Graham Couch

Lansing State Journal

EAST LANSING – If you want to know what sort of football team Michigan State will have before the season begins, ask strength and conditioning coach Ken Mannie. He’s seen the best and worst of MSU football, the entirety of the Nick Saban, Bobby Williams, John L. Smith and Mark Dantonio eras.

He usually knows in July. He can see it in the weight room and on the Spartan Stadium steps. Discipline, attitude, commitment, leadership — all of it shows itself, for better or worse, in the heat and strain of summer workouts.

The players usually can see it, too. At least in hindsight.

“You can always see when a storm is brewing,” junior linebacker Andrew Dowell said Friday afternoon, as members of MSU football’s leadership Eagle Council were made available for interviews — the first players to talk publicly since the end of a 3-9 football season and the tumultuous offseason that’s followed.

On Friday, this much was clear: MSU’s football players understand the problem — pluralize that if you’d like — on and off the field. The contrast between previous years and this last year put their issues in plain sight.

This isn’t about struggles at quarterback or the absence of a pass rush. Those things matter. The Spartans can’t win big again without fixing those areas. But the difference between 3-9 and 7-5 last season was something deeper and more revealing of disease at the core of the program. The culture wasn’t strong enough to withstand limitation and adversity. Just a year earlier, MSU made the College Football Playoff despite limitations and adversity.

“You could definitely tell the difference in leadership between the two years,” Dowell said.

“There’s always been cliques amongst the team,” senior offensive lineman Brian Allen said. “The first two years (I was here) it wasn’t as cliquish as last year and it’s easy to do that when things aren’t going well.”

“I’m not pointing anybody out, but my class, I believe many of us thought we were better than we were,” sophomore linebacker Joe Bachie said of a heralded 2016 recruiting class. “You come in, you get a taste of it and you get humbled real quick.”

The fix begins with introspection and humility. Talent doesn’t fix a culture. In that regard, the Spartans appear to be on the right track. Organized, clear-the-air player meetings have become commonplace.

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“There were confrontations in those meetings,” Allen said. “I don’t think they were bad confrontations. ... Guys (became) closer, and I thought, ‘OK, he looks at it like that, I look at it like this, but we’re going to come together and go about it this way.’”

Allen said he’s made a point of trying to diminish cliques by sitting with different players and hanging out with teammates outside of his circle.

Senior linebacker Chris Frey met with one of MSU’s sports psychologists, as have others.

“One of the things I took away from him is he kept asking, ‘What are you going to do to make this team better?’” Frey recalled. “I kept saying, ‘More team-building experiences, try to be a better leader.’ The thing he said to me, ‘You don’t have to do team-building exercises to build the team chemistry. You can get in here and really cuss somebody out, get in their face and push them to be a better person. They might hate you for a few hours, but they’re going to realize you’re a leader and we trust what you’re saying and that’s going to push them to be better.’”

It’s important that this permeates through the entire roster — both sides of the ball, every position group, and both races, black and white. Every college football locker room — like most of America — has racial division. But when there is leadership and common purpose throughout, it doesn’t fracture a locker room. MSU had that with Darien Harris, Shilique Calhoun, Kurtis Drummond, Darqueze Dennard and others in recent years. Not so much last year.

That makes the role of players like Dowell and sophomore defensive tackle Raequan Williams — also part of the Eagle Council group that spoke Friday — all the more important. Dowell is a natural communicator, Williams more soft-spoken.

“We thought because we’re Michigan State, we’re supposed to go out and win. It takes work,” Williams said. “Sometimes you’ve got to be vocal. I understand that this year. We got a lot better this spring.”

Said Dowell: “My freshman year, guys like Darien Harris, they took the young guys under their wing and they brought us along. Being an older guy now, we’re trying to get back to that.

“(Coach Mannie says) it’s about reestablishing our Michigan State culture. It’s been a huge emphasis this spring season. The word Coach Mannie has used a lot is ‘reaffirmation’ into what Spartan football is. And that’s how we get back to that culture.”

Culture doesn’t come with a few touchdown passes or quarterback sacks. “It’s a tough thing to put into words,” Dowell said. “It’s the atmosphere you’re around, through past guys, through present guys. It’s a natural thing that you feel.”

Something that takes work. MSU’s players seem to understand that now. We’ll see if they can get it back.

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.