CHICAGO – Pat Fitzgerald returned to the city that he called home for most of his life. In a few days, he and his wife, Stacy, will move into their East Lansing-area home.
Right as his first season as Michigan State’s football coach moves into preseason mode.
“We’re trending and moving in a direction we need to move,” Fitzgerald said of his team and program during Big Ten media days on Wednesday, July 29. “Now, the last phase of that four-quarter offseason – winter workouts, spring ball, summer – that fourth quarter is the most important. Which is training camp.”
The 51-year-old Fitzgerald preached about reviving the toughness of the Mark Dantonio era and working to end the Spartans’ decade-long drought since their last Big Ten title in 2015. Competing
for championships, he said, drives him as much as dispelling doubt from his dubious departure from his alma mater, Northwestern.
“I expect to win every game,” he said, with a Dantonio-esque assertiveness. “If we don't, I'm pissed.”
Which may be easier said than done for a program making its third coaching change since 2020 and with a once-again reworked roster that has the 42nd-lowest returning team production from a year ago (46%) out of 138 Football Bowl Subdivision teams, according to ESPN.
MSU is picked to finish 17th in the 18-team Big Ten, according to USA Today's preseason poll, and 16th in the Cleveland.com media picks. ESPN’s FPI rankings list the Spartans at 16th among league teams and 65th nationally, projecting between 4-5 wins and with a 0.8% chance of returning to the now-expanded College Football Playoffs for the first time since it was at four teams in 2015.
“I don’t really look at that outside stuff. I mean, it is what it is,” senior safety Nikai Martinez said Wednesday. “Indiana, probably nobody though of them when they went to (CFP in 2024) and then won it (in January). You never know until you know. You don’t know who’s gonna be who.”
Asked if he had seen the predictions and projections and if he’s tried to block out that noise from his players, Fitzgerald began with a long, silent pause and a glare.
“I can read,” he replied laconically. “Yeah, it’s OK. It’s not my first rodeo. Somebody’s gotta be placed where they were placed. It’s fine. We’ll roll the ball out and go play.”
The Spartans went 4-8 last season and are 33-38 overall since Dantonio retired after the 2019 season, following a 13-year career that produced three Big Ten titles, 12 bowl appearances and a CFP berth. They have missed a bowl game in five of those six seasons and have not played in the postseason since 2021. The lone winning season was the 13-2 finish under Dantonio’s replacement, Mel Tucker, whose tenure ended with an in-season firing for off-field issues. Jonathan Smith took over the past two seasons but went just 9-15 before being shown the door.
Enter Fitzgerald, whose personal redemptive arc now overlaps that of the program he takes over – with hope and belief that both can ascend again by harkening back to the tenets of Dantonio’s dynasty.
“We're going to take the green back to being Big Ten champions,” he said. “And we’re gonna do it with everybody. And we need everybody. … We're gonna get back to playing tough, hard-nosed Spartan football that's going to make our fan base and Spartan Nation proud. Expectations are to win the Big Ten championship, full stop. And if a head coach walks up here and doesn't say that, then I'd want to check their pulse.”
Fitzgerald, a native of nearby Midlothian, Illinois, became an All-American and College Football Hall of Fame linebacker at Northwestern before going on to coach his alma mater from 2006-22. He went 110-101 over 17 seasons coaching, reaching two Big Ten title games, but was fired before the 2023 season for a hazing scandal in 2023. Fitzgerald and Northwestern reached an out-of-court settlement to restore his tarnished reputation last August.
The Spartans hired him Dec. 1 to replace Smith, whom Fitzgerald still counts as a “good friend.”
“When the opportunity presented itself, I didn’t walk, I sprinted. It’s not very fast, but I went as fast as I could go,” Fitzgerald said of coming to MSU. “I’m a Big Ten guy. I think there’s certain places that I fit, and Michigan State was on that short list. And Smitty is a good friend, and you always hate to see something negative happen to somebody to be a positive for you. And so there’s great guys and staff (remaining), and I’m thankful for him.”
In the next breath, though, Fitzgerald again called back to Dantonio as “a modern model of what our program should look like” – calling their shared visions of being “built from the inside out, line-of-scrimmage teams.” And he said he and Dantonio “are cut from the same cloth.” That also means making the players spend the next month during preseason camp living in the Case Hall dormitory to cultivate team bonding, something that has gone by the wayside in recent years since COVID.
“I think it’s just culture building,” third-year sophomore quarterback Alessio Milivojevic said of the difference Fitzgerald has made. “Overall, culture building has been great. The team, he really wants us and focuses on genuine relationship building. So when you have a team, you don’t want to be a ton of individuals; you want to come together as one.”
Fitzgerald, who took over Northwestern in 2006 a year before Dantonio’s debut at MSU, said he had the former coach speak to the team early during spring practices “to set the tone” and had former strength coach Ken Mannie as the keynote speaker at a team retreat recently.
“So I think you could figure out the method to my madness pretty clearly,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s not too long ago that we were in the Final Four in basketball and football (in the same year). And we’ve got a Final Four-level basketball program; we need to get our football program back there. And I would be the dumbest guy in the world not to tap into (Dantonio’s) knowledge. So if he’s willing to give it, I’m willing to take it. And he’s been willing to give it whenever we ask, and I’m thankful for that.”
Asked whether how things transpired at Northwestern and three years away from coaching in college have lit a fire under him, Fitzgerald once more channeled his inner-Dantonio.
“I wouldn't say I have a chip on my shoulder. I wouldn't say our program has a chip on our shoulder,” he said. “I'd say we have a bag of chips on our shoulder. I'll leave it at that.”
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him @chrissolari.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Pat Fitzgerald's promise? Michigan State football to win titles again
