Mel Tucker Was Always A Fraud
I've been relatively quiet on social media regarding my thoughts on Mel Tucker. I've tried to save myself from the headache. Because of the team that I root for, most opinions that I have about Michigan State sports will be invalidated by many people. But the dust is starting to settle a little bit. Mel Tucker is no longer the football coach at Michigan State University. I'm not going to get into the legal mumbo-jumbo of all of this. People much smarter than me can handle that. But this era deserves something of a retrospective. It will go down as an anomaly. I can't think of any coach in the state's history whose star shined as brightly and burned out as quickly as Mel Tucker's did.
When Michigan State hired Mel Tucker, I didn't think much of it. He had very little head coaching experience besides a 5–7 season at Colorado. His first year, which many people considered year zero in the Covid season, wasn't successful, but the massive upset win over Michigan earned him a lot of goodwill in East Lansing. Year two was an overwhelming success. Michigan State went 11–2, and while they didn't win the Big Ten, they came pretty damn close, and they got a transcendent season out of Kenneth Walker.
There were whispers about Tucker potentially getting poached by LSU. Michigan State, still traumatized by the Nick Saban departure, gave him one of the most ludicrously stupid contracts in sports history. Even if this scandal doesn't happen, we're still looking back at that contract as being one of the dumbest that's ever been handed out. It will never make any sense to me. I understand Michigan State didn't want a repeat of Nick Saban. Are you telling me Mel Tucker would be the next Nick Saban? Okay, dude.
With a huge contract came huge expectations, and Michigan State took a massive step backward last year. A year later, many Mel Tucker haters are very validated now. Let's be real: Mel Tucker earned himself $95 million because Kenneth Walker had one of the greatest seasons in the history of Michigan State football. Let me take that back: Kenneth Walker had THEE greatest season in the history of Michigan State football. That was a six-win team made up of Mark Dantonio players and one of the best running backs the Big Ten has ever seen. I watched Michigan State last year, and I watched them in the early part of this year before the scandal came to light. Mel Tucker was a terrible in-game coach. His coordinators were trash, his clock management was subpar, and ultimately, his teams lacked the toughness that even some of the weaker teams of the Mark Dantonio era still had.
Despite having subpar seasons in two of his three campaigns, and even though the recruiting wasn't up to snuff the way people expected it to be, Tucker seemed to get a pass until this scandal broke. There's a reason for that. I don't believe any Michigan State fan actually fell in love with Mel Tucker, the football coach. They fell in love with the idea of Mel Tucker. They love the possibility of having the cigar-smoking, fast car-driving, cool football coach that everybody wanted. They felt like they had their Deion Sanders. Here's the difference: Deion Sanders can actually coach. This wasn't some elite coaching mind waiting for the right opportunity. He was a grifter.
When you really break it down, Mel Tucker was always a lousy coach. Just because Nick Saban might've bought you lunch one time doesn't make you an elite recruiter. There are a lot of Michigan State fans right now that feel betrayed, and they should. They bought into this phony image, hook, line, and sinker, and it came back to bite them. That's not an indictment on the fanbase. That is an indictment on Mel Tucker, a master manipulator.
It's impossible to predict the future of Michigan State football. They're in a very delicate spot. I know that many people in East Lansing don't have a lot of faith that the current administration will hire a great coach. The current state of things reminds you why you should enjoy the good old days when you're in them. It may not have ended the way Michigan State fans wanted it to, but Mark Dantonio was the greatest coach in program history. The idea that he was someone who laid the groundwork and the next guy was going to shoot them up into the stratosphere was always a silly notion. Dantonio was their lightning rod. It's not to say that the university can't return to a place where they have a great football program again, but their golden years are very much in the rearview. They are left picking up the pieces because they trusted a fraud.