Coach Jonathan Smith on rebuilding Michigan State’s football program

Michigan State and Coach Jonathan Smith are inching closer to the first kickoff of the season, a home game against Florida Atlantic. It officially marks the beginning of the Coach Smith era in East Lansing, an era defined by his ability to turn things around for the Michigan State football program.

Coach Smith has taken over a proud football program that has fallen from the national stage it once stood on. After helping rebuild Oregon State’s program, he will look to do the same at Michigan State. It will undoubtedly be a more complex situation for Coach Smith and his coaching staff.

While there are many differences between the situations at Oregon State and Michigan State when he took over, there are also more than a few similarities. Both schools had losing records in the two seasons before Coach Smith arrived. Oregon State went 1-11 the season before Coach Smith took over and 4-8 before that. Michigan State went 4-8 last season and 5-7 the season before that.

While at Oregon State, Coach Smith’s biggest in-state rival, Oregon, was and still is a college football powerhouse with an excess of resources. The same can be said for Michigan State’s biggest in-state rival, who happens to be the reigning national champion. Both of these situations at rival schools have clearly had an impact on the respective rebuilds that Coach Smith has led. Yet he has made it clear that he will not have patience with Michigan State’s rebuilding process.

“We (the coaching staff) are all competitive, so we don’t have a lot of patience to play quality football,” Coach Smith said at Big Ten Media Days. “At the same time, I think you’re always building. You start somewhere, you’re going to create a foundation and then you build on that. So I’m looking forward to that approach of we’ve built something before.

“(We) are not going to panic at the first setback we see, because we understand that sometimes there is a process that precedes it, but we are not going to say we have to be patient with it. We want to be in a constant state of improvement and build it up the right way.”

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