DotComp: Michigan State’s Harlon Barnett does not walk alone; that’s why he still has a chance

East Lansing, Mich. – It is awkwardly early for a coach to conduct a straw poll of his players following a September loss, to ask them whether anyone wants to abandon the campaign. But that’s what Michigan State acting head coach Harlon Barnett did on Saturday. And he was smart to do it.

When the Spartans came back to the locker room after Saturday’s 31-9 loss to Maryland, Barnett posted everyone up. He asked if there was anyone in the room who felt the season was over. Was there anyone who “wanted to be out of here.”

“Raise your hand,” Barnett told them. “There’s no love lost if you leave. You can move on. It’s no problem.”

Nobody raised their hand. Of course they didn’t. Not when surrounded by brothers in football warfare like this, after a loss like that, during a month like this. 

Then Barnett was pleased, and a little surprised, by what happened next. Players on the team, leaders of the team, echoed Barnett’s roll call. 

“If anybody feels like we can’t get it done, and get this turned around,” someone said, “go ahead and walk and leave.’”

Again, no one left. It was a safe play for Barnett, and a poignant one. It was a bonus that team leaders backed him up. They left the locker room and the stadium eager to get back to work on Sunday and Monday. Still confident.

The timing of Barnett’s “friends, Spartans, countrymen” speech is important. Four games have been played. Once you play a fifth regular season game, you can’t redshirt.  

If any player wants to shut it down and preserve redshirt status – like Connor Heyward did in 2019 – the following days will be critical to the decision, prior to game five. There might be one or two who choose that route. But it might be harder for them to do it after Barnett’s postgame plea.

It’s not that this team would be hurt by one or two players leaving. What’s more important is a strong, unanimous will to stay among those who stay. If Barnett has that in the locker room, they still have a chance. And that’s his only chance.

Another checkpoint is coming up soon. For the first 30 days after Mel Tucker is officially fired, beginning early this week, players will be able to enter the transfer portal. That doesn’t mean they can transfer to another school right now. That’s impractical, with classes already four or more weeks into fall semester at most schools.

Entering the portal after a coach is fired allows coaches from other schools to contact these players, legally. That doesn’t necessarily mean players will leave. Heyward entered the portal in the fall of 2019, but returned to MSU in the spring of 2020. There likely will be a few who put their names in the portal in October, just to get everything out in the open.

Many players on the team are already hearing from representatives of others schools about transferring. That’s illegal tampering, of course. But there are no tampering cops on this college football highway. Entering the portal, whether a player has decided to leave or not, just makes all the conversations legal.

Michigan State played the 2021 Chick-fil-A Bowl with a few players in the transfer portal. Some of them stayed the following year. Ben VanSumeren participated in spring practice in 2022 while in the transfer portal, and then elected to stay.

If players enter the portal in the coming days, I’m sure Barnett will welcome them to stick with the team and keep slugging. And it’s a good bet he can get them focused.

Barnett has this thing about him. He sees the good in people. He sees the best in people. He is expecting these guys to be the type of Spartans he played next to in the 1980s. And there will be some players that won’t want to let him down, even if they are just now getting to know him.

Barnett didn’t recruit this roster. He had a hand in recruiting some of the defensive backs, but he’s stayed in his lane as an assistant coach for the past three and a half years.

After Tucker’s suspension, and heading into his impending dismissal, Barnett was named acting head coach. He spent the past two weeks having five-minute sit-downs with each player on the roster, just to get to know more about them, look them in the eye, get a feel for their hearts and minds. In the process, they gained a sense for his teaching, mentoring football soul. This guy is genuine. They see that. They need that.

So when it came time for his post-game speech, he had them at “Listen up. All eyes on me.”

The timing was good. They lost another game by at least three touchdowns. But this time, they knew they were as good as the other team. Heck, they think they’re better than Maryland. That’s not saying a lot. Maryland is pretty good, not great. But the Spartans know they won a lot of downs and snaps in this game. You might not think that’s a big deal. But a team knows when it’s a few eliminated mistakes away from being right in this game, 3-1, and feeling pretty good about things. He didn’t have to sell them on that.

Barnett has stated that he wants to demonstrate he’s the man for the long-term, permanent head coaching job at Michigan State. The chances of that happening are diminishing. Michigan State still has games coming up against Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State. Michigan State needs to upset Iowa, in most peoples’ estimations, just to have a chance to go 7-5.

When watching Barnett speak and work, you don’t get the idea he is stumping for this job. That doesn’t come natural to him. Battling for the honor and pride of Michigan State? That comes natural to him. That’s pure. And that’s what he’s doing.

He doesn’t want to see this team and this season spiral downward toward the 3-9 despair the program experienced in 2016. At least that season was sandwiched around a 12-2 season and a 10-3 season. But this year’s team is in danger of becoming the first set of Michigan State teams to miss the postseason for two consecutive years since ’04, ’05 and ’06 during the John L. Smith era.

In danger of becoming the first? In danger? Is that a phrase we should be using in September? The team is 2-2. Barnett’s 1987 Rose Bowl team began 1-2 with two blowout losses.

