EAST LANSING – What would a “measuring stick” performance for Michigan State football against Notre Dame look like before Big Ten play begins the following week?
Pat Fitzgerald countered with a more existential question.
“Can you define what that means?” the first-year coach said Monday, Sept. 14. “I don’t know what that means. It’s like ‘guns ablazing.’ What does that mean?”
The term was then defined as what – beyond a win – are the two or three things he wants to see from the 2-0 Spartans as they take the road for the first time to face the No. 3 Irish (2-0). But Fitzgerald’s attention wasn’t even on traveling to the college football mecca in South Bend, Indiana.
He’s worried more about matters much closer to home and a to-do checklist that must begin well before packing for Saturday's game (7:30 p.m., NBC).
“I want to see us have a really frickin’ good Tuesday practice,” he said.
In other words, competing in its final nonconference game against an elite program – one which played for a College Football Playoff title two years ago – will come down to how focused MSU is on the details in preparation. And if the Spartans want to get to the level he envisions in a conference that has produced the last three national champions, it doesn't start with the results of the games or even individual plays.
Which Fitzgerald admitted “may sound simple” but is the bedrock of getting the Spartans back to the upper echelon of the Big Ten and CFP title chases.
“I didn’t like the way we do certain drills in practice. We did not do a couple of those very well last Tuesday, and so now I’m ripping a guy’s ass about the way we’re practicing and approaching a Tuesday [more] than about the play,” he said. “To me, again, it was a mindset. Then all of a sudden, we snap into it – I don’t believe in snapping out of it, we snapped into it. Then after practice last Tuesday, it’s, ‘Don’t make me have to coach you that way, I don’t want to coach you that way.’
“Yeah, man. Do I get fired up about preparing a team? I do. And I think the process of that, that gets you prepared for the opportunity. And the opportunity then is a result of that preparation and your performance. And you have no opportunity to perform at your highest level unless you prepare.”
Fitzgerald elaborated on some of the things he did not like coming out of Saturday’s 35-7 MSU win over Eastern Michigan, both with how staff prepared the team and his players' execution.
He called the Spartans’ special teams units “a work in progress” that is “not there yet fundamentally.” He saw “extracurricular nonsense” at the end of plays that could turn into penalties if it isn’t cleaned up. He even did not like the response he saw from the late-week scrimmages of his “B” team of young players the first two weeks, so he moved it up to Monday morning. That shift to “front-load” this week, he felt, will help Fitzgerald and his staff better assess the 80 players from the 105-man roster they will take to Notre Dame Stadium, the guys they believe give them the best chance to deliver an upset.
“It doesn’t matter who we play, if it’s Eastern Michigan or Notre Dame. We expect they’re going to be well-prepared, we expect they’re going to play well, we expect they’re going to be very talented. Good, put that aside,” he said. “All that matters is how we go about what we do and how we do it. It’s always gonna be about us, and that will be our focus.”
Fitzgerald owns upset two wins at Notre Dame, one as a player in 1995 with Northwestern, as a 28-point underdog, and one as the Wildcats' coach in 2014, as a 17-point underdog. This time around, the Irish are 29½-point favorites over Fitzgerald's Spartans this week.
Odds, however, mean nothing to Fitzgerald, who was an All-American linebacker en route to the College Hall of Fame as a player, as well as the Big Ten coach of the year in 2018 and the Bobby Dodd national coach of the year in 2020.
“We believe we can win every game. We believe that,” Fitzgerald said. “If I gotta convince guys of that, then they should get out of the locker room and go somewhere else. And please, recruits, don’t come here unless you want to compete and win Big Ten championships and compete for a national championship. You’d be coming to play for the wrong team and the wrong head coach.
“That’s our expectation, that’s our standard. We’re not there, but we’re gonna work our butts off to get there.”
Notre Dame, under fifth-year coach Marcus Freeman, is already at that point.
The Irish haven't allowed a point in their past five quarters, covering the final frame of a a 41-13 victory over Wisconsin at Lambeau Field in Green Bay and all of Saturday’s 52-0 blowout of Rice. They lost to Ohio State in the CFP championship game after the 2024 season but were snubbed by the CFP committee last year despite going 10-2.
Freeman took over a Notre Dame program that had won 10 games or more in six of the seven seasons before he took over for Brian Kelly in 2022. Fitzgerald inherits an MSU program that has missed a bowl game in five of six seasons since its all-time winningest coach, Mark Dantonio, retired in February 2020.
Dantonio won four of his nine games against the Irish, including twice in South Bend. And Fitzgerald has not been shy of wanting to get his program back into the same stratosphere with those Dantonio teams and Freeman's Notre Dame squad.
“It is my job to put together the structure, the discipline, the organization and the effort to play the Spartan way for four straight quarters on every rep. And we are nowhere close to that right now,” Fitzgerald said. “That’s where our focus is, knowing that we are playing an unbelievably well-coached, unbelievably talented team in a very difficult environment. Great – let’s go get prepared for it.
“I’m just trying to instill this mindset into everybody.”
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him @chrissolari.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Pat Fitzgerald focused on 'Spartan way' to get ready for Notre Dame
