Michigan State football 2019 outlook: Turn back the clock to 2013 season

EAST LANSING — Blake Treadwell knew exactly the frustrations Michigan State football players felt.

Because he felt it, too -- six years earlier, when he was in their cleats.

Treadwell, a graduate assistant on offense a year ago, watched the 2018 season unravel much as it  did in 2012, when he was a junior offensive lineman.

The quarterback play was shaky. The offensive line was banged up. Receivers did not produce.

But the defense played at a national championship level.

So Treadwell imparted some wisdom to the returning seniors before leaving in March for his first full-time coaching job at Bucknell.

“I was straight up with them,” Treadwell said Thursday. “ ‘How do you want your senior year to finish? Do you want to finish being 6-6, 7-6? Or do you want to make it a memorable senior season and do it right?’ ”

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That’s what he and the Spartans did in 2013, working to make the offensive deficiencies of a year earlier a distant memory by the end of a Rose Bowl and Big Ten championship season that began sluggishly.

And it is something coach Mark Dantonio thinks can happen again in 2019.

“It is similar,” Dantonio said of the vibe between 2012 and ’13 and this offseason. “Now, the results need to come. But it is similar.”

Getting humbled

It was the end of the dynasty, the return to mediocrity. At least that was what many outside the program believed in 2012.

But not in Dantonio’s mind. Not by a long shot.

A Big Ten co-champion a year earlier, MSU dipped to 7-6 after veteran leader Kirk Cousins and others who helped revive the program graduated. The Spartans allowed just 16.3 points a game in 2012 but scored only 20.0. They lost their six games by a combined 30 points, five of them by a total of 13.

They defeated TCU, 17-16, in the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl, but a quarterback controversy emerged between struggling starter Andrew Maxwell and emerging youngster Connor Cook, who led the comeback win in the bowl game. . And two of the biggest offensive producers in 2012, running back Le’Veon Bell and tight end Dion Sims, departed for the NFL.

“I think we had to get humbled a little bit,” said Treadwell, who played offensive and defensive line in his five seasons at MSU. “We had high expectations that 2012 year. We were supposed to continue to move forward, and obviously things kind of fell through. It was a very sour taste in my mouth at the end, and a lot of sour taste in a lot of the other (rising) seniors. So we made sure that we were not gonna have that type of taste in our mouths again, and that kind of started the momentum after that bowl game of starting to build toward something special.”

That winter at the team banquet, Dantonio told his returning players that they would “be the ones.” He was so sure, he shot a video on the field in Pasadena during that long offseason and sent it to them. 

It was his cryptic code expressing his belief in them.

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That they could win a Big Ten title. A Rose Bowl. Maybe even a national championship.

“Coach D always believes in every team, and he believed in us,” said Treadwell, who missed most of 2012 with a knee injury. “Even in 2013, when things were a little ugly at the beginning, Coach D kept the rock and we kept pounding away. We just had a deep belief that we were gonna come out through victories. And I think that’s the mindset the (2019) seniors need to have. As well as they should have a chip on their shoulder.”

Dantonio’s assessment seemed far-fetched in the moment, but prescient in hindsight.

And Treadwell said the team’s leadership — including himself, Denicos Allen, Max Bullough and Darqueze Dennard, among others — was determined to fix what went wrong.

“We knew that the defense was gonna be the strong point of the team, and us offensive guys knew it was time for us to do our part of the job,” he said. “So I think everyone together knew that, hey, this is not acceptable.”

Playing off each other

MSU changed offensive coordinators, turning to Dave Warner and Jim Bollman, and gave the ball full time to Cook four games into the season. Receivers Bennie Fowler and Tony Lippett started catching passes they didn’t a year earlier from Maxwell. The offensive line stayed healthy for almost the entire season, allowing Jeremy Langford to emerge as a star running back.

The result was 9.4 more points per game on offense, a 24-touchdown gain overall, and 26.2 more yards per game. MSU’s third-down and red-zone TD conversion rates both increased as the turnovers committed decreased.

