Michigan State in good hands with nasty Dantonio

CHICAGO -- This is a compliment, so make sure you read it that way: Michigan State football coach Mark Dantonio has some nasty to him.

It's a compliment!

"Yes, he does," Michigan State linebacker Greg Jones said with a nod.

It really is a compliment. And a necessity. Because you're not winning big as a college football coach without some nasty. You're just not. You're not winning big unless you're ruthless like Florida's Urban Meyer, who has run up the score on teams he thought deserved it. You're not winning big unless you're brilliantly clueless like Jim Tressel, who looked the other way while a future felon named Maurice Clarett was flashing neon character signs but scoring enormous touchdowns during the Buckeyes' 2002 national championship season.

The list goes on and on. Pete Carroll? Bob Stoops? Mack Brown? All are vicious, or ruthless, or conniving, in their own way. And they have the national hardware to show for it.

Honestly, I didn't think Dantonio had it in him.

My mistake.

And if you're reading this whole thing as a backhanded insult, stop. Just, stop. This isn't that. This is flattery you're reading, flattery and more than a little surprise -- because when Dantonio was at the University of Cincinnati, I walked out of several of his news conferences thinking to myself, "It's a shame that nice guy's too boring to ever win big."

I won't walk out of Chicago thinking that. And not because Dantonio was mean to me, or to anyone else. He wasn't. But he showed a dimension, an edge, I didn't think he had. And his players talked about that edge.

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"If I was in a car with him," said Spartans kicker Brett Swenson, "I'd let him drive. And I wouldn't touch the radio."

That's not the Dantonio I thought I knew. At Cincinnati, Dantonio was just so darned happy to be there, he would have let his kicker drive the car, pick the station and even sing badly to the music.

After a 7-6 bowl season in Year 1, Mark Dantonio led the Spartans to a 9-4 record and a New Year's Day bowl in Year 2. (AP)

Frankly, I think the Michigan State job has changed him. For the better. It has made Dantonio more ambitious. More cunning. And the rivalry with Michigan has made him more volatile. He doesn't have any of those qualities in abundance -- he's still as decent a man as you'll find in college football -- but he has just enough of those darker qualities to lift Michigan State into the upper level of college football.

This isn't a prediction, mind you. This isn't a story that says, "Michigan State will finish in the top 10 this year, and every year, that Mark Dantonio is the Spartans coach."

No. But this is something that -- at least to me -- is just as shocking:

Michigan State will always have a chance. Not in spite of Mark Dantonio, as I once thought. But because of him.

And the signs were there, if I -- or anyone else -- had been looking hard enough. When he left Cincinnati for Michigan State in November 2006, the first recruit he won to East Lansing, Mich., was an Ohio kid he had been recruiting for the Bearcats. Nasty. Within two weeks, he had stolen two additional verbal commitments from his former school, a perfectly legal but ethically questionable move.

And shortly after that, Dantonio swooped in on a Minnesota recruit who had backed off his verbal pledge to the Gophers after that school fired Glen Mason. Dantonio moved in on the kid, whom he had tried to recruit to Cincinnati, and got him. His name is Greg Jones. He's the 2009 preseason Defensive Player of the Year in the Big Ten.

Nasty. But beautiful.

In his first season, Dantonio was tooling along like Dantonio does. He was making no waves, no enemies, no headlines. Michigan State was decent, that's all. The Spartans were 5-4. Unremarkable. So very ... Dantonio.

And then came the Michigan game, Dantonio's first as coach at Michigan State. It was Nov. 3, 2007. It was a 28-24 loss, Michigan State's third in a row, and afterward, Michigan's Mike Hart called Michigan State the Wolverines' "little brother" and Michigan's players knelt at midfield -- the game was at East Lansing, mind you -- and held a moment of silence for the vanquished Spartans. Granted, Michigan was mocking Dantonio after he had offered to hold a moment of silence for the Wolverines after their loss earlier in the season to Appalachian State, but Dantonio wasn't letting it go.

In a series of moments immortalized on YouTube -- I recommend you watch; Dantonio won me over with this damn clip -- Dantonio mocked the 5-foot-8 Hart by holding his hand at chest level, and then methodically ripped Michigan a new rear end.

"I find a lot of things they do amusing," he said, his voice never rising. "They need to check themselves sometimes. Let's just remember -- pride comes before the fall ...

"They wanna mock us? I'm telling them -- it's not over. They can print all that crap all they want all over their locker room. It's not over. It'll never be over here."

Long pause.

"It's just started."

Nasty. Beautiful. On Tuesday, Dantonio acted almost sheepish about those clips, saying, "Let's just say I lost a little control." But he was smiling when he said it. Smiling proudly, too.

The Spartans rang up 48 and 35 points in winning their next two games, against Purdue and Penn State, to reach the Champs Sports Bowl. They lost to Boston College there to finish the 2007 season at 7-6, but a corner had been turned. Michigan State went 9-4 last season and played in a New Year's Day bowl.

Since then, Dantonio has taken Michigan to the woodshed in state recruiting, capitalizing on the Wolverines' coaching change and 3-9 slump in 2008, but also squeezing the best players out of the state while second-year U of M coach Rich Rodriguez casts more of a recruiting eye toward familiar grounds like Florida and Ohio.

Dantonio refuses to be a mere annoyance. A pebble in Michigan's shoe? He wants to be a rock upside the head, and he'll have to be. Michigan State is basically a basketball school in a football league, and it is definitely Michigan's little brother. Overcoming both of those won't be easy. And then overcoming that, plus Penn State, and then Ohio State? That might just be impossible.

Only a coach with a little bit of malice in his heart could make it happen.

Turns out, Michigan State has just such a coach.

It's a compliment, people.