East Lansing has just concluded its role as a location for the forthcoming Ben Affleck Batman film, and it is entirely appropriate in the sporting confines of the buzzing Michigan city. Not only is the futuristic Broad Art Museum a suitable backdrop for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but East Lansing also boasts its own superhero, and his name is Mark Dantonio.
Dantonio is a Renaissance Man, a remarkable individual with many and diverse interests, including a profound understanding of the increasingly complex relationship between the concept of student-athlete and the multi-million dollar era of the BCS Championship.
It would seem downright hokey if this were anywhere other than the heartland of the midwest, but the fact it emanates from the head coach’s office at Michigan State University ensures there is a solid under-pinning to the basic message – winning is most certainly not everything.
With the Spartans preparing for their intense annual rivalry game this Saturday against the “bigger” university just down the road in Ann Arbor, it is also a timely reminder of what’s at stake in college sport this year as well as the traditional imperative that continues to drive the non-NFL football narrative.
The NCAA and its championship pre-dates the NFL by 53 years and the Super Bowl by 98. In large parts of America, college games remain significantly more popular than the professional product, notably when you witness 39 straight years of 100,000-plus attendances at the University of Michigan’s “Big House” and the 90,000-plus who typically fill the stadiums at Alabama, Louisiana State, Texas and others.
This year, though, sees the shift to a genuine title playoff, with the unwritten warning of woe betide any of the five main conferences that are left out of the four-team equation. From the near hysteria emanating from some quarters – notably the SEC, where suggestions they might not be worthy of two of the epoch-making quartet are met with howls of disapproval – you might think it will be the end of the world for those who don’t make the playoff.
But that would be to ignore the remarkably stoic principles that characterise Dantonio’s position at MSU, tenets that serve as a timely reminder to his head-coaching brethren country-wide and which are comfortably at odds with much of what passes for reasoned debate.
Spend any time with anyone within Dantonio’s sphere of influence – from past players to current ones, alumni to fans, and local media to the university’s athletic director Mark Hollis – and you will immediately hear one overriding impression: he is just as concerned about building relationships off the field as victories on it.
Or, as he told me: “I am not going to define success here as just winning but in creating life-long relationships for these young guys and the university. I am challenged to help them become self-sufficient adults when they graduate and I love that expectation of mentoring young people and seeing them develop.
“They are two completely different individuals, when they first arrive and when they leave, but that relationship never stops. I still hear from players I coached 20 years ago and that’s just as important to me as a win on the playing field.”
The most remarkable fact about the 58-year-old coach, though, is that he has been able to mix winning with mentoring to a high degree of success since he returned to the Spartans in 2007 (he was a defensive coach under Nick Saban from 1995-2000), restoring MSU not just to state prominence but national significance, building an impressive resume of victories as well as high-character former players, like Washington’s Kirk Cousins, who quarterbacked the team from 2009-2011.
“Coach Dantonio has a lot of depth and is able to connect with the players. As a result, they play harder for him,” says Cousins. “He is about investing in you as a person. The best compliment I could pay him is how much he genuinely cares about his players. On many occasions he has told me it is not about wins or losses but how much he wants people to leave with a positive feeling. A lot of coaches pay lip service to the idea but Coach Dantonio actually lives it.”
That drive for a daily input has been part of Dantonio’s modus operandi since he was a graduate assistant at Ohio State and Purdue in the early 1980s, fresh from acquiring a master’s degree in education. Stops at Youngstown State and Kansas followed before Saban brought him to East Lansing for the first time. The Buckeyes lured him back to Ohio under Jim Tressel and he was the defensive coordinator for the 2002 championship team as well as the No 1-ranked defence the following year.
The University of Cincinnati then offered him their head coach’s job for the 2004 season and his star continued to rise until, in 2007, he returned to the Big Ten with the task of reviving a moribund programme that had managed just four wins the previous season and only one in the conference.
He was carefully recruited by the Spartans, as much for his character as for his ability to dial up a zone blitz. “The deciding factor we looked at was the right ‘fit’,” explains Hollis. “Someone who understood the culture of Michigan State, who had a midwestern mentality and familiarity and who had a coaching history with the kind of people you would want as mentors, from Nick Saban to Jim Tressel.
“It all came together with great good fortune. His children and my children were friends from when he was here with Nick and he understands the university’s core values. To my mind, great coaches are also great parents and you really want to look at that dynamic. Mark puts family first and, if you extend that philosophy to the team, you can be fairly sure it will have a positive return. Put simply, he makes the process fit the kids, not the other way round.”
It is a remarkably old-fashioned view of a head coach’s job in this BCS age, but it doesn’t ignore modern sensibilities. “We know our ‘industry’ is in danger of being defined by individuals on the outside who are trying to push the education process away from what it is supposed to do,” adds Hollis.
