EAST LANSING — Jay Johnson and Scottie Hazelton always seemed like an odd pairing.
Mel Tucker’s handpicked coordinators looked and sounded completely different. Johnson was clean-shaven with a professorial demeanor. He was exacting and precise with his words. Hazelton, in contrast, had a scraggly ZZ Top beard. He often rambled breathlessly with incomplete thoughts and run-on sentences.
Beyond the press conference room, the incompatibility of the two coordinators revealed itself in other settings, particularly on the field. Johnson couldn’t keep his offense on it and Hazelton couldn’t get his defense off it. It was a recipe for disaster that spelled doom for Michigan State football long before scandal blew apart Tucker’s regime last September.
The irony of it all was that Tucker stressed the importance of playing complementary football, of preserving the alignment between the unit that puts points on the board and the one that tries to stop them from ever being scored.
New Michigan State football head coach Jonathan Smith arrives in Lansing on Sunday, Nov. 26, 2023.
But he could never create that symbiosis. In each of Tucker’s four years, the Spartans finished among the bottom 30 teams of the Football Bowl Subdivision in time of possession. During that same period, the average number of plays they defended was consistently inflated, which is why MSU ranked in the lower half of the FBS in that category throughout Tucker’s term. The game management failures that persisted under Tucker spawned a vicious cycle that caused the defense to hemorrhage and the offense to sputter.
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Johnson’s unit couldn’t sustain drives, which further exposed the vulnerabilities of Hazelton’s ragtag bunch. When they couldn’t get stops, deficits…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/michigan-state-footballs-coordinators-determined-111235626.html
Author : Detroit Free Press
Publish date : 2024-03-07 11:12:35
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