Graham Couch

Lansing State Journal

Before Michigan State rose to college football prominence. Before Notre Dame regained its footing. Before Mark Dantonio and Brian Kelly were two of the preeminent coaches in the country.

There was Cincinnati, 10 years ago.

There and then, in the Queen City, two coaches shared a college football team, their careers briefly colliding on their way up.

They converged in East Lansing that season, too. Both were considered for the vacant Michigan State head coaching job in 2006 — along with then-LSU defensive coordinator Bo Pelini. MSU chose Dantonio, hiring him away from the University of Cincinnati on Thanksgiving weekend. A week later, Cincinnati hired Kelly from Central Michigan.

Kelly and his staff then immediately coached Dantonio’s players in Cincinnati’s bowl game in Toronto.

They didn’t even speak, like ships passing in the night. No communication whatsoever.

“Exactly zero,” Dantonio said this week. “Absolutely none. I moved to this position here and immediately started working on this position. It was all about Michigan State, had to be, based on the timing and everything else in my life that flipped upside down, as well as my family and children and our players. I did go back a week later and do the banquet. That was crazy. But I did it.”

Two contrasting personalities. Two different styles of coaching. Two conflicting offensive and defensive philosophies. Two bright men entering the primes of their careers.

When the books are written on Dantonio and Kelly, November 2006 through Jan. 6, 2007 — the date Cincinnati beat Western Michigan in the International Bowl — should be prominent chapters.

Dantonio to MSU

MSU announced on Nov. 2, 2006, that John L. Smith wouldn’t return as its football coach.

Kelly was the people’s choice as a replacement, a big personality and successful coach in-state at both Grand Valley and CMU. The quick turnaround in three seasons in Mount Pleasant made Kelly a popular name. More so than Dantonio, who, in three seasons at Cincinnati, had won modestly, twice going 7-5 with a program off the radar to most folks in East Lansing.

Pelini, who two years later would take over at Nebraska, might have been the hottest name of the three.

“People didn’t know Mark that well. The public didn’t,” said retired MSU vice president and spokesman Terry Denbow, who was around the search and emcee’d Dantonio’s introductory press conference. “I don’t think he had a deep group of supporters.”

Dantonio had been an assistant at MSU under Nick Saban in the late 1990s and then the defensive coordinator for the 2002 Ohio State national championship team, before Buckeyes coach Jim Tressel pushed him toward the Cincinnati head coaching job.

“I remember (Mark) Hollis telling me, ‘It wasn’t what he did at Cincinnati, it’s that he took the Cincinnati job,” Denbow said, referencing MSU’s then-soon-to-be athletic director, who ran the search even though Ron Mason still held the title. “(Hollis) said, ‘That showed me an ability and a self-confidence and a commitment to coaching. People have told him that he had to, but he didn’t have to go. And that was not a gimme success job. It was a risk to take the Cincinnati job.’ Hollis really admired him taking the Cincinnati job, and he got a lot of points on Hollis’ rating sheet for that.”

Hollis had all sorts metrics and measurables for MSU’s next coach. “He had binders on the decision-making process,” Denbow said. And he and president Lou Anna Simon were on the same page.

“The momentum gathered,” Denbow said. “People were surprised. A lot of people internally. But I think Hollis and Simon had little doubt. Now I don’t know if they knew it was going to be like this.

Dantonio hadn’t planned on leaving Cincinnati so soon. He didn’t chase the job or apply for it. But he knew he wanted it.

“It was very difficult for me,” Dantonio said, “because you grow with your players and you recruit players with the idea that you’re going to be with them for five years. That’s the way I’ve always been. I want to become a part of their lives, their everyday lives, not just their football lives, but their lives. And that came to an abrupt stop. And really there was no warning and there was no way to stop it because I knew this was something from a personal standpoint probably I needed to do.”

In the long run, it worked out for just about everyone – sans a few Bearcats fullbacks who didn’t fit Kelly’s offense.

Cincinnati had picked up steam late in the 2006 season, highlighted by a 30-11 win over previously unbeaten and seventh-ranked Rutgers, followed by a road win at Connecticut on November 25, the day before Dantonio accepted the MSU job.

In hindsight …

“The timing was perfect,” said former Cincinnati defensive back DeAngelo Smith — now an MSU graduate assistant — who was part of Dantonio’s first recruiting class and played two full seasons for Kelly. “It worked out for both coaches. I think we were on the rise, even throughout that (2006) year.”

Dantonio to Kelly

MSU landed the perfect fit and then some, Cincinnati lured a dynamic personality and offensive mind who would raise its middling profile and, three years later, Notre Dame found in Kelly the coach who could bring the Irish out of more than a decade of mediocrity.

