The New Same Old Michigan State Spartans

“The team will play better when the coach gets players that understand his way of doing things."

This now famous refrain of the Michigan football fan since last December has morphed from the "objective hope" of wanting Christmas Day to come into the "anxious hope" that comes with wanting and praying for the end of April 15th (or Friday the 13th?).

More remarkable than the spectacular ruination of this optimism for fans of the Wolverines is that the most appropriate application of this hope was never Michigan football to begin with. Since before that December day when the Wolverines hired Rich Rodriguez, and even more so right now, it is a better description of Michigan State and Mark Dantonio.

Two years ago next month, the Spartans were on their way to being a demoralized 4-8 football team with a fired head coach and an uncertain future that likely didn't include a postseason anytime soon. But one year later—one year ago—they had become a 7-5 team headed to a bowl game and had lost no game by more than a touchdown.

Using whatever new recruits were willing to take a chance on a reclamation project, and motivating what remained of the guys that had won just four times the year before, Mark Dantonio and his staff had whipped somebody else's players, used to somebody else's system, into his team—winners—in just 12 months.

Best of all, they were getting noticeably better as time went on, with their comeback win as underdogs against Penn State to end the regular season arguably being their most impressive performance of the year.

At this point, Spartan fans were justified in upgrading their expectations. It was reasonable to conclude that the 2008 season could step up a notch from there.

With full confidence that Michigan State had a real winner of a coach, my version of boundless optimism this spring was to predict an 8-4 season with a fourth-place finish in the Big Ten, noting that a "better team than last year is playing a much tougher schedule."

In that prediction linked above, I expected the four defeats to be against Cal, Ohio State, Wisconsin, and Penn State. But halfway through those projected failures, and for the second season in a row, I am again forced to set aside more reasonable pessimism and mutter in amazement that the "team will play better when the coach gets players that understand his way of doing things."

Wondering how many more pleasant surprises are in store for a Spartan team that is punching above its weight is turning into a regular holiday tradition. You could almost start referring to it as the "Same Old Spartans."

With perhaps only one exception—Northwestern last season—these new "Same Old Spartans" have won every game that they should have been expected to win. Last year, against Wisconsin, Michigan, and maybe on the road at Iowa, they found ways to lose winnable games against teams that were their equal or better.

This year, they have evolved another step, finding ways to beat teams that outplay them—even potentially better teams—such as Iowa and now Wisconsin.

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