Is anyone else not that scared of Tucker long term at MSU
November 19th, 2021 at 3:02 PM ^
We never learn.
November 19th, 2021 at 4:22 PM ^
Clearly MSU sees something in him. We would be stupid to say it was pure luck that the running back he specifically recruited and landed is a Heisman candidate. I’m not so sure it’s time to be comfortable with Mel Tucker. Maybe try winning against him first.
November 19th, 2021 at 4:40 PM ^
Do they actually recruit now through portal? Is that called recruiting? I didn't realize that.
Also, what winning against him got to do with commenting on him? Unless we beat him, we can't say negative things about him?
I guess the coaches who had him were dumb and didn't know how good he is and they recruited him. But Mel knew it just by looking at game film. I am not buying that.
November 19th, 2021 at 6:44 PM ^
It is recruiting from the portal yes. These kids have multiple suitors. What would you say happened to Xavier Worthy? He just had a vision quest and went to Texas? Without anyone recruiting him?
You can comment on Tucker or whatever and I can disagree. Some say he’s just lucky, maybe he is. But that is one heck of a turn around. A turn around that required turning over 40 spots on the roster. So maybe he got really lucky a lot. Or maybe he’s good and has good coaches around him.
calling him lucky, until proven true, just comes across like a sour grapes little bro move.
If Tucker does end up being a really good coach it sure would suck. He’s basically the total opposite of Harbaugh on paper and Harbaugh certainly looked like the best chance to win championships. More evidence that we might be living in a 14 yo Ohio St. fan’s simulation.
November 19th, 2021 at 7:31 PM ^
I just wasn't sure if the effort through portal is also called recruiting. I genuinely have not heard it being called that. I find it difficult to differentiate between high school to College and a transfer portal because rules are different. Mel did not recruit many of the skilled players on that team.
I find the comment being overly positive on finding one RB when the overall defense didn't improve at all. It does not mean Mel is not going to be a good coach. One just doesn't know yet. Calling him good when the jury is still out sounds like BPONE and ready to equate positive event that happens at MSU as some kind of a skill with MSU coaches, when it implies that M sucks.
November 19th, 2021 at 9:32 PM ^
MSU beat us because Tucker out coached us. Walker is great but if you think all of their success is due to him, you’re delusional. It takes a good coach to take a bunch of random parts from the portal after being left with nothing from Dantonio and make them work together. It takes a good coach to recognize we couldn’t handle tempo and shove it down our throats. Watch the film, our guys were not coached well on stopping Walker. Nebraska, Maryland, and IU kept him under 5 yards a carry. The only team that did worse on containing him than us(8.6ypc)is Northwestern. And that’s a list that includes Western Kentucky.
November 19th, 2021 at 10:20 PM ^
No, MSU beat us because the officials re-officiated a play that completely changed the course of the game.
They want to pay Tucker that much money to hold on to him? Hope they're prepared for the questions as early as tomorrow.
November 20th, 2021 at 12:56 AM ^
There’s always an excuse. Every year. What was it last year? We lost because we gave up 37 points. 33 should’ve been plenty.
November 20th, 2021 at 2:16 PM ^
A fact does not equal an excuse, in fact both points could be true: 33 points should've been enough, of course we also scored 37 points but hey, let's not get in the way of your narrative.
They want to pay him NINETY FIVE MILLION DOLLARS for running last chance U and assume he's going to be able to sustain any kind of success that way? More power to 'em.
Best thing about that game is it completely doesn't matter to anything Michigan wants to accomplish this year. Beat Maryland.
November 20th, 2021 at 10:09 AM ^
Both are true. The officials screwed us. MSU used tempo to a massive advantage. MSU stayed strong and came back when down 16. Tucker/Tucker's staff found a key advantage to leverage against us and, with the help of the refs, beat us. A year after picking one key weakness (CBs deep) and exploiting it. He's game planned well for us and assembled a team with enough talent to hold up against us. Whether this continues, time will tell.
November 20th, 2021 at 10:40 AM ^
We scored 3 points lost a 30-14 lead in the second half. That overturned touchdown should not have had an impact on the game. We blew it.
