On Sept. 18, The Athletic reported that Michigan State provided Mel Tucker with written notice of intent to terminate his contract for cause.
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Just a few days before the next chapter of his life is set to unfold, Mel Tucker’s phone, as one would imagine, is blowing up. Phone calls from close friends and family members. Text messages from colleagues new and old, offering support and words of encouragement. It’s a reminder that a new season is on the horizon and hope springs eternal. For a brief moment in a nonstop profession, their words remind Tucker to reflect amid the start of another year on the job. Perhaps even more so now, as he begins his first season as the head coach of a program that gave him his start.
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“Those texts and voicemails have started to roll in,” Tucker said Tuesday, with a smile. “I reflect on my mentors, people that have had a positive impact on my life on a daily basis. Those are blessings to me and I think about those people that have been special in my life and have helped me get to where I am today. I haven’t gotten here on my own. I’ve gotten a lot of help along the way. I’ve learned from some great coaches and some great people that are not in the profession that have helped me. I like to count my blessings every day and reflect on those folks.”
Tucker is a coach who waited years for an opportunity like this. He is 24 hours away from the official start of his 23rd season and his first at Michigan State, despite not always knowing this coaching thing was the path for him. One thing Tucker did know, early on, was that he loved the game of football and solving problems.
Following his playing days at the University of Wisconsin under Barry Alvarez, one of Tucker’s first jobs out of college had him going door-to-door selling boxes of frozen food — steak, chicken, seafood and pork, whatever. There was little advertising for the company he worked for, no social media to promote his work, nothing. It was his job to knock on 100 doors a day and sell as much food as he could on the east side of Cleveland.
Perhaps one of his first real tests as both a problem solver and a recruiter — two necessary skills to coach at the highest levels of football — came in the mid-’90s. Tucker remembers a time when he entered a client’s home to deliver his spiel. He brought with him a case of frozen food and laid it all out on the table in an orderly fashion. At this point, he was no rookie. He made his pitch, talking up the product he was selling. He could tell there was interest. When he finished, he eagerly awaited a response.
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The client — an older woman — was intrigued and impressed by his delivery. Tucker believed he had the sale in the bag. However, by the end of his speech, she was still hesitant to commit.
“You know, I love this food, but I don’t have room in this freezer,” the woman said.
“This is a problem,” Tucker thought to himself. In an effort to close the deal and make the sale, Tucker walked over to the woman’s freezer, opened the door and scanned up and down. It was packed with what looked like food that hadn’t been touched in years. Old popsicles. Freezer-burned boxes of Steak-umms. It was in need of some spring cleaning, and Tucker was there to help.
As a solution to the woman’s problem, Tucker offered to buy everything in that freezer in exchange for cash. A dollar here, three dollars there. By the end of his re-shuffling, the woman, now $30 richer with the necessary space to buy the frozen foods Tucker was selling, changed her stance. At that point, all she could do was write him a check.
“You had to be diligent,” Tucker said. “When you get knocked down, you gotta get up. When someone knocks on your door and is trying to sell you something, usually, you’re gonna tell them no and to get out. My goal was to knock on 100 doors a day. Even if I got 20 no’s, just keep going. You just never know when you’re going to get that yes.”
It’s a story he often tells, but it signals the beginning. There were lessons learned from that job, ones that he still takes with him to this day. Tucker learned not to judge a book by its cover. He learned how to take rejection, and how to get back up — all traits that would serve him well later in life.
Around that same time, Tucker spent his free time volunteering as a football coach in the Cleveland area. His love for the game never left after his career was over. After some conversations with the people close to him, Tucker believed there was more for him in coaching, but he didn’t know how to go about it. In search of a start, he was put in touch with an acquaintance by the name of Nick Saban, then the head coach at Michigan State.
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When Saban was at Toledo, he recruited Tucker hard. Tucker’s father, Mel Sr., is a member of the Toledo Athletics Hall of Fame and starred as a defensive end for the program. Mel Sr. is a football guy through and through, and taught his son those same values. Saban viewed Tucker as a potential legacy recruit, and someone who could help jumpstart his tenure.
