Vannini: For Michigan State, Jonathan Smith is the right hire at the right time

There’s no guarantee a coaching hire will work. In college football, most of them don’t. It’s the nature of the business. But you want the hiring process to identify the characteristics your school needs and find the leader who best fits them.

Michigan State got exactly what it needed in hiring Jonathan Smith from Oregon State .

Over the past few months, I talked with more than a dozen people associated with MSU football , from former players, coaches and staffers to people currently involved in the program. I came away with a clear understanding of what the Spartans needed in their next head coach.

A steady hand. That’s what Smith brings.

In recent years, MSU had gotten off track and lost its identity. Mel Tucker went from 11-2 to 5-7 on the field. Players got in a fight with Michigan players in Michigan Stadium’s tunnel and faced criminal charges over it. Then Tucker was fired for cause and ultimately found to have violated the school’s sexual harassment policy , and this year’s team crumbled. The program had become a mess.

“You better get somebody that isn’t going to embarrass the university,” Tom Dieters, an MSU alumnus and donor who runs the This is Sparta! Collective, told me a few weeks ago. “That’s a pretty low bar. That’s step No. 1.”

MSU had reverted to what it was the last time a John Smith was in charge. Under John L. Smith from 2003 to ’06, the Spartans became a joke. They’d crumble at the first sign of pressure, constantly blowing leads, often against Michigan. Smith smacked himself in the face at a press conference and once said during a halftime interview, “The kids are playing their tail off, and the coaches are screwing it up!”

That was the environment Mark Dantonio walked into in late 2006. Dantonio came in with a steady hand and clear expectations that never wavered. He went on to win three Big Ten championships and brought the program its most success since the 1960s.

“It was all business,” a former player from that period told me. “From the very first team meeting throughout that entire year, it was his expectation of what he envisioned the program to be. ... He always stuck to his core beliefs, even when things weren’t going the way you wanted. A lot of coaches want to shift. The best coaches I’ve been around, when things aren’t going well, they stick to their fundamental beliefs. He just stayed with it and got us believing.”

That’s the blueprint for what Jonathan Smith needs to and can accomplish.

Someone associated with MSU told me a few weeks ago that Tucker’s confidence level just didn’t match the level of the team. Coaches need to exude confidence, of course, and Dantonio’s greatest skill was giving confidence to his players. But Tucker’s confidence was too high. The cigar photos, the fashion statements, the personal branding, it was too much for a program that has historically only thrived when it is the underdog with a chip on its shoulder. Tucker had gotten away from creating a team that played with an edge.

Smith knows exactly what he wants to accomplish and how to go about doing it. He built one of the toughest teams in the Pac-12, despite being near the bottom of the conference in recruiting at one of its most difficult jobs, and the winning followed. The offense relies on strong line play and creative formations through a lot of shifts.

For those who haven’t met or paid close attention to Smith, he’s the most normal dude I’ve ever seen in a Power 5 head coaching position. When I visited him in Corvallis last year for a story on how he rebuilt Oregon State , it jumped out how down-to-earth he was. He didn’t wear team-issued apparel like almost every other coach or pitch me on how he was at the best job in the world. He wore a plain gray sweater, said he could win enough with players who were good people, and we talked about the books we’d been reading. He does not give out juicy quotes. I’d never had an experience like that with a head coach.

Again, that doesn’t guarantee success. And this isn’t meant to sound so cliché. Plenty of coaches win with rah-rah quotes and bells and whistles. But Michigan State needed a reset because it had gotten too far off track from what it is.

MSU is never going to be Michigan or Ohio State , and that’s OK. It never has had and never will have the resources of those schools. But it doesn’t need all that in order to beat them. MSU’s success under George Perles, Nick Saban and Dantonio has proven that out.

Tucker modernized MSU in many ways, but he tried to build MSU in an Alabama/Georgia mold at a school that might just not be that. The program has money — Smith’s salary pool is $10.75 million — but it’s also behind in certain amenities like facilities and nutrition, former staffers told me. Tucker took big swings at a lot of five-star players and missed.

Speaking to local media yesterday, athletic director Alan Haller recounted telling Smith MSU has 53 support staffers and that Smith responded he didn’t need that many. That’s a good sign. That’s a coach who knows exactly what he needs for success. Smith is rarely going to wow you. He doesn’t need to. It’s not who he is. His motto is simple and fits him: “Low ego, high output.”

You can win big at Michigan State. This program has reached four BCS/New Year’s Six/College Football Playoff games since 2013. But you can also spin off track if you get away from your identity, as Dantonio and Tucker both did late in their tenures.

There’s a historical model for what wins at Michigan State: a tough team that overachieves and plays with an edge. Smith walked on at an Oregon State program that hadn’t had a winning season in more than 25 years. He left with school records and a Fiesta Bowl championship ring.

Yeah, that sounds like a Michigan State identity.

There is a tall task ahead of Smith. He doesn’t have Midwest connections, and he takes over a team that just saw three quarterbacks enter the transfer portal. This era of college football is different than when Dantonio led the Spartans. MSU’s NIL situation needs to get on the same page. Smith also won’t have defensive coordinator Trent Bray, who is replacing him as Oregon State’s head coach. This is going to be a true rebuild that could take some time. But the fundamentals of what creates success at Michigan State remain the same.

With next year’s Big Ten expansion, MSU can’t afford to get this wrong and fall behind. It hired a coach who has beaten Oregon and UCLA in the last two years and pushed USC and Washington to their limit.

“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 told reporters. “I know that. We had to get this right.”

There’s no guarantee Smith will win at Michigan State, but he fits what the school needs right now. Haller made the right hire. Now it’s up to Smith to prove him right.

(Photo: Dale Young / USA Today)