November 20th, 2021 at 11:29 AM ^
ERdoc, I'm sure trailing us 30-14 in the 3rd quarter was all part of his master plan. They got a huge play from Walker, their crowd got involved, and they assumed the momentum. It happens frequently in college football. Unfortunately, we came up short with our comeback bid.
November 19th, 2021 at 4:45 PM ^
We would be stupid to say it was pure luck that the running back he specifically recruited and landed is a Heisman candidate
If it wasn't luck, then why aren't any of the other players he snatched up Heisman-caliber players? He did, after all, grab 14/22/126 or however many players, that's a lot of lottery tickets. That defense sure looks like it could have used a few more Aidan Hutchison-level players to shore up that LITERALLY DEAD LAST pass defense. Why didn't he simply find some top notch corners if he's so good at scouting talent? Their OL is porous as shit. Was the portal devoid of decent linemen?
If he finds another Heisman RB in the portal, then we can drop the lucky spiel
November 19th, 2021 at 5:22 PM ^
So your logic here is that Tucker is lucky because he's led a program to a massive turn around very quickly with only ONE Heisman candidate instead of doing it with a bunch of Heisman candidates?
Interesting...
November 19th, 2021 at 10:46 PM ^
Did you miss the point? If he's an amazing talent scout, he wouldn't be depending a single, generational talent because it's impossible to judge who those singular generational talents are before they become said players (or else Saquon Barkley would been in a bidding war as a high school kid rather than committing to Rutgers initially) and you generally need a whole team of good guys to win conference championships, not one.
If he was an amazing judge of talent, a majority of those 14 players would be decent additions with a few standing out above the others. If most have no impact, but A SINGLE ONE is a literal Heisman caliber talent, that means he hit the jackpot.
Not sure what part isn't clear there....
November 19th, 2021 at 3:03 PM ^
My guess is that he continues the same middling rate of success or, if he's as good as MSU wants to believe, he'll be gone despite that 10-year contract and claim that it's a destination job.
November 19th, 2021 at 5:51 PM ^
100%. Even though he said that "MSU is a destination job" (lol) he's gone the minute a primetime program offers. Much like how he left CU for MSU - a slightly above lateral move after dissuading rumors he was leaving
November 19th, 2021 at 3:04 PM ^
This is the reason I am not concerned
November 19th, 2021 at 3:15 PM ^
Shakira tried to warn us that hips don’t lie
November 19th, 2021 at 4:05 PM ^
Right on!
November 19th, 2021 at 5:22 PM ^
I thought I heard Mel talk about decided schematic advantages. Am I right??
November 19th, 2021 at 9:46 PM ^
Good ol’ Front Butt. I miss that guy.
November 19th, 2021 at 10:18 PM ^
For some unbelievable reason I've never heard that term before. I laughed
November 19th, 2021 at 3:04 PM ^
Definition of insanity, right there.
November 19th, 2021 at 3:04 PM ^
I'm not scared, but I'm also not jumping for joy
I thought it was a poor hire at the time. Then, it looked last year like he could at least coach some. Then, recruit pretty well.
Then, this year they are way better than they have a right to be, and he's still a decent recruiter.
Yes, he could flame out, but I think it's even odds that he could be a real good coach.
IMO the money is irrelevant, most programs aren't trying to optimize bang for their buck, they're trying to maximize wins
November 19th, 2021 at 3:06 PM ^
One off years happen. If MSU looks this good again next year, time for a bit of concern.
November 19th, 2021 at 3:07 PM ^
Nope...
November 19th, 2021 at 3:07 PM ^
Tucker's 2-0 against Michigan by a total of 7 points. Embarrassing as Harbaugh rounds the corner to year 8....That being said, he is a farrrrrr cry from what Ryan Day(who always scares me) is doing and I don't expect his wins against Michigan to be sustainable. Problem is at the end of the day, he is 2-0 and Michigan can't say a word until they beat him. My gut tells me that if Michigan played MSU 10x last year and 10x this year, I'd expect Michigan to win 15 of the games(go ahead and call me a slappy).
