Penn State's football resurgence last season coincided with another Big Ten East superpower's sudden demise.
While the Nittany Lions rolled to a surprising Big Ten championship, Michigan State morphed from a College Football Playoff team into a 3-9 disaster.
The nightmare didn't end there for Spartans fans. Mark Dantonio's team is going through two separate sexual assault investigations, with at least four players and one staff member suspended indefinitely.
The recruiting headlines have been ugly, too. A defensive end who committed to the Spartans didn't sign after being arrested for burglary and stealing a firearm. Another incoming recruit received an alcohol citation during a visit to East Lansing in mid-January. And yet another incoming recruit recently was hospitalized after a water scooter accident in the Bahamas.
Dantonio's long periods of silence and nonanswers haven't helped. The Spartans kept spring practices closed to the media until the spring game. They had 15 players not in uniform for the spring game, and the coach offered no explanations.
"Obviously there's a concern off the field, so we need to work through those situations," Dantonio said last week in a Big Ten teleconference. "But as much as anything, when you have a young football team, you need to find leadership.
"We're going to come together as a football team, and if we're not going in the same direction, there's people who will be left behind."
The Big Ten East is an unforgiving place, anyway, so the Spartans can ill-afford these missteps. Urban Meyer and Jim Harbaugh recruit and develop talent with machinelike efficiency.