Though Tucker ultimately ended up at Wisconsin, Mel Sr. and Saban stayed in touch. When Tucker was ready to leave sales and begin his football career, his father’s relationship came in handy. Saban had a graduate assistant vacancy on his staff. One day, Tucker received a call from Saban, inviting Tucker to a spring football practice in East Lansing. He later asked the 25-year-old Tucker if he wanted to join his staff.
“I’m in,” Tucker told Saban.
Thus began Tucker’s coaching career and life as a GA. In 1997, Tucker spent many long hours at the football facilities, crunching numbers and handling any task Saban and his staff gave him. These were the days of long nights and little pay. He made $400 a month back then. There were times when he slept under his desk in the office to make sure he wasted no time getting his work done. The sound of the loose change in Saban’s pockets as he walked down the hall kept Tucker alert and focused, always looking to impress the boss man.
That hard work paid off. Tucker spent two seasons with Saban at Michigan State, learning from someone who would later cement his place as an all-time great. In East Lansing, Tucker learned the importance of recruiting and attracting talent. He learned how important preparation and attention to detail is. He put in the hours, and those around him noticed.
After proving himself as a trusted GA, Saban helped Tucker land his first job as a position coach — coaching defensive backs at Miami (Ohio). Along the way, Tucker’s connections to Saban and those early Michigan State years set him up for what was to come.
In 2000, Tucker was hired by Saban at LSU to coach DBs. The following season, he was hired by Jim Tressel and Mark Dantonio — Saban’s DB coach at Michigan State — to coach the same position at Ohio State, and won a national championship with the school in 2002. Two years later, Tucker was promoted to defensive coordinator when Dantonio took a head coaching gig at Cincinnati. As a Cleveland native who found success with the nearby Buckeyes, Tucker caught the eye of Cleveland Browns head coach Romeo Crennel, and was hired to run his defense.
Tucker spent seven seasons as an NFL defensive coordinator from 2008-2014. (Kirby Lee / Getty Images)Tucker parlayed that hiring into a 10-year run in the NFL with the Browns, Jaguars and Bears, before returning to college. Saban re-hired him at Alabama in 2015 to coach his defensive backs. Kirby Smart, another longtime Saban assistant, took over at Georgia and hired Tucker to be his defensive coordinator. Those connections helped him land his first permanent head coaching job at Colorado in 2019, before Michigan State came calling in February.
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Dantonio announced his retirement on Feb. 4, leaving MSU in search of a coach. Though he wasn’t initially planning to leave Colorado after just one season, the chance to return to the school that gave him his start — and the necessary resources to compete — was too good to pass up. On Feb. 12, Tucker was officially introduced as Michigan State’s head football coach. Back where it all started.
“I’ve known Mel Tucker since my days coaching at Michigan State when he was a graduate assistant on our staff,” Saban said in February. “Since then, Mel has made a name for himself as one of the best and brightest coaches in our profession. I believe he will do a tremendous job as the head coach of the Spartans. MSU is getting a guy with infinite class and a great personality, who is smart, works hard, and does it with an incredible amount of enthusiasm and positive energy. Mel is a tireless recruiter who knows the game of college football and understands what it will take to be successful in East Lansing.”
“My dream was to come back here and be the head coach,” Tucker said that day. “That was my dream. When you work for a guy like Nick Saban and you see him do it, you know, you can’t help but to aspire to be able to be in that position one day and do that.”
To this day, the lessons learned from Tucker’s early years at Michigan State working with Saban have been applied to the current product — the one he took over earlier this year. Saban is known as one of the best recruiters in the country. Early in his Alabama tenure, he assembled a personnel staff that is widely viewed as a blueprint for the way modern Power 5 programs would handle recruiting. Years ago, that group had an intern named Geoff Martzen. After learning from Saban and Ed Marynowitz at Alabama, Martzen went on to earn several gigs as a player personnel director, and was introduced to Tucker ahead of the 2019 season.
