Michigan State football: 2024 recruiting class ranked No. 38 after rapid rise

It's been a wild month for Michigan State football. The Spartans were head coach-less from mid-September until late-November and then they hired Jonathan Smith in the last weekend of the regular season to fix the problems left behind by Mel Tucker.

The Spartans' 2024 recruiting class was sitting at single-digit commitments and the roster was slowly falling apart with transfers left and right -- including all three scholarship quarterbacks.

Smith was tasked with fixing that before National Signing Day and he had to make the right staff hires and get out on the trail and host a couple of big official visit weekends. He did just that.

Those official visit weekends have yielded fantastic results as the Spartans have gone from a recruiting class that ranked in the 90-100 range, per 247Sports, nationally all the way up to the No. 38 class in the country at the end of Early Signing Day. They moved up about 60 spots in two weeks and the class went from a handful of commitments to 19 -- 18 of them signed their NLIs on Wednesday.

This massive rise in the rankings deserves some major respect. It's also impressive to see him utilizing the transfer portal as Smith has landed five players who could all start next fall.

Michigan State now has 24 new players coming in as of right now and there's still time to add more before the 2024 season kicks off.

We really need to give Smith a ton of credit for the job he's done in a short period of time.