EAST LANSING – It was the kind of gut punch that would have floored Michigan State football each of the past few years, when a losing identity started to infect a once-proud program that had sunk deeper into the abyss. The fourth quarter had just begun Friday, and Toledo, the Spartans’ first opponent of the Pat Fitzgerald era, trailed by only five points despite running only three plays on MSU’s side of the field. A fourth-down stop gave the Rockets a little momentum boost.
On the second play of the ensuing drive, Connor Walendzak took the handoff, surged through a gap and turned on the afterburners as he sprinted into open space. Seventy-one yards beyond where his run began, he crossed the goal line. In a flash, Toledo had taken a one-point
lead.
The crowd at Spartan Stadium recoiled in horror, with a few shrieks of dismay. It was an understandable reaction.
The green-and-white die-hards had seen this before. They lived through the disaster against Indiana in 2022, when the Spartans blew a 17-point lead in the second half. They saw the slow-motion collapse that doomed MSU at Iowa a year later. They then watched MSU fritter away a potential road win against Boston College the following season. Last November, they witnessed MSU give up a late lead before succumbing to Minnesota in overtime. On and on it went. The meltdowns kept happening no matter who was in charge, whether it was Mel Tucker, interim coach Harlon Barnett or Jonathan Smith. Was the next one about to happen to Fitzgerald in his first game? It seemed possible after Walendzak scored.
“I wasn’t sure when adversity was going to strike,” Fitzgerald said Friday, Sept. 4, after his team’s 30-20 victory. “But it did right then and there. And I wanted to see a response.”
He got the one he desired.
Down 20-19, the Spartans regained possession and then promptly marched down the field with Alessio Milivojevic, their plucky redshirt sophomore quarterback, leading the charge. Three consecutive completions and a personal-foul penalty carried the Spartans inside the red zone. It seemed right then and there MSU was about to wrest the lead back.
Then the offense stalled again in Toledo territory. It had been an issue all night and put them in this uncomfortable position, where they had suddenly found themselves in the upset danger zone. Up until this point, MSU had already made it inside Toledo’s 40-yard line seven times. Yet, despite their repeated advances, the Spartans managed to produce just one touchdown and four field goals in the first 49 minutes of regulation.
“We had a lot of drives we couldn’t capitalize when we should have,” receiver Rodney Bullard Jr. said.
The problem had started to fester. But there was fear it was about to reach calamitous proportions with MSU on its heels in this final stage of the game. Three straight plays netted just 9 yards, and the Spartans were suddenly thrust into a fourth-and-1 situation at Toledo’s 5-yard line. The safe play was to settle for a field goal. Fitzgerald, though, chose to roll the dice and go for it.
Milivojevic took the snap from shotgun, rolled right, scanned the scene in front of him and then fired a pass to the back of the end zone. Bullard, standing in a vacant zone, grabbed it, and the Spartans exhaled. The touchdown put them back in front, 25-20. A two-point conversion gave them a little more cushion with 10:37 left in regulation.
Fitzgerald’s gamble had paid off with the biggest jackpot possible.
“I’m not going to be reckless, but I’m going to be aggressive,” Fitzgerald said.
As he explained, “Scared money doesn’t make money.”
At a program that has had four straight losing seasons and has gone 31-37 since Mark Dantonio’s retirement, Fitzgerald is trying to seed bleief and nurture a winning mindset. That will take time. But the three-minute, 10-second sequence between the touchdowns scored by Toledo's Walendzak and MSU's Bullard should help galvanize Fitzgerald’s effort. It was during this critical segment of the game that the Spartans showed resiliency and resolve.
“You have to respond to win,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s tried, true and tested in every athletic competition. It’s never going to be a yellow brick road to success. It could be injury. It could be bad plays. It could be coaching, whatever it might be. You’ve got to be able to respond to it.”
The test of adversity came suddenly and unexpectedly after MSU controlled the game for so long. Through three quarters, the Spartans had a 20-minute time of possession advantage and outrushed Toledo 116 yards to 2. Then, without warning, Walendzak delivered a haymaker with his 71-yard dash to the end zone, giving Toledo an improbable lead. In the stands, the unease was palpable. But on the sideline, there was a much different feeling – one that suggests that Michigan State, under Fitzgerald, may be on the verge of shedding its losing identity.
“I think there was unwavering faith that we were going to win that game,” Milivojevic said. "I think the entire time we knew this is our game … and we’re going to go out there and take it. So, when they hit that play, we rallied the troops, we went out and we drove down and scored a touchdown.”
Ten minutes later, they were 1-0.
Contact Rainer Sabin at rsabin@freepress.com. Follow him @RainerSabin on X.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Why MSU's response vs Toledo gives hope Spartans have shed losing DNA
