EAST LANSING – It took one practice and a couple pieces of trash for Pat Fitzgerald to make an important point: Certain actions are unacceptable.
Expectations are high from Michigan State football’s new coach in every aspect of his program – players, coaches, staff and others in the organization.
“I walked by a garbage can – and maybe it was pure dumb luck on my end – but I picked up two Gatorade bottles and some chewies. And I took a piece of their ass afterwards,” Fitzgerald said after the Spartans’ first preseason practice Thursday, Aug. 6. “Because the standard is, everywhere we go, we’re going to leave it better than we found it. And so as that moves forward, that will be held accountable.
“It’s like the same thing with the team room. You guys should always walk in here, and it should be pristine. It should look the way it should look if our most important recruit or our most important donor, the president of the United States – I don’t care who’s walking in here. We should take great pride in being a Spartan and how we do things not some of the time, but all the time.”
Practice 1, lesson 1 in the books. And that attention to little details carried from the sidelines onto the practice field, where Fitzgerald and his coaches barked out instructions and demands of their players to increase the tempo of getting from one station to the next, to honing in on the intricacies of what each drill represented in a bigger picture with the Sept. 4 season opener against Toledo coming fast.
“Obviously, that trash part, it’s unacceptable. It’s something (where) the team should be doing something, I should be doing something as a leader. I should be picking that up instead – coach should never have to pick something up off the field,” sophomore quarterback Alessio Milivojevic said after practice. “But I think you just feel the energy out there. Starting off, we went we ran straight into some pads and run over them. ‘Fast, fast, fast, let’s go, go, go.’ Guys are loud, guys are yelling. I think just the energy, the intensity, you can just feel it out there.”
Fitzgerald’s focus trickled down to emphasizing the basics, Hall said. And while Fitzgerald got irked afterward seeing the left-behind litter on the sideline, he also got frustrated when a pause in practice for hydration went awry and looked “unorganized, dissheveled, making it unrealistic for our dietician team to make sure the guys get what they need, how they need it.”
It became about more than simply teaching them “how to take a proper water break.”
“I want to practice like our hair is on fire. But to be able to do that, you gotta be able to make sure you got the right fuel, you gotta make sure you rehydrate, you’re continually hydrating. And than I want to get back going,” Fitzgerald said. “We’re going to take a break – we’re taking it for a reason, it’s prescribed in the part of our practice. We’re working with sports science and the staff the way we want to do it, so let’s look the right way.
“You’re taking over a program. How we look in practice – we shouldn’t have our tails hang out of our shirts, we shouldn’t have tails streaming down to the ground. It’s not what we do. I don’t really give a [expletive] if they do that at other places, that’s not we’re gonna do; THIS is how we’re gonna do it. And once we get to a point where we don’t have to have those conversations anymore, then we’ll reinforce it even harder.”
In the decade since Mark Dantonio led the Spartans to his third Big Ten title and a berth in the 2015 College Football Playoff, the Spartans have only been in the mix for a championship twice, in 2017 and 2021. They are coming off a 4-8 season that led to the firing of Jonathan Smith after just two seasons, and MSU has not been to a bowl since making the 2021 Peach Bowl under Mel Tucker – two years after Dantonio’s retirement.
And while wonky water breaks and errant garbage might seem irrelevant to playing winning football, it is part of the attitude change Fitzgerald wants to see after spending 17 seasons at his alma mater, Northwestern. It’s the cultural shift he hopes will lay the groundwork for the Spartans to return to the upper echelon of the Big Ten.
“It’s something that I respect, being able to have a leader who prioritizes urgency along with efficiency,” said senior linebacker Jordan Hall, on his third different head coach in four seasons at MSU.
This is the first time Fitzgerald is taking over a program in 20 years, since he was thrust into the top job at Northwestern as a 31-year-old after Randy Walker’s death at 52 from an apparent heart attack in the summer of 2006. Fitzgerald went 110-101 over his 17 seasons with the Wildcats, leading them to two Big Ten championship games as a coach after winning two Big Ten titles as an All-American linebacker in 1995 and 1996.
Now 51 and after three years out of coaching, Fitzgerald said he believes that “every team is new, especially now in the era where you have so many new players each year.” That requires going “back to ground zero” and preaching the primary principles at the outset in order to work toward his ultimate goals for the program.
“We’re building a standard of expectation, because that’s gotta be the bedrock we build this thing on. It’s not gonna be built on sand,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s a path less traveled. To do something special, we gotta get ourselves up to a championship standard. And that’s everybody that touches the Spartan football program.”
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him @chrissolari.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan State football: Pat Fitzgerald honing details in 1st practice
Reporting by Chris Solari, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Chris Solari, Detroit Free Press | USA TODAY Network
