Couch: If the NIL money is there, MSU football under Jonathan Smith can win big. Michigan and Washington just proved it.
EAST LANSING – New Michigan State football coach Jonathan Smith looked and sounded more relaxed Thursday than he did a month ago, like a man who’s getting his feet under him.
His coaching staff is finalized. His roster for next season, while not finished, is no longer in flux — he introduced 11 transfers to the fold Thursday. He’s hoping to have his family join him sometime in February.
“It’s slowed down to an extent. There’s still a lot going on. Feeling more and more established,” he said in his first press conference since signing day in December, which hit barely three weeks after he was hired.
There have been a number of heartening developments for Smith over the past month — from the number of MSU players who withdrew from the transfer portal, choosing to stay and play for him, to the nearly dozen transfers who’ve decided to join his program and the needs that they fill. That includes two quarterbacks, sophomore Aidan Chiles, a heralded transfer from Oregon State, and graduate transfer Tommy Schuster, who played in 45 games in four seasons at North Dakota, both of whom are now enrolled. Chiles stood in the Izzone at Thursday night's MSU men's basketball game.
Also heartening for MSU and Smith in that time frame: Michigan winning a national championship. And beating Washington to do so. Hang with me here. You can cancel your subscription after you finish the column.
There’s nothing enjoyable for the Spartans about the Wolverines winning it all. Nothing that feels good about the harsh truth that your program just lost to both national championship game participants by an obscenely large amount — a combined 90-7 — illustrating the gap between MSU and the mountain top.
But for Smith and his staff — and suffering MSU fans with dreams, living a nightmare — it should be encouraging to see two programs that won without overwhelming five-star talent, two teams that reached that level by developing players and by retaining players and by having the right quarterback and strong coaching staffs.
MSU can be one of those programs. It was — not all that long ago. There is nothing about the Wolverines this season, sans Connor Stallions, that’s all that different than the 2013 or 2014 Spartans. Those who follow MSU have known since then that MSU’s program is capable of winning a national championship. Those who’ve mocked the idea point to the 2015 College Football Playoff semifinal result against Alabama as a convenient reason to dismiss the Spartans’ ceiling. But MSU a year earlier might have won the title, if Ohio State’s J.T. Barrett hadn’t turned into John Elway on a November night at Spartan Stadium. MSU in 2013 would have had a chance at a title, too, had there been a four-team playoff. That team looked a lot like this year’s Michigan team.
Yet in many of the seasons between then and now, it looked like the four-team playoff had squeezed out all but the recruiting elites, those programs that see three-star prospects as steerage. What this year showed was if you have the right quarterback, a stout and experienced offensive line, a veteran defense and several NFL prospects on both sides of the ball, you can get it done.
Washington and Michigan were not made up of unheralded prospects. These were squads born in part from 2019 and 2020 recruiting classes that both ranked in the top 15 nationally and, in Michigan’s case, a 2021 class, in that realm.
But they weren’t at the top. They were both rosters made by a keen eye in recruiting, by development, by picking the right transfers (especially Washington), and by convincing players to stick around with lucrative NIL offerings.
Not easy. But doable at a place like MSU. If the NIL money is there.
“The goal is that, to get it to the highest level, this program here,” Smith said Thursday, in a speaking cadence that sometimes sounds like Yoda from “Star Wars”.
“It can be done that way in regards to developing.”
The 12-team playoff creates more opportunities (and likely further parity). MSU would have made such a playoff, had it existed, six times from 2010 through 2021. Perhaps twice in that span, as mentioned, the Spartans would have had the squad to make a run in it. Getting there occasionally will be the minimum expectation for coaches at programs like MSU's — in the upper half of the Big Ten in terms of resources.
Smith has proven at Oregon State that he can build something, that he and his staff can identify and recruit and develop talent. The question is how much higher is that ceiling at MSU and will MSU have the NIL funds to do it.
I have little doubt that the money will be there for quarterbacks and such. Chiles might have followed Smith from Oregon State, he might have wanted to play for Smith, he might like MSU, but he did not come for free. MSU had multiple NIL collectives willing and ready to step up and pay him.
What’s in question is whether MSU’s donors — high-end and mid-level alike — will support MSU football at the level needed to maintain a roster, to keep players who’ve developed at MSU out of the transfer portal and away from other NIL-driven opportunities.
MSU has a third NIL collective launching soon — Spartan Nation NIL, founded by billionaire and mega-donor Greg Williams. That joins Steve St. Andre’s SD4L collective, which has been the primary NIL fund for MSU basketball and football, and Tom Dieters’ This is Sparta! collective, through Charitable Gift America, which has contracts with 11 MSU sports and allows donors to choose where their money goes (and, because of the charitable component, deduct their gift on their taxes).
Those are three people who care deeply about MSU athletics. But whether there’s enough money and desire in the MSU donor base to support a football program at the level it takes to win these days — projected to be more than $10 million annually in NIL funds at MSU and elsewhere — remains to be seen. That’ll have to truly be a collective effort, one steered partly by the athletic department. The top donors aren't going to do this alone. But those running the collectives also have to be organized, inclusive and patient when seeking help.
I have my doubts. MSU's is not a fan base that aches for football 365 days a year. You won't find another school with fans that care about men's basketball as much as MSU fans do that's also in the mix regularly in football. Not at the top of this year's College Football Playoff rankings. Certainly not Michigan or Washington.
That's OK. But expectations would need to fall in line with limitations.
The best case for MSU would be for a significant level of revenue sharing with athletes — call it NIL or whatever — to come under the athletic department umbrella and budget. MSU is already preparing for that. And that's likely where this is headed relatively soon, per the national conversation from the NCAA, congress and court rulings. MSU would be one of the schools that can afford to live in that world. Its football program would benefit.
Because if the money to play players at a competitive rate is there for Smith's program, winning big at MSU isn’t out of reach. We just saw it from two programs — two Big Ten programs — that were built in the mold Smith would like to build MSU. Two programs that weren't in any better shape than MSU just a few years ago.
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: MSU football: Jonathan Smith can win big, if the NIL money is there.
