Michigan State Spartans beat reporter Graham Couch, writing in the Lansing State Journal, November 30, 2024
“I hear from MSU fans all the time who say they want and expect a big-time football program that contends for playoff berths and championships. And to the 25,000 or so fans who braved the first snow of the season to watch the 5-6 Spartans play Rutgers on Saturday (Nov 30) at Spartan Stadium, you have every right to want and expect it.
To those hardy souls who stayed until the end of MSU’s 41-14 season-ended loss, the athletic department and football team should send you Christmas cookies. To a lot of the rest of you … I’m not sure you want it badly enough.
I’m not suggesting you should have been at the game — people should do what they want with their time and money. However, people’s expectations for their program should align with how badly they want it and their willingness to help the cause. If you want to be a school that longs for more but doesn’t ache for it, a school that can take refuge in basketball and hockey season each November and forget football for a little while, that’s great. Probably healthy, too. Be that. But being that doesn’t often come with winning football.
I see the argument that if MSU wins, fans will show up again, that this program hasn’t given them any reason to be there. I’ll cite JFK’s famous inaugural address: “Ask not what your football program can do for you. Ask what you can do for your football program.” Or something. If MSU is a program that needs to win nine games for people to show up in a snow globe, that’s OK. But understand that might not be the case at some of the schools you’re trying to compete against.
Apathy doesn’t win. If you’re making a statement with your absence that you’re unhappy with the state of things at the end of Year 1 of the Jonathan Smith era, you’re not making Years 2 or 3 any easier. What happens on the field, behind closed doors in recruiting, and with NIL is significantly more important than the full sections of empty bleachers at Spartan Stadium by the second half of Saturday’s game.
Yet, this was also a final impression at the end of a difficult season — for the 15 to 20 recruits in attendance, for how much MSU football means to the community, and for the players who have to decide whether to stay. And jokes aside, fans should want a lot of these players to stay. It shouldn’t be the driving factor, but 50,000 empty seats and 65,000 after halftime is nothing for someone comparing the passion and energy around one program to another. Butts in seats is one way to show recruits your program can be a vibrant place, especially if you’re demanding more from the program’s recruiting.
MSU football’s current state stinks and it’s not any fan’s fault. But if you’re not showing up and you’re able to, you’re not part of the solution.”
Usually, I agree with Graham Couch by close to 100 percent. Not in this case.
I can’t understand shifting the blame onto fans who have supported the program through numerous years of poor—and mostly mediocre—football performances, with Mark Dantonio’s “glory years” as the recent exception. In addition to paying for costly tickets and donating to MSU Athletics, fans are encouraged to donate so that athletes’ NIL coffers will be filled. Those expenses come when fans also face increasing media costs, including subscription service fees to watch their team play (e.g., NBC Peacock).
Besides, last Saturday’s game started at 3:30 PM during a busy holiday week and was played in cold and snowy weather. Many students had left campus for the Thanksgiving Weekend, and other fans could easily view the game on TV at home or their favorite watering hole.
As I see it, a value-added was necessary to encourage/convince fans to attend. Even with a bowl berth at stake, attending was still a tough sell. Why? The team had lost six of its previous eight games; a win would make MSU just a .500 team; and a loss would give the Spartans a 5-7 record and bid goodbye to the thirteenth game. As it turned out, the Spartans were down 23-7 by halftime and lost 41-14.
Furthermore, let’s not pretend that non-attendance is only a football matter. Yes, it is for some, but for others, it is not. One reason is MSU’s awful institutional history from the Nassar situation forward, a history littered with multiple public black eyes and poor institutional decisions that have been described in various terms, including “a corrosive institutional environment.” As one commentator said, institutions as dysfunctional as MSU don’t get that way by accident. So, right or wrong, MSU has burned some of its goodwill with the fan base.
MSU (and all universities) must understand that sports fans have agency. They can decide whether to buy season or single tickets and offload them if and when they choose not to attend games. Furthermore, they don’t have to automatically like and endorse decisions about the game made by schools, the conferences, the NCAA, and the media.
There’s a lot to like about college football and athletics and a lot to question and dislike. Graham Couch seems to have forgotten the last part.
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This commentary is not meant to criticize or critique head coach Jonathan Smith.
