Spartans' Dantonio is champion of continuity

East Lansing — With birds whistling in the background, the way they seem always to be warbling during Masters telecasts, two groups teed it up in April at Augusta National Golf Club.

Hallowed golf ground was about to be attacked by Mark Dantonio, Tom Izzo, Mark Hollis, Kirk Herbstreit and Kirk Cousins.

Together with two members accompanying them, Michigan State’s and ESPN’s sports elite played 18 holes on back-to-back days, overnighting at club cabins after dinner and wine and whatever other beverages had been enjoyed deep into a night of laughs and sports storytelling only this group could have crafted.

“I’m not a good golfer, but I enjoyed it,” Dantonio said last week in his office at Michigan State’s posh football quarters, the Skandalaris Center. “The biggest thing to me was how vast the fairways were. And the greens — the places you had to aim a putt! Those bunkers are deep, too. I gained an appreciation for what the pros experience there.

“But it was really nice, too, getting back with Kirk, talking with him,” Dantonio said, speaking of Cousins, the ex-Michigan State quarterback who is now a handsomely paid starter for Washington. “And (ESPN college football savant) Herbstreit has really become a pretty good friend.”

These are moments a college football coach probably deserves and not all experience. Hollis, who is Michigan State’s athletic director and the man who most directly worked to hire Dantonio a decade ago, had been pushing Dantonio to join him and Izzo for an Augusta National pilgrimage, courtesy of an unnamed member and Spartans alum.

Dantonio finally could say yes. He had wrapped up spring football four months after bagging a Big Ten championship, three months after having a tough night at the office against Alabama at the Cotton Bowl, and days before he would resume the usual routine of recruiting, recruiting, recruiting, hitting alumni golf events, overseeing football camps, and maybe stealing a weekend or two at the Lake Michigan shoreline home he and his wife, Becky, and two daughters enjoy near Montague.

Dantonio’s scores from two Augusta National rounds were not divulged. But he had his moments. He birdied the par-5 13th, an Amen Corner memory that won’t soon fade. And on one of his 18s he parred the bedeviling 12th, where only a few days earlier Jordan Spieth had dunked consecutive shots to blow apart what might have been a repeat Masters celebration.

For a man who says a bit too suspiciously, “I’m not a very good golfer,” Dantonio followed the Augusta revelry with an eagle on a par 4 at a course in Atlanta (“I don’t remember the club’s name,” he said, with a wan grin) when he knocked in a 50-yard pitch.

Well now: Where, might a nation of college football zealots ask, was all this magic against Alabama?

Ouch.

That night. New Year’s Eve. Now a coach knows how Spieth felt on Masters Sunday.

“I keep saying the score wasn’t that bad, we were in it (0-0 until late in the first half),” Dantonio says, a reference to Michigan State’s 38-0 wipeout by Alabama in the national championship semifinals. “My wife says: ‘C’mon. You lost. Get over it.’ ”

He has. To a necessary point.

Focus too much on a single game, whether victory or defeat, and you can lose perspective on season goals and on past success that has helped deliver for you and your team another championship shot this autumn.

It doesn’t mean the Spartans, who have gone 36-5 with Dantonio since 2013, are percentage bets in seven months to again crash college football’s Final Four. They aren’t. But they’re percentage probabilities to duel for another Big Ten title and draw a bowl game matchup that likely will be kinder than the date with last year’s national champs.

Hence, Dantonio’s insistence about staying contemporary with a football team’s thought. It’s pretty much a first requirement for Michigan State or for any of the Big Ten’s heavyweights.

“People want to talk about the future, and they talk about the past, but not many want to deal with the present,” Dantonio said, sinking against a sofa in his nicely appointed office, with its heavy emphasis on furniture that recruits, particularly, might find relaxing.

“I’m concerned about what we’re doing. Now. There are a lot of great programs in the Midwest, and we’re gonna do what we can to be one of the best. We don’t need to change any plans.”

Smooth transition

That’s because the Spartans stick to Dantonio’s script, which was written in indelible ink some time ago.

They build good rosters. They tend to replace quality athletes with equivalent personnel. And they keep their players on campus until eligibility expires or the NFL calls early.

Top coaches, prospects make Sound Mind Sound Body ‘awesome’

Take, for example, that nerve center known as quarterback. Dantonio lost three-year triggerman Connor Cook to graduation and to the fourth round of April’s NFL draft. Cook might have been the best — and definitely was the most productive — quarterback in Michigan State history.

In years past the Spartans would have needed grief counseling after saying farewell to a star at a position of unmatched responsibility.

Dantonio instead this fall can choose from four vintages as he mulls what varietal of skills pairs best with his 2016 team. Tyler O’Connor has won the early taste test because of experience and requisite skills. But there will be no issues, in the collective view of the Spartans, if they must turn to Damion Terry, or to Brian Lewerke, or even to blessed freshman Messiah deWeaver.

