Michigan State football: Video analysis of MSU’s 27-24 win at Maryland
Lansing State Journal columnist Graham Couch and Detroit Free Press writer Chris Solari break down the Spartans’ 27-24 win Saturday at Maryland.
EAST LANSING – Days before Aidan Chiles launched a beautiful 77-yard touchdown bomb to Nick Marsh that set Michigan State football up to beat Maryland with a last-second field goal, the seeds of its surprising Week 2 victory over the Terrapins were sowed.
They were planted over several news conferences that followed the Spartans’ unimpressive six-point win over Florida Atlantic in their opener. First, Chiles accepted blame for the pedestrian performance, which had his fingerprints all over it after he posted a dreadful 42% completion rate, threw two interceptions and barely surpassed 100 yards passing.
“I’m taking full responsibility for everything that happened today,” he said.
Soon thereafter, head coach Jonathan Smith, popped in and told reporters he wasn’t without fault either, noting that the score was probably closer than it should have been because he erred when he opted to go for it on a failed fourth-down opportunity inside the red zone instead of attempting a short field goal that would have increased the lead to nine points.
“Probably overaggressive,” Smith acknowledged. “Hindsight 20/20, we’d probably have gone in a different direction.”
Days later, offensive coordinator Brian Lindgren issued his own mea culpa, when he explained that he could have done more to set up Chiles for success in the quarterback’s first college start against FAU.
“I’ve got to do a better job of trying to get him in a little better rhythm early,” he said.
MSU FOOTBALL WINNERS/LOSERS: Stock soars for QB Aidan Chiles, WR Nick Marsh
Flash forward to this past Saturday and there was Chiles, on MSU’s opening play from scrimmage, zipping a quick, easy pass over to Montorie Foster Jr. for a 7-yard gain. It would be the first of Chiles’ 24 completions during an afternoon when he and MSU’s offense came to life.
He threw for 363 yards, forging an explosive connection with Marsh, a freshman wideout from River Rouge. The young receiver made eight catches for 194 yards, helping the Spartans score on five of their 11 possessions. Smith was pleased with what he saw from Chiles and Marsh. He was certainly satisfied with the final result, considering it was achieved in the Spartans’ first Big Ten game. But there were mistakes that rankled him, including a rash of penalties committed when MSU possessed the ball.
Smith could have pinned the infractions on his players, considering they were the ones flagged.
Yet, he pointed his finger at himself – literally.
“It starts with us,” he said Monday, gesturing his hands toward his body. “We’ve got to be able to coach this better, set a higher standard for that.”
Ahh, how refreshing. A culture of honesty, transparency and accountability has returned to East Lansing.
“Where everyone’s selfless, where the coaches are selfless, where the players are selfless, where there’s no blaming one another,” left tackle Stanton Ramil said. “When you can be that selfless and that hard on yourselves, it’s huge. … It’s massive in the game of football.”
“It’s awesome,” kicker Jonathan Kim echoed. “It’s great, because. … nobody’s above the program.”
It wasn’t always this way, of course. Former coach Mel Tucker rarely took ownership of his team’s poor play after losses, which mounted during the final two years of his doomed regime. He often blamed bad execution instead of substandard coaching, even though the problems that revealed themselves on game day were often systemic. Most of the time when he was pressed about something that had gone wrong, he would default to some variation of a tired old refrain, telling reporters he had to watch the film. After one of the worst defeats of his doomed tenure, a 56-7 bludgeoning by Ohio State in November 2021, Tucker opened a window into his “it wasn’t me” mindset when he was asked to detail what he told his team following the rout.
“I said, ‘Listen, you don’t have to go to the media, you don’t have to go to them and say it was my fault and I did this, I did this,” he relayed. “You don’t gotta do that.”
Tucker certainly didn’t that day.
“We knew what they were capable of doing and we knew what we had to stop and we didn’t stop them,” he said of the powerful Buckeyes. “From a coaching standpoint, there were no surprises out there in terms of what we saw. It’s just a matter of they out-executed us.”
Tucker’s habitual unwillingness to accept responsibility for his team’s unsatisfactory performances was a bright, red flag. After all, acknowledging shortcomings is often the first step toward correcting them and making the necessary upgrades. It’s a sign of strength, not weakness.
SEIDEL’S TAKE: Quietly, succinctly, Jonathan Smith is ironing out how to build a winner at Michigan State
Smith and his staff get that.
“We let our guys know we’re all in this together,” receivers coach Courtney Hawkins said. “And nobody’s perfect. They’re going to make errors. We’re going to coach them up. We’re going to make errors. We’ll coach ourselves up, coach each other up. They know that we got their back. And we need them to have our back when we make a bad call and do something, in hindsight, to say, you know, I would do it a different way. … Guys depend on each other, believe in each other and are playing hard for one another.”
Ramil agrees.
He sees buy-in from his teammates and a marked improvement in the atmosphere within the program. There is more unity across the board, in part, because the blame game along Shaw Lane has stopped.
“It’s nice,” Ramil said. “I’m sure the coaches are at fault sometimes, the players are at fault sometimes. Just everyone being selfless and calling themselves out, it’s been big.”
Foster can attest to that.
Like his quarterback, he struggled in the opener, losing a fumble and bobbling a pass that led to the first of Chiles’ two interceptions. Foster felt some guilt afterwards, calling it a “rough game.” He then set out to make amends, focusing on the details over the next week of practice. What came next was redemption. Against Maryland, Foster made six catches for 53 yards, scoring MSU’s first touchdown on a crisp slant route.
“At the end of the day,” Foster said, “We’ve just got to execute.”
Foster and the Spartans did that in their second game, in part, because they corrected a series of mistakes they were quick to acknowledge in the aftermath of their disappointing opener. That’s how Smith’s team defied expectations to make it to 2-0 and set themselves up for a promising season.
Contact Rainer Sabin at rsabin@freepress.com. Follow him @RainerSabin.
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Publish date : 2024-09-10 23:11:00
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