Michigan State football's coach has baggage, but he could be perfect
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The new coach of Michigan State football can talk. He can vibe, too. And sell and charm and explain – with great passion – the changing state of college football, why his last job went awry, the regrets he has, what he learned, and that he is ready to do this again.
Win, that is.
And teach and develop and lead and all that other business that goes with running a Big Ten football program.
Listen to Pat Fitzgerald talk – as he did in early November on ESPN’s “College GameDay” podcast – and it’s not hard to imagine why MSU athletic director J Batt wanted to take a chance on him. And why MSU’s board and president and principal donors are apparently all in as well.
They all had to sign off on Jonathan Smith’s dismissal, which was announced by the school Sunday, Nov. 30 – less than 24 hours after the beleaguered coach finally got his first Big Ten win of the season – over Maryland, at Ford Field in Detroit.
Smith, on the other hand, can’t talk. Or rather, communicate. Not like Fitzgerald can. Not to the public, at least. Not to the donors.
It cost him. Win games and no one cares: Shhhhhh! A quiet genius is at work.
Lose? Hey, this is the Midwest, not Or-a-gone –we detest Michigan (the school, not the state) with every green-and-white cell!
In the end, it doesn’t matter if a football coach sounds like most folks’ idea of a football coach (though when a coach does sound like a coach, it buys time).
It only matters that they win.
It also matters that they not run a program where players are hazing other players, which happened at Fitzgerald’s last stop.
He didn’t know about it, according to the investigative firm Northwestern hired (and according to Fitzgerald himself, of course). If he did, Fitzgerald wouldn’t be the next football coach at MSU.
‘Everybody [who knows me] knows exactly who I am’
Northwestern fired Fitzgerald in July 2023 for allegations of hazing in the football program. The school said the hazing included “forced participation, nudity and sexualized acts of a degrading nature.”
Fitzgerald sued for wrongful termination. Northwestern’s investigation, meanwhile, found no evidence their former coach knew about the hazing. The parties settled out of court.
MSU’s new coach told the ESPN podcast crew he felt vindicated and hinted that job inquiries started rolling in as soon as the case was resolved and he was cleared.
“The facts are the facts,” he said. “Everybody [who knows me] knows exactly who I am.”
But should he have known?
Of course.
It’s why he didn’t balk at the initial punishment in 2023 – a two-week suspension – handed out before he ultimately lost his job. His program, his responsibility.
Fitzgerald told ESPN he learned a ton and that, while he had a zero-tolerance policy for hazing, he wished he’d recognized some signs earlier and wished he’d made sure his players felt like they could have talked to him about it.
“I’m disapointed I didn’t get the information,” he said on the podcast.
MSU no doubt vetted all of this themselves, considering the Spartans‘ experience with another hastily hired football coach a few years back. Batt – and the school president and the board – had to know hiring Fitzgerald wouldn’t be the best optics among some in the wider Spartans community.
It’s not hard to see it as tone deaf, even if that’s not entirely fair to Fitzgerald, who, again, was cleared by Northwestern.
Yet perception doesn’t always take to nuance, and though it appears the president and the board and the athletic department and the donors are aligned – and that isn’t always the case at MSU – Fitzgerald will have to prove he can run a program without ever letting forced hazing occur under his watch again.
Some will be skeptical, rightly so.
As for the football? (And isn’t it always about football?)
Fitzgerald showed he can do a lot with a little, which is a good thing considering he’ll have more to work with at MSU. He won 10 games in a season three times at Northwestern, and that isn’t easy to do; the entirety of every other coach over the Wildcats’ 132 seasons did it just twice.
He also developed players.
In fact, he believes that it is the key to program building, even in this rapidly changing era.
“Developing your homegrown talent is going to be the differentiator as we move forward,” he told “GameDay.” “The new zero is the [revenue sharing] number. What’s going to be the separator is what you get with real NIL and then how your staff builds relationships.”
His pitch to MSU recruits/portal transfers will be that the “better you get as a player internally, the more money you’re going to get. This is not rocket science.”
Which is funny because Fitzgerald joked on the podcast that he now has a “Ph.D” in college football’s new ecosystem. This, no doubt, is another reason Batt wanted him, to help sync up – and raise up – NIL money with all of the moving parts within a program these days.
A man for the future?
A coach can’t just coach. Or even just recruit and develop. A coach has to manage and oversee an operation that lets prospective players envision not only how they fit in on the field, but how their skill set translates to a dollar figure, and how that money fits into the larger pie.
Fitzgerald made his case to MSU that he is a man for the future in this way, and that his past – all those years at Northwestern, both playing and coaching – will help take the Spartans into the future, too.
He knows the Midwest, after all. Knows the Big Ten in his bones. Even better, he can explain it, and will have something to say when the Michigan game arrives next fall.
That matters, too. Maybe more than anything else.
A college football coach, for better and for worse, is not just the face of the program, but often the face of the university. That face has to smile sometimes, and charm. And that face has to sell.
A vision. Belief. The future.
Smith, as much as he connected with his players (as evidenced by their reaction after Saturday’s win), struggled to communicate all three. And in this era of the quick turnaround, the lack of obvious and public charisma ended his time in East Lansing almost as much as the losses.
Now comes a man who can tell a story – and has a story to tell.
“The old era is dead,” he told “GameDay,” “you have to evolve. If you’re a head coach who doesn’t understand that, your days are limited.”
Fitzgerald sounds like he gets it. We’ll see if he does.
In this new era, he won’t get long to prove it.
Contact Shawn Windsor: swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him @shawnwindsor.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan State football and Pat Fitzgerald need each other
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