Dantonio recruits smart, if not dramatically, then redshirts the bejabbers out of his classes to the extent possible. He keeps his kids in school, minimizes transfers, and extracts a heavy benefit from the season-sustaining depth.

He has his exceptions. Two developed this spring when a pair of defensive linemen, Craig Evans and Montez Sweat, headed home following some disciplinary issues.

But not since Duffy Daugherty’s merry run in East Lansing 50 and 60 years ago have the Spartans retained such consistency in quality numbers.

“Continuity,” Dantonio said, with a nod. “Continuity has been our greatest accomplishment — on the field, off the field, and in the classroom.”

He graduates almost 85 percent of his players, which is something those guys who beat him New Year’s Eve can also say. So, in that single context, Michigan State is not vastly different from much of college football’s elite.

Rather, it is the big-picture gains Dantonio and Michigan State have made since he arrived in December 2006, which explain why his program construction has been one of the sterling success stories in all of college football.

Steady improvement

The Spartans for too long were jump-ball bets to qualify for even a marginal bowl game. They weren’t always recruiting well, and only rarely were they and “Big Ten contender” spoken in a rational sentence.

Dantonio cleaned up a mess of historic proportions and slowly, steadily stamped it with his brand. Teams and seasons got better. Bowl games became something other than aspirations, or player vacations, or cannon fodder for more accomplished bowl opponents.

Michigan, a detested rival that had kicked sand and mud and other material in Michigan State’s faces for years, became a regular victim. Big Ten championship games evolved into the occasional December postseason stop. Those championship games began going Michigan State’s way, which brought on a for-the-ages Rose Bowl victory in 2014. A year later there was a whopping Cotton Bowl virtuoso against Baylor, all before Michigan State beat Michigan and Ohio State last autumn ahead of whacking Iowa on a gallant, theatrical late drive in Indianapolis.

It put Michigan State on New Year’s Eve’s national stage much in the way Izzo’s team has so often specialized in Final Four visits.

Except the football Spartans were mauled.

“Jim Tressel used to say something after a particular season hadn’t gotten us a national championship,” Dantonio began, with a pained smile, remembering days from when he was Tressel’s defensive coordinator at Ohio State. “ ‘So how far have we come, really?’

“I know we’re not there yet. We’ve known some peaks. But there’s still a mountain to climb. And yet, I don’t know that we’ll ever get there.”

It seems a startling acknowledgment, the notion a coach, five months from the semifinals, would say a national championship is perhaps too much to hope for. And he doesn’t for a moment believe Michigan State is unqualified or inferior to any team in America.

But he understands the national landscape. And that everyone wants and expects to win. It was extraordinary that Michigan State last season would have beaten Michigan on a final, incredible play and conked an astonishingly blessed Ohio State team at Columbus. It wasn’t that a subsequent knock-off of Iowa in the Big Ten championship game was overachievement. But, realistically, to have plowed past two kingpin teams in a college football playoff?

It’s nice to dream. But college football is fundamentally about realism. Alabama and Clemson, which played in the title match, were simply and demonstrably better than Michigan State by any four-quarters measure of personal assessment and performance.

That particular brand of NFL-grade talent, more common to the Southeastern Conference, annually makes it to the championship game, a degree of difference obvious in Alabama’s romp and second-half massacre.

Keeping perspective

It isn’t out of the question the Spartans will return to the playoffs and, again, Dantonio is the first to say they can. What he won’t say is that had Michigan State avoided Alabama or Clemson in January they might have been a better Rose Bowl match against Stanford, which destroyed Iowa on Jan. 1.

It’s all about maintaining success — and perspective. You need not win a trip to the White House to have a marvelous football product. The coach likes his chances for keeping a historic, unprecedented run ablaze in East Lansing.

“My job is to make people happy,” Dantonio said. “As simply as I can state it, it means we’ve got to win here, to graduate players and keep ’em out of trouble, and maintain our focus, which is the here and now.”

He adds something.

“My job is not to sell myself,” and in the same breath he quips: “Hope you got my name right.”

Nice zinger there. It’s a poke at ESPN and other outlets that have called him “Mike Dantonio” — confusing him with NBA coach Mike D’Antoni — and various other appellations that suggest a nation is still getting to know Dantonio and Michigan State.

It leads to another discussion point and to a separate message Michigan State is working to underline.

Move over, Harbaugh

Jim Harbaugh isn’t the state’s only Big Ten football coach.

Anyone might wonder. Harbaugh arrived in Ann Arbor 17 months ago and has had about the same capacity to manhandle news cycles as a presidential candidate named Trump.

