Michigan State football is losing recruiting firepower. Can Mel Tucker make up for it?
EAST LANSING — It wasn’t a major coup. Some would describe it as only a small victory. But Mel Tucker will surely take it, knowing that wins have been hard to come by as of late.
The commitment of three-star offensive lineman Andrew Dennis last weekend provided some good news to a Michigan State football program that has been in a rut the past six months. A series of defeats on the field have been exacerbated by disappointments away from it, leaving the Spartans with a hazy outlook as Tucker enters the fourth year of his tenure.
Go back to last spring, and it would have been hard to believe MSU would be find itself on such shaky ground. Fresh off an intoxicating 11-2 season marked by a dizzying ascent, the Spartans were riding a wave of momentum. Tucker and his staff were determined to capitalize on that success, marketing MSU as a ready-made contender to the most coveted high school players in the nation.
“We’re going after the best kids in the country,” former general manager Saeed Khalif declared in March 2022.
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Khalif had become the point person of that ambitious campaign after he was hired in 2021 to replace chief of staff Geoff Martzen. Labeled a dogged recruiter by Tucker, he quickly became a principal figure within the program. Tucker and Khalif were often in the same orbit, appearing together at public events and the occasional news conference. This past December, Tucker even singled out Khalif and complimented him after the Spartans had assembled their latest class, which included 15 high school prospects, one junior college product and 12 transfers. Tucker told reporters Khalif had done a “great job” leading the effort by “getting this recruiting staff relentlessly working” toward its completion.
But not long thereafter Tucker elected to blow up that same department. The contracts for Khalif and recruiting operations coordinator Jensen Gebhardt were not renewed and MSU’s director of community and high school relations, Thomas Wilcher, left without any fanfare.
Their quiet departures have cast a pall of uncertainty over a program that has staked its future on the acquisition of better talent.
Tucker has spent the past three years trying to upgrade a roster that had deteriorated in the final seasons of Mark Dantonio’s regime. The process has been a challenging one. Progress has often been blunted by setbacks. Just look at the last recruiting cycle. The Spartans landed eight blue-chip prospects — their highest total since 2016, when MSU had just made an appearance in the College Football Playoff. But those gains were mitigated, in part, by the defections of eight players who rescinded their pledges. The volatility reflected the mercurial nature of a program that followed its remarkable rise in 2021 with an unexpected crash this past fall.
“There’s always going to be change,” Tucker said Monday. “It’s one thing that’s constant.”
Tucker clearly doesn’t fear that volatility, initiating a shakeup within an essential division of his organization that few saw coming.
What prompted the flurry of moves remains unclear, and Tucker refused to offer an explanation.
But he said the staffers picked to fill the vacancies left by Khalif, Gebhardt and Wilcher will be “huge hires for us.”
“Recruiting is critically important,” Tucker asserted. “I know what championship football teams look like. And we have to recruit to that.”
But last offseason Tucker could have been confused with Icarus, the mythological figure who flew too close to the sun and paid the price. Trying to capitalize on their new-found fortune, Tucker and the Spartans went after a series of elite prospects who were also pursued by the sport’s perennial powers. MSU earned their consideration but not much more, which may have caused it to miss out on other players who were more attainable for a program that had still so much to prove.
Chalk it up to an aggressive miscalculation. But it also seemed to be a costly one. After all, it may have impeded Tucker’s effort to ween the Spartans off the transfer portal, which supplied 43% of the players in their 2023 class.
Now, Tucker faces perhaps an even more challenging situation as he attempts to augment his roster in wake of a 5-7 season. The regression killed off the buzz that had built around the Spartans last spring. MSU is off to a slow start in the ’24 cycle, with only three spots filled thus far. Rival Michigan, in comparison, already has secured 11 commitments.
With eight months before the first signing date, there will plenty of time for the Spartans to close the gap. But who will help lead that effort from inside the recruiting department? That isn’t quite clear within a program that right now is raising questions more than it is supplying answers.
Contact Rainer Sabin: rsabin@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @RainerSabin.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan State football loses recruiting help. Mel Tucker's next move?
