Pat Fitzgerald will coach his first game for Michigan State on Friday night, and the timing puts the Spartans on the spot immediately. At 8 p.m. on FS1 against Toledo, Michigan State Football begins another reset, its third coaching transition in six years, with Fitzgerald asked to make the program look and feel like the hard-nosed teams the school still treats as the model.
That search is why the game matters now. Michigan State wants to return to the identity Mark Dantonio built over 13 years, when he became the winningest coach in program history and turned toughness, defense and a heavy ground game into the program’s clearest route back to relevance. Fitzgerald used his weekly radio show Tuesday night to say the program wants to stand upon the shoulders of those who came before and the great Spartan Dawgs, then added that the goal is to get back to playing football Spartan style.
The blueprint is plain enough. It starts with winning at the point of attack on both lines. It asks for an aggressive defense that can fly around the field. It demands an offense that can move opponents and dominate on the ground first. In that world, Joe Rossi sounded genuinely encouraged Wednesday, Sept. 2, saying he felt he had found a kindred soul in Fitzgerald because he understands how to coach a football team and manages offense, defense and special teams at a high level.
The challenge is that Fitzgerald is not stepping into this as a savior from the past. He said on Tuesday night that he has not earned being side by side with Dantonio, even as the program points to that era as the standard it wants back. Dantonio, who recently told WILX-TV in Lansing that Fitzgerald is a great coach because he is about toughness, spent his best years showing how far a team can go when the defense travels, the offensive line holds up and the running backs punish people late.
That is the part Michigan State is trying to recreate, not in theory but in a game that counts. The 2007 team that helped define Dantonio’s approach finished 7-6, reached a bowl for the first time since 2003 and featured Jehuu Caulcrick and Javon Ringer as a battering ram backfield with Brian Hoyer at quarterback. It also lost 48-41 in overtime to Northwestern and Fitzgerald, a reminder that the coach now taking over in East Lansing has been part of the same Big Ten grind for a long time.
What happens next is simple and unforgiving. Fitzgerald gets his first chance to show whether Michigan State’s talk about Spartan style can become something more than a reference point when the ball is kicked off Friday night. If the Spartans are going to make this transition stick, it has to start immediately, with the lines setting the tone and the rest of the program following where they lead.
