MSU's Pro Day offers reminder of Mel Tucker's failed mission and Jonathan Smith's big task
EAST LANSING — There were no headliners. There was barely any buzz. At times, it felt near-empty Wednesday inside the Duffy Daugherty Building. This was the hollowed-out scene at Michigan State football’s Pro Day, where the remnants of former coach Mel Tucker’s fallen regime were on display, where the worn faces from his doomed program offered reminders it had failed in one of its principal missions: Developing future NFL draft picks.
The 10 Spartans participating in this try-out event aimed to convince the scouts in attendance they were worthy of hearing their names called next month in Detroit. But all the available evidence suggests it won't be an easy sell. Eight NFL teams didn't even bother to send a representative Wednesday to East Lansing. And only one of the former MSU players on site, center Nick Samac, was among the 321 prospects invited to the league’s combine in late February.
MSU’s small presence in Indianapolis at the NFL’s pre-draft showcase took running back Harold Joiner III by surprise.
“An eye-opening experience, really,” he said.
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But it shouldn’t have been. Even though Tucker promoted his program as an incubator of NFL talent, it never became one. Only seven Spartans were drafted in the past three years and five of them were recruited to campus by Tucker’s predecessor, Mark Dantonio. Perhaps more damning was the fact that Tucker struggled to develop players on defense, which was his specialty. Cornerback Ameer Speed became the first and only one from that side of the ball to be picked during his tenure. But the Georgia import spent only one season in East Lansing and didn’t surface on the NFL’s radar until he returned to his former school and performed well at the Bulldogs’ Pro Day late last winter.
He proved to be an exceptional case. Jacoby Windmon and Aaron Brule, a pair of pass rushers who played key roles in MSU’s front seven, may not be as fortunate as he was. The stars, after all, never quite aligned for them at MSU. The two transfers arrived there in the afterglow of the Spartans' brief ascension in 2021, when they went 11-2 and Tucker received a massive contract extension. The future looked bright then. But soon after they enrolled, MSU began a precipitous decline. The departure of one-year wonder Kenneth Walker III exposed the Spartans’ systematic flaws. The losses came swiftly. Then there was the October 2022 tunnel fracas at Michigan Stadium that led to the sudden suspensions of eight members of the team, including Windmon.
The mood around East Lansing darkened and it lingered into this past fall, when Tucker was fired for cause after a sexual harassment claim was levied against him. That sent MSU deeper into the abyss. The Spartans won only two Big Ten games and suffered lopsided defeats to rival Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State as they careened toward a 4-8 record.
“Everything doesn’t always go your way, which was a position I was put in,” said Windmon, who missed the last nine games of 2023 because of a pectoral injury.
He doesn’t assign blame to Tucker for his dismal fate, chalking it up to bad luck.
But a convincing case can be made that he, Brule and some of their former teammates absorbed the stink that surrounded MSU during its unraveling.
Deep down, some of them wonder if it may have compromised their draft stock and negatively affected how they were individually perceived by NFL evaluators.
“As you win,” Brule noted, “you get more recognition.”
For evidence of that, Brule just had to look 65 miles down the road. There he would find Michigan, the reigning national champion that set a record when it sent 18 players to the NFL scouting combine. Toward the end of his nine-year tenure in Ann Arbor, Jim Harbaugh cultivated undervalued recruits and turned them into pro-ready players. Tucker’s successor at MSU, Jonathan Smith, will have to do the same if he wants to restore the Spartans as contenders in an expanded, more competitive Big Ten. His track record suggests that he can.
Over Smith’s last four years in Corvallis, eight Beavers have been drafted. They include Green Bay Packers tight end Luke Musgrave and Dallas Cowboys cornerback Nahshon Wright, a pair of Day 2 picks. Musgrave was a three-star high school recruit in the 2019 class. Wright had a similar rating when he was plucked out of Laney Junior College that same year.
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Referring to Smith, former Oregon State defensive back Ryan Cooper Jr. told the Free Press, “He gets the most out of guys. He puts the program in the players’ hands and allows them to do what they do best.”
Cooper, another JUCO transplant, was one of four Beavers invited to the combine this year. All of them, including projected first-rounder Taliese Fuaga, shared one thing in common: They were lower-rated recruits in high school who made an impact at the college level.
“Guys going to the NFL means they’re playing really well,” said Joe Rossi, MSU’s new defensive coordinator. “Playing really well means we’re going to be winning football games. The goal isn’t just to say, hey, I’m producing an NFL guy. The goal is to produce guys that play really, really well. And if you play really, really well, then you’ll probably be a guy the NFL is attracted to. And then that’s naturally going to bring in recruits who see you’ve developed people.”
That’s the life cycle of a healthy program.
That’s what Smith aspires to ignite.
But he has his work cut out for him. The humdrum scene Wednesday, which he witnessed first-hand from the 50-yard line, offered yet another reminder of the tall task he has in front of him.
Contact Rainer Sabin at rsabin@freepress.com. Follow him @RainerSabin.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: MSU football's Jonathan Smith must succeed where Mel Tucker failed