November 19th, 2021 at 4:03 PM ^
I'm disregarding the entire 2020 season here because obviously.
But Tucker needed a literal Heisman contender at RB (who he lucked into via the portal. If he finds another Heisman in the portal, I might start to consider it not luck) and the 2nd most slanted officiating I've ever seen since the 2016 Ohio State game to beat us by 4. At home. If he's 4-0 against us, maybe I'll start to respect him a bit. Consider how James Franklin recruits at an elite level, had 2 wins in a row (2019-2020) versus us, and beat Ohio State and has a B1G title, but do we fear him? Absolutely not.
Ryan Day, that's a different story. When Mel Tucker is unleashing the best offense in CFB year after year like Day is, then I'll give him respect.
November 19th, 2021 at 4:29 PM ^
I'm in a lot of agreement with this post. Mel Tucker is a solid football coach for sure... He does not strike the proverbial fear in me like Urban Meyer did or Ryan Day does now. Against Michigan, he beat a team in 2020 that didn't even look like they wanted to ride the bus home together, let alone play 60 minutes of football (that's been fixed). And he won this year on a ludicrous whistle with a Heisman trophy candidate he found in the recycle bin. That is not going to happen again.
Quite frankly, I think Dantonio was a more formidable foe than Mel Tucker projects to be. Tucker will be a better recruiter for sure in my opinion, but Dantonio truly hated Michigan with every fiber of his body, and always has dating back to his years as an OSU assisstant. To me, Mel Tucker's distain feels manufactured. Sure, he gets rivalry games, but the utterance of "the University of Michigan" doesnt make his blood pressure spike I don't feel like.
Here's my HAWT take: I am glad Mel Tucker is coming back for the long haul. Come on down to Ann Arbor in '22 Mel, and get the ass beating you are owed after having the first two dropped firmly in your lap.
November 19th, 2021 at 4:21 PM ^
Disagree that Michigan "can't say a word until they beat him," look around this community... many words are said, effusively.
November 19th, 2021 at 4:48 PM ^
An NFL team is gonna swoop in and hire Day right. Right, right?????
November 19th, 2021 at 6:41 PM ^
Hey Slappy!!!
November 19th, 2021 at 3:08 PM ^
He's a good coach. He did hit big in the transfer portal this year. 40 transfer players, one named Walker you may have heard of, but that is not always going to be the case.
Can he build his roster through recruiting? At first glance he got a class ranked around 18, one spot below UM at 17.
He will keep them competitive .
November 19th, 2021 at 9:03 PM ^
40 transfer players?, what are you on ?
14 signed transfer players, all 3 stars .
So 19 recruits + 40 transfers, in your world, a 59 number class, go fish.
Will recruit at UM levels.
November 19th, 2021 at 3:08 PM ^
As a Bears fan, he absolutely sucked as a DC with the bears. He was run out of town here and we haven't looked back.
MSU can have him.
November 19th, 2021 at 3:57 PM ^
Based on what we have seen from him at MSU, defense is not his strong suit.
November 19th, 2021 at 3:09 PM ^
Uggh. Let’s not do this. Is this an RCMB member pretending to be a Michigan fan?
November 19th, 2021 at 4:37 PM ^
Can't be a RCMB member. They didn't bring up Dr. Anderson, say scUM, or create a 400 page post based on a single random tweet that they found disrespectful of their "totally clean and superior in everyway" program
November 19th, 2021 at 3:09 PM ^
While I wouldn't pay him $9.5 mill/year, I think he's fine. He's good enough to be a thorne in UM's side. He's already 2-0 versus UM and is only one spot behind UM in the 2022 recruiting cycle and has already beaten UM for guys like Dillon Tatum & AVS. He's not Nick Saban, but he clearly has done a good job of preparing them for UM and will be a pain in the butt if we don't really focus on them.
November 19th, 2021 at 3:38 PM ^
He didn’t really beat Michigan for either of those recruits. Michigan got tired of waiting for Tatum to commit and moved on months ago. We lost AVS the moment his brother transferred and Michigan never picked back up recruiting him, months later he committed to MSU.