But on that weekend in 2006 and over the coming weeks, this was like any other coaching change. There were hurt feelings, a massive transition under way and, still, a bowl game to play — with the new staff coaching the game. That’s rare.

Dantonio told his Cincinnati team he was leaving at 7 a.m. Monday, Nov. 27. His players already knew. They’d seen the reports scrolling across ESPN’s bottom line the night before.

“I had about 40 guys end up in our room that night,” said quarterback Dustin Grutza, a team captain and one of two starting Bearcat QBs that season. “We were all discussing, ‘What are we going to do, what’s happening with the university, losing Dantonio.’”

Pat Narduzzi was briefly the interim head coach, before joining Dantonio in East Lansing.

The following Sunday, Dec. 3 — the day before Kelly was hired and introduced at Cincinnati — Dantonio and his staff returned for the team banquet. “That was different,” he said of the awkwardness. “That was the only way I could try to come back and have some closure.”

Kelly arrived that week to a roster loyal to his predecessor.

“It’s like when you’re the baby-sitter and they come to you and say, ‘Mom said we could stay up until 2.’ Of course that’s not what she said,” Kelly said in the days before that January 2007 International Bowl, which I covered for the Kalamazoo Gazette. “So we’re kind of going through that process of figuring out the rules and what the expectations are.”

He also brought with him a new offense — a spread, rather than a pro-style — and, after the bowl game, implemented a more traditional zone defense, rather than the attacking press coverage approach Dantonio and Co. prefer.

Kelly kept the same terminology in the offense for the bowl game, so his players could digest the additional plays without learning new language.

More so then than now, he was a brazen public personality.

“I’m too full of myself to be in over my head,” Kelly said after a 27-24 win over WMU in the International Bowl.

“They’re definitely two completely different philosophies in how they coach, how they push forward,” Grutza said. “In the end, I think I learned and had great respect for Brian Kelly and what he was doing. He’s not going to hold anything back, he’s going to let you know how he feels. In that moment, he’s very forthcoming with what he’s saying and how he’s feeling. He’s strong with that.”

Dantonio tolerates the media. Kelly used to seek out interviews. For a program like Cincinnati, that was helpful.

Early in his tenure, members of the Cincinnati athletic communications staff called just about every national television and radio outlet they could think of, trying to book their new head coach.

“He knew we needed to do things a certain way and change things and how he wanted it done,” said Kelby Siler, Cincinnati’s football sports information director during Dantonio’s final season and Kelly’s first. “And there is no other way. I cannot tell you a time he was wrong. He’s the smartest person I’ve seen when it comes to coaching and dealing with the media.”

Siler, though, loved working for Dantonio, too, even if he wasn't an exhilarating character.

“My wife went into labor during our (bye) week (in 2006),” Siler said. “(Dantonio) called me and, as an SID, I answered the phone while we were in labor in delivery. And he was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe it. You don’t need to talk to me. You’ve got more important things to do.’ And his wife, Becky, she grabbed a hold of me next time she saw me, she said it hit them so much, she said she never got to shop for boys. So she went shopping and she wrapped presents and next time I saw him, he said, ‘Hey, there’s a bag in the corner for you’ of his office. It was a bag with pretty ribbons and bows that had baby clothes that came from the Dantonios. My wife still says that’s her favorite coach in America.”

Kelly took the Cincinnati job and ran with it. He had good players, and he knew it.

“Mark has a style of player that he loves,” Kelly said this week. “And (that player is) a tough-minded kid that loves to play football, and (we) had a lot of those guys that he recruited at Cincinnati that we got our hands on. And we pointed them in the right direction and had a lot of success with them.”

Kelly won 33 games over three full seasons, mostly with Dantonio’s players — though with several of them at different positions and with his own systems in place.

“You kind of knew when BK inherited our Bearcat team we were a dominant defense and we were young and ready,” DeAngelo Smith said. “Those following years, coach BK he inherited a good defense, he brought in his offense, which was even better with our personnel that we had, made it better.”

What Dantonio had in place allowed for Kelly to catch the eye of Notre Dame. What Dantonio put in place at Cincinnati caught the attention of Hollis and Simon at MSU.

It was a defining time for three programs and two coaches, 10 years ago.

“I think a lot about it,” Dantonio said. “First of all, those players — and I’ve seen a lot of those players since then or talked to them — they were responsible for me getting here. The work I had done previously, the work that I or we or whoever had done at Ohio State, but also the play of our then-current players at Cincinnati were responsible for bringing me here. That’s what was the hardest thing about leaving, that they had played well enough to get me this opportunity. And that’s a debt that I owe them.”

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