That allowed the defense to get even better as it shaved more than three points a game to 13.2 points allowed and just 252.2 yards a game, both Dantonio-era lows. The Spartans also forced eight more turnovers and generated 12 more sacks.

“They say the best defense is a good offense and vice versa,” said current defensive coordinator Mike Tressel, who was the linebackers coach in 2012 and ‘13. “But the fewer minutes we’re on the field (defensively), the more adjustments we can make, the fresher our guys are, the lesser you have to go into 2s and 3s at positions. Those are all big factors. But it’s the ultimate team game. Them moving the ball and scoring points is huge.”

The Spartans achieved almost all of the goals Dantonio set, shaking off early offensive problems to turn into a juggernaut by the end of the season. They went 13-1, beating Ohio State for the conference crown and Stanford in the Rose Bowl.

“We had a mindset that we were gonna win the Rose Bowl — we weren’t just gonna go just to enjoy it, but to win it,” Treadwell recalled. “And I think the experiences of being in the last few bowl games and understanding maybe the highs and the lows, it makes you appreciate what you got because not too many people can say they’ve done something special like a Rose Bowl or Big Ten championship game.

“We were very grateful, nobody took it for granted.”

Another revival?

Which brings us to 2018, another season in which the offense sputtered to historic lows under Dantonio.

A lot of that can be attributed to injuries. Four of the five returning starters on the offensive line got hurt. Returning running back LJ Scott missed most of the season, as did fullback Collin Lucas. At one point or another, seven of the top eight wide receivers were injured.

The Spartans scored just two offensive touchdowns in the final four games, ranked 125th out of 129 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision with 18.7 points and 116th with 342.1 total yards per game. They ran for just 124.8 yards per game (114th in rushing offense). Those are the worst averages in Dantonio’s 12 seasons.

And just like in 2012, the Spartans’ defense was good enough to overcome many offensive problems. They finished No. 1 in the nation against the run (77.9 yards allowed) and No. 10 overall in yards allowed (303.2). Their 17.2 points allowed per game ranked eighth in the country. Dantonio called it “as good as any defense we’ve had.”

“One of the biggest statistics I don’t think people really acknowledge is we had the fewest big plays (allowed) in the country … Explosive plays are probably the biggest indicator of scoring,” Dantonio said. “I would look at last year’s offensive struggles as just that — we didn’t have enough explosive plays.”

MSU lost six games by a total of 51 points, an average of 8.5 per loss, and was competitive in all of them until the fourth quarter, when it was outscored 60-3 as the offense failed to sustain drives and left the defense vulnerable.

“Unfortunately, some things slipped out of our hands in 2012 that kind of led to some of the same things that happened at Michigan State last year,” Treadwell said. “Not closing games.”

Again, Dantonio made changes to his staff, demoting Warner and Bollman and promoting Brad Salem as the new offensive coordinator, with the mission of “revamping our system and philosophy.”

“And now, we have to put that into more of a week-to-week, game-to-game type situation,” Dantonio said. “But there’s gotta be productivity, I don’t think there’s any question about that. I understand that. … I think people will notice a difference.”

Just as in 2013, there are a number of players — veteran voices and leaders — returning with starting experience, including nine on defense from the Redbox Bowl loss to Oregon.

On offense, they have the advantage of third-year starting quarterback in Lewerke and receivers in Darrell Stewart and Cody White, all of whom have produced when healthy.

Treadwell believes strong leadership will be a major key, much like it was in 2013. The hope is that hours of work during a long offseason between the season-ending 7-6 loss to Oregon and waiting for Friday’s opener against Tulsa will not be misspent.

The hope is that the seniors can exit just like Treadwell did. With a championship.

“My last year, I made sure that whatever happens, I’m gonna look myself in the mirror and I’m gonna have no regrets,” he said. “So I think some of those guys know that this is your last ride. How do you want to be remembered?”

Contact Chris Solari at csolari@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @chrissolari. Read more on the Michigan State Spartans and sign up for our Spartans newsletter.