Michigan State football players have to realize that respect is earned

Respect. It’s something that Michigan State football fans feel like their favorite program has never quite been able to garner, even when Mark Dantonio was leading it to five 11-plus win seasons in six years. It’s been apparently lacking from a national perspective.

And that hasn’t stopped in recent years, but the reason for that is clear.

Michigan State just hasn’t been very good since 2015.

Sure, there have been a couple of anomaly years (2017, 2021), but other than those two instances, Michigan State has been one of the most painfully mediocre teams in the Big Ten. They went 3-9 in 2016 before a shocking 10-win season in 2017 and then had two boring bowl berths in 2018 and 2019 before COVID hit Mel Tucker in 2020.

In 2021, Michigan State shocked the nation by going 11-2 and Tucker was considered the next coming in East Lansing. And then 2022 started and everyone realized they may have jumped the gun.

The 2022 and 2023 seasons were nightmares for Michigan State, proving that 2021 was the extreme outlier. Tucker was let go a month into the 2023 season because of inappropriate off-field conduct and Michigan State went on to finish 4-8, missing a bowl game for a second straight year.

Counting 2020, this was the fourth year since 2015 that Michigan State had missed a bowl game. That’s about half the time. It’s hard to respect a program like that. It’s basically Rutgers (sorry, Rutgers).

So when the Big Ten preseason media poll was released earlier this week and it had Michigan State projected to finish 16th out of 18 teams, it wasn’t a huge shock. The Spartans have been pretty bad over the past decade. But some players took exception to the ranking (notably Charles Brantley and Ken Talley). It’s fair for them to feel the disrespect and it’s almost expected that they do feel slighted and in need of an explanation, but it’s pretty simple: you have to earn respect.

No, the media isn’t going to give a Michigan State team that hasn’t won a single thing in four years without a guy named Kenneth Walker III on the team. It’s going to assume that a program that was left in an extremely unfair spot for Jonathan Smith with four new contenders joining the conference is going to struggle mightily in year one of a new regime. That’s a fair assumption.

Is it disrespectful to project a team that has gotten worse in each of the past two seasons to be poor in 2024 with a whole new staff and basically a scrapped and revamped roster? No.

While I will say that confidence is something that you always want to see from players in the face of adversity or doubt (Brantley is just doing his job), it’s better to prove people wrong with actions rather than words.

Respect is earned and hopefully Smith is preaching that to his team in year one.