CHICAGO – Alessio Milivojevic confidently strode across the stage and sat down on the dais, snappily dressed in a dark colored pinstripe suit that blended into the black table cloth and microphone in front of him.
Any nervousness that he showed last fall as a redshirt freshman who was thrust into the Michigan State football quarterback job also faded with every answer to every question at Big Ten media day. He knows now he is the starter and face of the program going into Pat Fitzgerald’s first season, and Milivojevic’s comfort at the podium came from advice he got recently from his new coach.
“I think it’s just being yourself at the end of the day,” Milivojevic said last week. “I’m just coming up here talking as if I was talking to one of my
best friends right now.”
As the Spartans prepare to open preseason camp on Thursday, Aug. 6, Milivojevic and his 104 teammates will spend the next month building their bonds inside the walls of Case Hall. That’s where they will be living when they are not across Chestnut Road at the football complex working toward Fitzgerald’s debut game against Toledo on Friday night, Sept. 4, across Shaw Lane at Spartan Stadium.
Fitzgerald, a former All-American and College Football Hall of Fame linebacker who spent 17 seasons as head coach at his alma mater Northwestern, flashed back to his days in high school and college. He brought back the tradition of putting the Spartans in the dorms for camp because of the friendships and connections he cultivated as a player and watched as a coach before being dubiously dispatched by Northwestern before the 2023 season.
“I'm just honored to be here, I'm humbled to coach our guys,” Fitzgerald said at Big Ten Media Days. “I love our guys. And it's been so impressive to me, in an era where it's about me, to see our group of guys be about each other. And we've been talking about that since the moment we arrived in East Lansing – we'll only be as strong as our commitment to each other and the relationship we build. And they have to do it.
“We can facilitate this team-building thing or that, that's all cute for social media. But they really gotta pour into each other, and they've done that.”
All eyes are on Fitzgerald as he tries to restore the tarnished reputations both he and MSU have endured over the past three years. He recognized and expressed his admiration for how Curt Cignetti turned Indiana in two seasons into a national champion, but he also knows his situation is different. And the two tenets Fitzgerald talked about when he was hired in December – improving toughness and strength – are among the biggest building blocks he believes will get the Spartans back to a bowl game for the first time since 2021. And returning MSU to the togetherness it won with under Mark Dantonio also is high on his priority list, particularly as camp begins.
“Overall, the culture building has been great,” Milivojevic said. “I think the team, he really wants us to focus on genuine relationship-building. When you have a team, you don’t want to be a ton of individuals, you want to come together as one.”
Milivojevic, who is from Naperville, Illinois, brings the Chicagoland toughness at quarterback that Fitzgerald exuded on the other side of the ball. Last season, when the Spartans lost at Iowa, Fitzgerald watched as Milivojevic was sacked twice and hit hard a number of other times. That came after Milivojevic got dropped seven times in his starting debut at Minnesota, 16 times in his nine appearances overall. But he had MSU within a score of winning both games in a 4-8 season that ended without a postseason trip and with Jonathan Smith’s firing after a two-year tenure.
“I watched 'Less compete in Kinnick last year, and he got his lips absolutely frickin' knocked off. And he kept getting up and getting up and getting up and getting up.”
In short, a model for how Fitzgerald envisions the Spartans this season and beyond.
“I know exactly the play he’s talking about. A 15-yard penalty, by the way,” Milivojevic said. “My mouth may have been bleeding, I may have been coughing up blood. But it’s very cool to hear a guy who’s been through the Big Ten for many, many years as a head coach talk about you like that.
“And now, he’ll be my coach. And I can show him in person how I am a tough guy.”
Reviving the physical and tenacious brand of football Dantonio used to turn MSU into a consistent winner during the late 2000s and 2010s for the first time in nearly 50 years is a priority for Fitzgerald. But so is establishing his own identity for a program that has lacked one in football since Dantonio retired as the Spartans’ all-time winningest coach two months after the 2019 season ended.
There are snippets of Dantonio’s gregarious personality in Fitzgerald, who is charming and quotable and still looks like he could level an oncoming running back. There also is a shared urgency to restore MSU football after two failed coaching experiments, as Nick Saban-acolyte Dantonio did in following Bobby Williams and John L. Smith during seven years of darkness after Saban’s departure.
But, at least for now, there isn’t any of the defiant gruffness Dantonio became beloved for by Spartan fans. He’s more like Tom Izzo, who Fitzgerald said he is leaning on for leadership and guidance in learning his new home and navigating a first season without an athletic director. A beer-and-burger guy, as both Izzo and Fitzgerald have said about school president Kevin Guskiewicz, to potentially give MSU its most aligned top-down academics-to-athletics direction in a decade.
Fitzgerald knows he’s getting a second chance. He’s leaning into his affable personality to win back fans and the football cognoscenti that watched Mel Tucker’s tenure implode and Smith fail to get off the ground or generate any spark the past two years. He called himself “a Big Ten guy” and considered MSU one of the short-list schools where he would fit.
His next step is to build a team to fit that identity that defines who he, Dantonio and Izzo are. True to themselves.
“I'm just trying to be genuine and authentic in who I am,” Fitzgerald said. “I chose to do this again. So I'm just going right down the middle, man. Fastball, right down the middle.”
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him @chrissolari.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Pat Fitzgerald sees toughness MSU football needs in Alessio Milivojevic