This team isn’t in the same stratosphere as the ’87 team, but Barnett is appealing to the same type of camaraderie and brotherhood that that team had. He’s hoping this team has some of that fabric within it. He doesn’t know for sure. But he believes in the good football soul of most players. If you have something like that in your heart, he feels he can bring it out, wring it out, and make something good from it.

That’s why he hasn’t lost that smile.

I’ve covered lame duck coaches before. Several of them. At some point, they get beaten down and depressed, and get overrun by a feeling of helplessness. Barnett isn’t close to that. He’s had a great career either way. And he’s going to be a Spartan at the end of this year’s journey, either way. So he’s good. He’s fine. He’s working for this team, for the program, and in the process, I guess, for the head coaching job, because it’s his dream. But to him, this team is more important than that dream. That’s just the way he’s wired. He’s not a self-promoter. He’s a football grinder from Cincinnati Princeton High School. And Saturday night ended with him in front of a copy of the game film, reviewing it and grading it a couple hours after the stadium emptied. It was going to be that way regardless of long-term aspirations. Film review revealed the progress that is made in blocking, tackling, discipline, but regression in taking care of the ball.

He still thinks there’s a good football team in there somewhere. I wasn’t as sure after reviewing video of the Washington game. There were loose screws all over the place that day.

This game against Maryland was spoiled by five turnovers. The dangerous decision-making of Noah Kim was unnerving, although mixed with his unquestionable talent. Kim’s decison-making is the one thing that will be the hardest to correct, going forward. He can study film, and work on routes and throws in practice, but he’s going through a learning process at the position that some are never able to master, even those with excellent arm talent.

He’s started only four games. Kirk Cousins had plenty of messy moments four starts into his college career. Michigan State invested three starting seasons in him, and the talent eventually shined.

The program, and the current regime, doesn’t have that kind of time to wait and cultivate Kim. Cousins barely won the job after splitting time equally with Keith Nichol for a month in 2009. Nichol was good. Hell, Nichol might be an NFL quarterback right now if that QB competition in 2009 had swung the other way. And it was that close.

Kim throws a prettier ball than back-up Katin Houser. He out-dueled him in practice during the spring and August camp. But maybe Houser is a gritty gamer, like Drew Stanton. At some point in the coming weeks, we may begin to find out if he is.

The Spartans tightened a few of the loose screws that were rattling around during the horrific loss to Washington. Players told me that the practice week prior to Washington, in the wake of the Tucker news, was not a productive one. That’s understandable.

Practice was better in preparation for this Maryland game, and it showed, if you looked closely. Maryland came into the game ranked No. 1 in the Big Ten in total offense at 480 yards per game. Quarterback Taulia Tagovailoa is firecracker.

Michigan State held him to 21 of 36 passing, for 223 yards, with one interception.

For the maligned Michigan State defense to contain Tagovailoa the way it did, and to hold Maryland to 362 yards, is noteworthy progress. And they did it with a defense in the second half that mixed zone, man-to-man, blitzes, and zone pressures. It was a pretty good array, considering that the defensive backfield in the second half was made up of Dillon Tatum, Chance Rucker, Armorion Smith and Malik Spencer – who had seven combined career starts coming into this game. They are the least-experience secondary in the Big Ten. They played pretty well, against the league’s No. 1 statistical offense.

There are no moral victories in this business, but there were some checkpoints that Michigan State crossed in this game. The Spartans’ running game had some success too, although a fourth-and-one run play at the goal line in the first quarter was a mistake.

Michigan State can crack a 10- or 15-yard ground gainer between the 20-yard lines here and there. But when it’s time to push a Bear front off the line of scrimmage in a nut-crunching, fourt-down, goal line situation, this team should know it’s not there yet. And may never be, this season.

That decision might have cost Michigan State 7 points, to go along with the 7 the Spartans lost when Montorie Foster failed to haul in a 29-yard TD pass late in the second quarter, and the lost 7 when Kim overthrew a wide open Foster on what should have been a 76-yard TD pass in the third quarter.

As is the case with most losses I’ve covered through the decades, it’s not hard to find the missing points in a small handful of plays, even in a blowout loss like this.

But this was unique in that it was a blowout loss that Michigan State could have won. I haven’t witnessed many of those. But this was one of them. And that’s what made Barnett’s speech believable to the players in the locker room.

They lost. But they are not defeated.

When Michigan State fell behind 21-0, I expected to see a visible departure. I expected sulking, fragmentation and division. Instead, we witnessed the opposite. The sideline was jacked, pumped, united. They thought they were going to come back and win the game – and for good reason. They were just as good as Maryland, if not better, despite what the scoreboard said in the third quarter.

The Spartans played well enough to come back and make this a tight game, if a couple of plays had gone differently. It was kind of impressive – but only if they can build on it and eliminate the fat.

And if they eliminate the fat, they can beat Iowa. And Rutgers, Indiana, Minnesota and Nebraska. That’s a doubtful run, not because those teams are good, but because this is a Spartan team that hasn’t shown it can do anything with consistency.

But I’m not doubting their will, right now. And I think Barnett can keep them centered and progressing.

“We have a team of competitors,” Barnett said. “When you’re a competitor, you always are trying to get better and right the ship.”

And he’s willing to go down with that ship. The players know that, and respect him for it. That’s why they’re re-committed to making sure it won’t happen. And I think they have a chance to see it through. 

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