Since the regular season ended, there have been several major coaching moves from Lane Kiffin leaving Ole Miss for LSU before the College Football Playoff or Florida poaching Tulane’s Jon Sumrall.
Michigan State got in on the fun, too, firing Jonathan Smith the day after the season finale and hiring former Northwestern head coach Pat Fitzgerald just hours later. The move to fire Smith wasn’t surprising, but immediately hiring Fitzgerald was rather shocking. No one could have expected the program to hire a coach right away, but J Batt had a guy in mind.
The hire was given mixed reviews originally, but most fans have warmed up to the idea of Fitzgerald leading the program because he has a little Mark Dantonio to him.
Plus, he’s hired a great staff so far and he has a history of success at a much smaller program that had a fraction of the resources that Michigan State is giving him. He has a massive assistant salary pool and he’ll get some money to work with in the transfer portal, too.
By all accounts, this was a good hire by Michigan State, and it seems to have a high floor and a high ceiling.
Not everyone agrees, however.
According to ESPN’s Bill Connelly, Michigan State’s hire of Fitzgerald is the worst of the cycles so far. That’s right, he ranked all 30 coaching hires, and Fitzgerald came in dead-last.
ESPN’s Bill Connelly says Pat Fitzgerald was the worst hire of this coaching cycle.
— Justin Spiro (@DarkoStateNews) December 22, 2025
He ranked Fitzgerald 30th out of 30.
Take notes, don’t forget @coachfitz51.@ESPN_BillC pic.twitter.com/UZB0Rowkqm
I don’t know about you, but that seems harsh.
Pat Fitzgerald has won with much less
Michigan State is handing Fitzgerald the keys to a brand new car worth quite a bit of money and it’s letting him drive it however he’d like. He has plenty of resources at his disposal, and he won’t have a shortage of money backing him when he needs it.
Yet “experts” like Connelly believe that he’s a dinosaur because he’s been out of the game for a couple of years. I do get the criticism regarding the NIL era and the fact that Fitzgerald struggled in the final two years of his tenure with Northwestern, but he was considered a top NFL coaching candidate at one point — the dude knows his Xs and Os.
Fitzgerald was winning 10-plus games with glorified MAC rosters and he had major restrictions in recruiting both monetarily and academically.
Now, he’ll be able to cast a wider net in East Lansing.
If you can win 10-plus games multiple times at a program like Northwestern, there’s no reason you won’t be able to succeed in the same conference at a better football school with more resources.
Fitzgerald will prove Connelly wrong.