Harbaugh holds spring practice at IMG Academy in Florida and it’s as if P.T. Barnum has moved the Greatest Show on Earth to a football field. Harbaugh trades barbs with Nick Saban at Alabama and with Brett Bielema at Arkansas and the social media galaxy enjoys a meteor shower.

Harbaugh’s national signing day celebration in February was choreographed, cleverly, as a Hollywood-comes-to-Ann-Arbor moment. Even this spring, Michigan’s recruiting targets tend to be widely publicized and sodden with so many four- and five-star national names you wonder how their national haul in 2017 can be fitted into a single season’s class limit.

And, of course, it seems not to matter that Harbaugh and Michigan lost to Michigan State — again — in 2015, with the word “fluke” generally attached to the Wolverines game analysis, while bitterness is the flavor of the month at Michigan State as the Spartans deal with what they believe to be ongoing disrespect.

Dantonio sees it all, feels it all, but doesn’t say the word “Harbaugh” or “Michigan” even as some natural competitive resentment bubbles beneath.

Take, for example, that trendy college football topic du jour, satellite camps. Harbaugh and his staff have turned national instructional camps at various national and international (even Australia) sites into a highly visible, highly promotional barnstorming tour.

“Satellite camps have been around forever,” Dantonio said, when asked about college football’s vogue conversation piece. “Oklahoma has had satellite camps in Dallas for years. Oregon State had ’em in Los Angeles.”

Dantonio will opt for Michigan State’s relationship with the Sound Body Sound Mind camp cavalcade, which began more than a decade ago in Detroit and this summer will include added stops at Atlanta, Houston, Tampa, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. It’s fewer than half as many as Harbaugh and Co. will hit.

But it’s a presence Dantonio says is right for MSU’s football genetics. He mentions that Michigan State has a later spring game, in mid-April, and that the staff hits the recruiting road later, which doesn’t bother him when he can, in his view, glean better, fresher information on recruits deeper into the calendar year.

He also believes his staff works enough overtime during the course of an endless football year and that maybe, just maybe, a few nights at home during summer aren’t the worst thing for a coach, a marriage and kids.

Another factor is at work. Dantonio is convinced as George Perles and Nick Saban were when they ran Spartans football that Michigan State does best when it mines a 300-mile radius for the brunt of its recruits.

It doesn’t preclude recruits from any region, as Michigan State’s roster has shown, with its emphasis on Georgia, Florida, New Jersey, California, etc. But program dividends tend to flow, Dantonio says, when relationships built with recruits, families and coaches are more easily constructed within a five-hour drive of East Lansing.

“I think we know our players more fully when we have more history with the (high school) coaches,” said Dantonio, adding that the Spartans each year have few de-committed recruits. “You’re able to track players longer. There are only so many big fish in the pond, but we’re getting our share of four-stars, especially when the difference between three, four and five is not very much.”

He looks at video of every snap in which every recruit has played in high school. As much as any trait for which Dantonio is known, his jeweler’s eye for detail and for projecting talent is considered extraordinary. He gauges elements apart from the player, his family and a coach’s testimony.

“It might be where he’s located,” Dantonio said. “How he’s developed and coached. It might be the system.”

In that context and others, he sees debates over satellite camps in the same vein as Michigan State’s attention to them. An excess of talk or presence isn’t on the coach’s must-do list.

“We’re sitting in proximity of schools with great tradition,” he said, and it’s possible a university 70 miles away was being referenced here. “We’re all in the fast lane.

“But, again, you’ve got to do what’s best for your program. And what’s best for our program is to not change too much in what we’ve done.

“I’ve got to take care of business here, and if I’m not here, I can’t take care of MSU’s business.”

He offers a scenario: Say the Spartans, after ramping up their satellite camp swings to cover half the globe, turned around and won eight games rather than their usual double-digit load.

“Why did we do what we did?” Dantonio sees himself asking when he realizes how close any quality team each autumn comes to an 8-4 regular season.

“I went through a drawer the other day, loaded with stuff from 2007, and 2009, and other years, and I noticed that we were still focused on the same things we were before.

“I’m still trying to critique this program all the time. I just don’t want to see us get so far out that we can’t get back.”

‘I see people here’

He would know, he says, when that line washes away. Nothing about his team, including New Year’s Eve, has spurred a coach to think the Spartans have sacrificed an ounce of solidity.

“We’ve built into our players here,” said Dantonio, who three months ago turned 60. “It’s not that we don’t have problems. But what we look for is always to solve the problem.

“I see people here, not football players. I want to make their dreams come true. And I want them to have a personal relationship with us when they leave.”

It is mentioned to Dantonio that, purely in terms of tenure and accomplishment, he might be considered Michigan’s governor of football.

“Not bad,” he said, breaking into a chuckle that might surprise Dantonio observers more accustomed to a coach whose sideline expression is all business.

“I can live with that.”

lynn.henning@detroitnews.com

twitter.com/Lynn_Henning