowl in December 2019.

That’s the uncomfortable truth of Michigan State football in 2023: The full-time inheritor of this team, regardless of who's in the mirror, has his work cut out for him.

Barnett knows that more than anyone. The Spartan lifer has felt the pain of the past 10 weeks, describing the entire experience as “the season of adversity.” It has tested his strength and even his faith. But he would still like nothing more than to lift his beloved alma mater out of the depths of despair.

“I need the opportunity to do it my way from the start,” he said while making his pitch for the job to a skeptical audience.

But unfortunately for Barnett, he was tied too closely to Tucker, the deadweight coach responsible for dragging MSU so far down that his eventual successor has nowhere else to go but up.

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

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Next Michigan State football coach will need to repair broken program