Dantonio: Master architect of MSU football

 Rolling down a steep San Francisco hill, Mark Dantonio hung on to the cable car's handle and stayed planted on an outside running board that kept him from tumbling onto Powell Street.

Ahead lay San Francisco Bay's blue water and gold-white clouds. This was exhilarating, this perfectly permissible ride, last spring, on the outer edge of a historic vehicle, minus seat belt or some authority figure ordering him to get his tail inside and sit down.

Kids have this kind of fun, often on a farm where travel can be rustic and rules are loose. But to discover moments so free and borderline naughty, yet safe, in a town of pure enchantment where a 59-year-old head football coach could travel with his wife in relative anonymity, well, this was the way to celebrate Mark and Becky Dantonio's 25th wedding anniversary.
"Did the whole thing — Fisherman's Wharf, Napa Valley, saw the Redwood trees," Dantonio was saying last week in his second-floor office at the Skandalaris Center, across the street from Spartan Stadium.


In a parallel sense, Dantonio and his seventh-ranked Michigan State team are hoping to do the whole thing this autumn: Big Ten championship, College Football Playoff, and who knows what if they can handle those first two items. It figures to be some trick in the Big Ten, where last year's national champion, Ohio State, resides and where most teams, including one in Ann Arbor, are planning a 2015 ambush against the Spartans.
Dantonio loosed a smile and shoulder shrug in about the time it takes for an eye to blink. What else is new, his body language asked. This is the Big Ten. This is Michigan State, where for the past nine years Dantonio has been bolting together perhaps the best pure example of program construction anywhere in college football.

Mark Dantonio holds the trophy aloft as MSU beats Stanford, 24-20, in the 100th Tournament of Roses in Pasadena on New Years Day 2014. (Photo: Dale G. Young, Detroit News)

Practices would start in a few days. Dantonio, on an early August afternoon, for a few moments had time to talk about something other than blitz packages and how quarterback Connor Cook might meld with a phalanx of new receivers.

That spring anniversary vacation with Becky had grabbed him and still had a coach in its grip. The trip was rapturous, which you could detect from the glow on a man's face. He sat in a brown leather chair, dressed in white shorts, a dark green short-sleeve shirt with a Spartan logo, and green-and-white Nike shoes, talking about San Francisco's treats: the cable-car ride, and a drive that delivered him instantly from a spectacular city's density to those rural hillsides and valleys in Napa and Sonoma.

There seemed to be no transition, Dantonio noticed. In his mind, there was only fascination. In a world where so much, including a football team's growth, must occur in stages, how could you leave those packed San Francisco streets and in moments find yourself transported to an opposite, supernal realm?

It was a thought to be savored as he and Becky stopped at a couple of wineries ("I like reds," Dantonio said). They took in the vintages and Eden-like scenery at Opus One, as well as at Robert Mondavi's estate, and celebrated 25 years of life together and, perhaps, the best time any football coach and his wife together have enjoyed at Michigan State in a half-century.
Spartans spirituality

It has indeed been some timeline Dantonio has crafted and observed:
He arrived in December of 2006 and had a clean-up job that would have been better assigned to a Hazmat squad. But a string of bowl seasons began in 2007 after Dantonio's first class won seven regular-season games and narrowly lost five.

Dantonio's gang won eight games in 2008, then broke even in 2009 before losing a bowl game after losing 10 players to dismissal or suspension following a nasty ruckus at a dorm. A year later, and keen on making amends, the Spartans won 11 games. Dantonio's program was back and trending north.

The Spartans' status, which was growing incrementally, rose in 2011 when they went 10-2 and learned how to beat a quality team in a bowl game, knocking off Georgia in triple overtime.
On to 2012, and to a setback season: six losses, five by a combined 13 points. The deflation was temporary. MSU snapped back in 2013 to win 11 games, beating Ohio State in the Big Ten championship, and stuffing Stanford at the Rose Bowl.

It was a tough season to match, 2013, but last year's Spartans again won 11 games, including one of those you're-kidding-me comebacks in sniping Baylor, 42-41, at the Cotton Bowl.
So here comes 2015 and Dantonio is expected, properly most agree, to have another of those years where State grabs 10 or 11 games — or more — and perhaps makes college football's final four playoffs.