How Michigan State’s AD landed Jonathan Smith amid a high-stakes search

EAST LANSING – At home Michigan State football games, Alan Haller has settled into a routine.

The Michigan State athletic director watches the first quarter from on the field, then walks through the Spartan Stadium bleachers up to the press box for the rest of the game.

On his walk up, he’s come to recognize the same faces in the stands week after week. And as the Spartans floundered this fall toward a second straight below .500 season, those faces became more and more joyless.

As Haller set out to choose the coach that he hoped would turn Michigan State football around, he kept those faces in mind.

“The look on their faces sometimes, I kept in this search,” Haller said. “I wanted to change that.”

Haller’s coaching search came to a close over the weekend when he tabbed Oregon State coach Jonathan Smith as the Spartans’ next hire.

That hire culminated a long, lonely process for the Spartans’ third-year athletic director. And he knows that the decision at the end of that process will be of the utmost importance for Michigan State and for himself.

“At the end of the day, this is probably the last football coach I’ll hire as the AD here at Michigan State, and I understand that,” Haller said. “This will be the last coach that I hire at Michigan State, and I know that. We had to get this right.”

The search started when Michigan State abruptly fired Mel Tucker in September amid a sexual harassment scandal. That meant Michigan State was among the first major jobs to be open in the coaching cycle.

That timing set up a search that was in many ways the opposite of the last one that Michigan State conducted. Mark Dantonio’s February 2020 retirement set off an expedited eight-day search that landed on Tucker. Haller admits he had little time to research candidates in that search (Haller was then an associate athletic director but played a key role in a search).

This time, Haller did plenty of research over the more than two months the search lasted. He spent September watching games, reading articles and pulling up press conferences on YouTube. He wanted to know everything there was to know about his candidates.

This search was also different in its visibility. There was little hidden about who the Spartans were targeting in 2020: Michigan State’s finalists quickly became known as fans tracked a plane carrying a Michigan State delegation went from Colorado to California to Cincinnat.

This time, Haller conducted a far more clandestine operation. For weeks, not another soul knew who was on his candidate list. Haller did all of his own initial research and held preliminary interviews himself. He said Michigan State’s Board of Trustees and administration supported him and didn’t meddle.

“I was the only one that knew what was going on for a long time,” Haller said.

That long time was often stressful. Haller heard fans shouting names to him at games but made a point not to publicly comment on any. He worried about what other jobs would come up and compete for his preferred candidates. He resisted the urge to reach out early and let a process drag out too long.

“If this was easy, then I would have finished it a long time ago,” Haller said. “It was difficult because I had to get it right. I couldn’t make an emotional hire.

Eventually, though, it was time to start winnowing the list. Dantonio was essential, Haller said, as he reached out to caching contacts to vet potential candidates on the list. Tom Izzo chipped in with his advice, too.

Smith wasn’t originally a top candidate on that list, Haller admits. But as other candidates fell down the list – some due to on-field performance, some as a result of research – Smith continued to rise.

For one, Smith’s Oregon State team was on its way to a third straight bowl game with an innovative offense and physical players on both sides of the ball. But Haller was more swayed by a two-hour zoom interview in which Smith came off as down-to-earth and community-oriented. Throughout interviews with former colleagues and players of Smiths, Haller said he didn’t hear a negative word about the 44-year-old Beavers coach.

After that initial interview, Haller said he focused his conversations solely on getting to know Smith. The more he heard, the more he liked. When Haller mentioned that Michigan State had 53 football support staffers, Smith responded that he didn’t need that many. Amid the arms race that is college football, that attitude was a breath of fresh air.

“At this level of college football it’s always ‘Ohio State is doing this’ or ‘Somebody else is doing that.’ He never said any of that,” Haller said. “It was just about getting the right people in the building, getting the right student-athletes and developing relationships.”

Eventually, Haller got down to three finalists and scheduled interviews with all three. Smith was first. Haller held the second, then canceled the third.

He had found his coach, and brought a long, stressful fall to a close.

“I haven’t slept a lot since October,” Haller said. “I’ve thought about this every minute of every day. This is a very important hire.”