Graham Couch

Lansing State Journal

EAST LANSING – If there was any doubt whether Michigan State’s football program ought to hold its annual spring game this Saturday, Mark Dantonio’s behavior at Tuesday’s press conference answered it unequivocally.

The game shouldn’t happen. Can’t happen. Not in front of people as planned. MSU isn’t ready. Dantonio’s head is in no place for this. The university and its head football coach don’t have an adequate game plan for how to deal with the situation that's had them behind closed doors all spring until now.

Three suspended players are under investigation for a mid-January sexual assault. The Ingham County prosecutor’s office hasn’t decided whether to charge them. To the credit of the media in this state, no one has named the three players. No reputable news organization would in a sexual assault case. Not before charges. Not without unusual circumstances.

RELATED:

We might just about be there. Dantonio confirmed Tuesday that other players are suspended for other reasons. He didn’t specify which players or explain their transgressions. And so, Saturday, they’ll go into the pool of pieces missing on the football field, as folks in the stands and on television and a few lost souls in the media do the math and speculate.

If Dantonio thinks that’s not what's going to happen, he should check out my Twitter feed. This story has juice. Perhaps more juice than teeth. But it’s all inquiring minds want to know. “Name names!” they say, as if their lives are the ones impacted.

And as Dantonio learned Tuesday with a question from a Fox17 Grand Rapids television reporter, not everyone in the press has done their due diligence on this. One rogue or uninformed reporter can stir rumors.

When the pool of possible players under investigation was an entire team, having the three players remain anonymous wasn’t damning of the entire group. But Saturday that pool becomes much smaller. Sexual assault is not simple battery. It is not a failed drug test. The seriousness of the crime is why we don’t identify the accused before a prosecutor’s office deems the evidence worthy of charges. But, after Saturday, if the game is played, several other players will be among those rumored to have taken part in such a heinous act.

Dantonio made clear Tuesday he doesn’t intend to differentiate between the suspended players.

“I don’t think that would be fair to do that right now just based on the situation,” he said. “Because I think, in doing that, I’m pointing a compass toward other individuals.”

When pressed on whether it was fair to the other suspended individuals not involved in this investigation, he threw it back at the media.

“You’ll be the person lumping them in, if you write about it,” he said to a reporter. “No, I don’t think it’s fair. But you’ll be writing about it.”

Don’t put this on us, Mark. This has been handled about as professionally as it can. Organizations that sell their souls for page views on a daily basis have behaved with integrity, as most do when the subject is this heavy.

MORE MSU FOOTBALL:

The reporter Dantonio addressed is one of the more ethical journalists I know. And he and his organization, like the rest of us, have a decision to make. To be clear, this isn’t a decision made at the reporter or columnist level. I’ll support whatever decision is made by my editors. I don’t think we should reveal the names of the three under investigation without charges. However, I do believe we should make it clear that the other suspended players, name by name, aren’t part of that investigation. Would folks be able to decipher who the players involved in the sexual assault probe are? Yep. And that’s not fair to those three players under investigation but not charged.

You can’t play this spring football game in front of people at Spartan Stadium and be fair to every young man you brought to your campus. So you cancel it or hold it out of public view.

That option, Dantonio said, wasn’t considered very seriously. It should be now.

“Obviously I had anticipated that this would be sort of finalized to some extent, just in terms of the investigative process,” Dantonio said. “But that’s not been the case, so because we have a spring football game on Saturday, because it’s a community event, because we have a huge youth clinic that last year drew 1,800 young people. I wanted to come before everybody today just to sort of step out into the light a little bit.”

Not yet. You and your program aren’t ready.

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