Michigan State Football: Highlighting 4 quotes from Mel Tucker at media day

Mel Tucker spoke at Big Ten Media Day on Wednesday. Coming off a disappointing Michigan State football season, I was hoping to see if Tucker can have some hindsight on what went wrong and more importantly, what he’s doing to fix it.

I’m going to skip over the quote about the Michigan-Michigan State rivalry that is, among other rivalry-related items, sweeping the Twitterverse.

Here are four quotes that I found interesting.

Quote on depth

“It takes time to build depth.”

This first one is short but so important. So much has happened in the world since February of 2020 and even then, Mark Dantonio’s retirement was a surprise to almost all of us. He retired right around signing day and even his last few recruiting classes were lackluster.

Once Mel Tucker came in, there were quite a few Dantonio recruits who decided to transfer with about 95 percent of them going to non-Power Five schools. This team lacked serious talent in 2020 and even in 2021 on the offensive line and essentially the entire defense.

The lack of depth really reared its ugly head last season with the number of injuries that plagued this team. Yes, there were quite a few coaching mistakes, but the defense got leaps and bounds better when Xaiver Henderson and Jacob Slade came back.

With all the injuries, though, came experience for the younger players that will pay dividends this year.