Michigan State Football: RIP to the weekly goals and football blogs

When I first started setting goals for the Michigan State football team, they were essentially benchmarks that, when hit, usually resulted in victory. It’s the same principle as when losing weight, the goal isn’t to lose weight. The goals should be to get 10,000 steps a day, to eat more vegetables, and to drink more water. If you do these things, it usually results in weight loss.

Goals like 4.5 yards per rush or create two turnovers usually results in winning. But week after week, not only were they not accomplishing these baseline goals (for average teams), but they were also creating new ways to lose games as if they created their own goals on how to lose a game. They were asking a new quarterback to make difficult throws. They were attempting to run the ball in ways that did not put the players in position to succeed. It was becoming more and more obvious that this season couldn’t end any other way than disaster.

It all started Week 1 vs. Central Michigan. The offense looked stagnant. The play-calling was head-scratching. The defense couldn’t stop the run or defend tight ends and even when they did, they were committing stupid penalties. It took them three quarters to put away a team that started a quarterback who couldn’t complete a pass and doesn’t even see the field anymore. They are fourth overall in the MAC and had no business being within three points at the half.

I don’t care if Connor Stalions is next to Jay Johnson, listening to every single play and directly telling the CMU staff exactly where to put their best players. Michigan State should be bigger, stronger, and faster than a middle of the pack MAC team. If you can’t complete elementary standards as a Power Five program, then you’ve shown us all we needed to see.

Even when they accomplished two of the three goals against Minnesota last week, the offense was putrid enough to negate any good the defense had done. Nobody on this coaching staff should be retained, 20 percent of the roster won’t be back, and I just can’t foresee MSU winning anymore games.

Nebraska has been on a roll and Indiana is in Bloomington. Michigan State has shown that it can lose to inferior opponents, mainly due to coaching malpractice and player execution errors. I am just thankful that basketball officially starts on Monday (preview article coming this weekend). I’m not sure what else I could say about Michigan State football’s on-field performance.

Sure, there will be topics to write about off-field like the coaching search, portal news, and recruiting. But for the last four games, there’s nothing to get excited for. A bowl game is completely out of the question and even if they miraculously win out, the extra practices don’t do the kids any good because it’s just more exposure to coaches who won’t be there and more exposure to bad coaching.

So, we say goodbye to goals, revisiting goals, and the football season in general. Any new news that comes up will be touched upon, but as things are right now, there’s no reason to spend time writing about the 2023 Michigan State football team.

I will still watch, I will still cheer, I will still live and die with every snap, and wish these players the best. But, I can only call the coaches inept so many times. It has become Mad Libs where I fill out the opponent’s name, and the adjective of how the coaches screwed it up and whichever play Jay Johnson insists on running four times, each resulting in a loss of yardage.

We must now look forward to brighter days, where Urban Meyer is bringing in a top five recruiting class while Spartan Nation is still coming off our collective hangover from Tom Izzo’s second national title.