“But we are not set up to be professional sports, we are in the business of educating young men and women. My first responsibility is still to the 50,000 students we have here as much as to the 800 student athletes. And Coach Dantonio takes the same view; he knows only a handful of his players will go on to pro sports, so it is about making it a positive experience for them, irrespective of wins and losses.”
There haven’t been too many losses under Dantonio in recent years. In 2010, the Spartans won 11 games for the first time in their 118-year history and repeated the trick the following season. Last year, they went several steps further with an 11-1 regular season record, a victory over Ohio State in the Big Ten championship game – their first outright win since 1987 – and then the conference’s Holy Grail, a Rose Bowl triumph over Stanford.
Last weekend, MSU thumped Indiana 56-17 for the 70th win of Dantonio’s 100-game reign. He has the third-best winning record of any MSU head coach at .700 after John Macklin (.853 from 1911-15) and Clarence Munn (.846 from 1947-53) and he holds the MSU record for most Bowl games (7) with George Perles (1983-94).
Possibly his greatest triumph, though, was in leading the team out of the shadow of their state rivals. Lansing State Journal columnist Graham Couch explains: “There was a real inferiority complex with the University of Michigan and right away Coach Dantonio insisted ‘Pride comes before a fall.’ He made that a priority and backed it up. He has done what nobody has done in modern times in MSU history in flipping the rivalry.
“He is a midwest guy, and he fits what is important to people here. In a lot of places, the National Championship has become the big thing but, around here, the Rose Bowl is what people wanted most and there would always have been something missing for this programme and this community without it.”
For all his accomplishments, Dantonio still treats those two sporting imposters of success and failure with equal measure.“Whether he has won the Rose Bowl or only eight games on the season, he will critique himself the same way,” says Hollis. “What I like most is his ability to reflect and make corrections, not to get comfortable with what any record might be.”
Part of his equable on-field nature is enforced, the after effects of a mild heart attack during a particularly nail-biting victory over Notre Dame in 2010, but he remains fiercely committed to the cause and is surprisingly BCS-friendly considering the traditional nature of his upbringing.
“I am a supporter of the BCS Championship because I think it will grow and give other teams possibilities,” says Dantonio. “As it is set up now, you can still have a great season and not be in that top four. There is definitely room for growth. But I always take the approach of one thing at a time and we will get to that when it is realistic. For us as a team, there is a certain amount of wanting to succeed at the highest level. We want more after the Rose Bowl – it is a natural human instinct. Once you go to the moon, you want to go further.”
Talk of championships and beyond quickly reverts back to Dantonio’s favourite subject, though – his players. It is absolutely clear nothing motivates the head coach more than working with his young charges and seeing them evolve into fully-fledged adults.
“I can’t do this job if it’s just about winning. You can become overwhelmed because you are not always going to win. The Rose Bowl was actually seven years in the making – we had a plan to perform and succeed at the highest level and it was an exclamation point for the achievements of that group of players.
“But it was also a life experience for them, not just to go there and win but to be there and enjoy it, to make it a positive experience and be aware of how it affected all the fans, every Michigan State Spartan around the country who has a story about how that day evolved for them, and they are all invested in it. I want our guys to understand all that. Then we can say, ‘OK, now we can reach further’.”
Dantonio is reluctant to talk about himself in terms of success and achievement, and he’ll adopt a “steady as she goes” approach for this Saturday’s Michigan showdown and then a potential conference decider the following week at home to Ohio State.
But senior offensive lineman Travis Jackson has seen everything there is to see in the past four years and is ready to offer an insider’s insight. He concurs: “Coach Dantonio cares about players as people first and foremost. When he was recruiting me, he was the only one who talked not about recruiting great players but great people. He talked about the hard work and toughness required but he also talked about building a family here.
“He is also a really humble guy and I can honestly say he hasn’t changed a bit in all my time here, through all the wins and bowl games. He always says ‘Remember where you come from,’ and that is a big deal around here. He makes sure you don’t take anything for granted and it really is that ‘one week at a time’ mentality. He knows if you lose one game at this stage, that is it. So our whole focus is just on the next game, nothing else.”
If anyone is looking for the ultimate endorsement of the Spartans coach, however, they might be advised to seek out Herb Confer, a stallholder at the weekly Meridian Township Farmer’s Market in neighbouring Okemos. This is truly the heart of this midwestern heartland, where fresh-caught Lake Perch and fried pumpkin-spiced donuts provide the background to much MSU conversation. “Yes, we are all big Coach Dantonio fans,” Herb insists. “He has taken his time and created a programme that is a credit to the university. But it’s what we all know here – if you take your time, good things grow as a result.”
Match that, Batman and Superman.