November 19th, 2021 at 3:48 PM ^
This is 100% the case for AVS. It's like saying Indiana beat OSU for Dasan McCullough even though he is going to Indiana because his dad's on the coaching staff.
There are no Gholston/McDowell prospects in this MSU class that Michigan is bummed about.
November 20th, 2021 at 9:07 AM ^
You can rationalize it however you want, but the fact is they are 4-star recruits, we both wanted them, and they got them. MSU has 4 of the top 10 in state recruits compared to UM's one.
November 19th, 2021 at 3:11 PM ^
Not at all worried.
He's a fine coach. If he had to rebuild that dumpster fire he inherited the "normal" way they'd be irrelevant for 5 years...but he didn't have to do it the normal way. Dude changed his roster in one offseason. What, 37 players or some insane number? Even then he pulled a guy from Wake Forrest that can lock down a Heisman with a big game this weekend. That's probably not a recipe for sustained success.
As is, he'll do fine. He'll probably have them on the East hunt most years but he likely isn't turning them into anything too incredible. Worth $9.5M a year? Probably not.
I add qualifiers like "probably" and "likely" because you never know but nothing about him worries me. He's a fine coach, that's it. If anything, Michigan insisting on playing 1984 football will give him a chance in that game every year. I can say that much, that he at least knows what offense is in 2021. I doubt he'll ever start pretending to be his old coach so that alone will probably be enough 40% of the time.
November 19th, 2021 at 4:11 PM ^
Michigan should be worried because we constantly underperform.
There was also nothing special about Dantonio and he handed it to us for a decade.
Tucker is going to be able to recruit. Look at their assistants and look at ours....he is going to be able to recruit. We look like the rich country club team on the sidelines across from them.
November 19th, 2021 at 4:15 PM ^
I think the transfer portal number was more like 20 players. Then the NCAA made a rule change in response to cap it at like 7 players. So his “trick” was a one-time event.
Seems like a good coach, but still not the body of work that normally points to a $95M deal.
November 19th, 2021 at 3:11 PM ^
I've not yet decided on this. On one hand, he is 2-0 against UM which counts for something even if they lucked into the most recent win. He also did well in recruiting transfers and is doing ok in recruiting the 2022 class as MSU is only one spot below UM.
OTOH, will he continue to beat UM? How will he fare against OSU and PSU? Can he win big games on the road? All these questions remain to be answered. Plus, he will no longer be able to get so many transfers at once as going forward I believe you can only bring in 7 in one year?
I don't blame MSU for putting together a package, but IMO they should have waited a few more weeks even though he potentially could get snagged. They're going to pay him money that top coaches make, ones that win championships. At least Harbaugh doesn't have that hanging over his head anymore with the new contract.
At the end of the day this could go either way, they're taking the gamble that they struck gold and to retain him they had to overpay him, although I think they went above and beyond that measure.
November 19th, 2021 at 4:55 PM ^
I'd add one more question: Would he be in this position if he hadn't stumbled onto Walker? Tucker should give half of his money to him, because his running skills hide other talent issues on the team. Lousy pass defense, so-so OL to name a couple. Even much of Thorne's success has much to do with Walker forcing defenses to stack in the box to try to stop him. Haven't heard it discussed, but is Walker gone after this season? If so, we may soon find out what Tucker's got.
Much too soon to say what kind of coach he'll be based on the small sample size, but as said by someone's comment above, raiding the transfer portal every year isn't very sustainable. He struck it rich in the portal this year, good for him, but MSU can't claim to know what kind of coach he really is, especially after the Purdue game. Regardless, even if he takes the program down the dumper and they part ways down the road, MSU's money will still spend, and as the old saying goes regarding fools and their money, it would be pretty satisfying to see those two reported big MSU donors part ways with theirs.
November 19th, 2021 at 3:13 PM ^
seems solid so far. give the guy some credit. had a pretty empty cupboard thanks to dantinininio.
November 19th, 2021 at 3:15 PM ^
Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.
Sounds about right. Carry on.