Tucker adopted the same recruiting philosophy as his mentor. He views recruiting as the lifeblood of his program and has a specific blueprint for the players he looks for and the type of staff he needed to assemble. Because he spent years scouting high school talent for Saban, Martzen and Tucker think the same. After an interview two years ago, Tucker hired Martzen at Colorado, and again at Michigan State — needing only a simple text to get him to follow. Martzen is now Tucker’s chief of staff, and helped him identify like-minded individuals to join them in East Lansing.
“He’s a guy that I would’ve followed anywhere,” Martzen told The Athletic. “He could’ve taken a job at any school in the country and if he asked me to come, I would’ve gone.”
Tucker is a neutral thinker, never getting too high or too low in any particular moment and processing information as it comes. It’s a philosophy he picked up from Trevor Moawad, an author and mental conditioning consultant who has worked with Saban teams dating back to his days with the Miami Dolphins. At Michigan State, Tucker has encouraged his staff to read Moawad’s work and has brought him in on several occasions to speak to the team via Zoom. He wants his staff to be consistent in how they approach practice, how they approach their players, how they approach game situations and how they approach life, in an effort to establish a culture.
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“I think that the coaching staff is a reflection of the head coach and the players will feed off of the coaching staff,” Tucker said. “If we’re very deliberate and process-oriented and we can stay neutral as a staff, then that will carry over to our players. The most important play is the next play. It doesn’t matter what happened on the last play. Don’t look at the scoreboard, just continue to execute and focus on the process. The outcome will take care of itself.”
That mindset was put to the test this offseason. After a late start to his Michigan State tenure, Tucker inherited a roster he wasn’t able to evaluate in person for six months, thanks to a pandemic wiping out spring football. Recruiting restrictions that prohibited staffs across the country from inviting prospects to campus meant that, even with all the downtime, Tucker couldn’t properly show recruits around and offer a proper face-to-face sales pitch. And then, of course, there was the start-and-stop nature of the Big Ten’s 2020 season.
However, those around the program were impressed with Tucker’s ability to navigate the turbulence this offseason. Athletic director Bill Beekman said Tucker has been able to make lemons into lemonade every step of the way. Parents of players told The Athletic they were kept in the loop with Zoom calls and updates when the student-athletes were invited back to campus in June and when the Big Ten postponed its season in August. Michigan State wasn’t a school that actively pushed for an immediate return to play, instead opting to focus on what they could control. Just days after the Big Ten shut down, Tucker’s team was back at the football facilities, working on agility and speed in an effort to be a faster team whenever their next opportunity to play arrived.
And when the Big Ten announced it would re-start football in late October, Tucker, again, got his team on the same page.
“I feel like he’s done a fantastic job of pulling us all together,” cornerback Dominique Long said of Tucker. “We have Zoom meetings with special guests, just keeping us all together, and he will just mention at the end of the call, just staying positive and staying neutral. I feel like he’s done an excellent job in bringing us together and he’s trying to keep us focused because there’s so many things to be distracted with, so many things could just pry us away from the football mindset. But I feel like he’s done a fantastic job of just continuing to pull us all together and asking people how they’re feeling and how everybody’s doing. I feel like he’s done everything to the best of his abilities.”
(Photo: Michigan State Athletics)“It’s a great opportunity for us,” Tucker said of the upcoming season. “I never really got caught up too much into scheduling — who you play and when you play them. I was raised as a football guy. I was always taught when they put the ball down, (when) they snap the ball, it’s time to play — regardless of when or where. We’re preparing our players that way. This situation, this year has been a challenge. It’s been unusual. It’s been unprecedented. But at the end of the day, we’re going to have an opportunity to go out there and play. And that’s what we all want to do.”
Success isn’t guaranteed simply because of the people Tucker learned from or who he’s worked under. The truth of the matter is, if Tucker wants to get Michigan State back into a place of contention, it will take time. It will some convincing. It’ll take attention to detail, the ability to navigate problems that come along the way and surrounding himself with the right people — all things Tucker knows entering his 23rd season as a high-level football coach. It’s why the school hired him. They know what he’s all about.
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Those humble beginnings are constant reminders for Tucker. Earlier this week, when asked to put into words what these final days leading up to his Michigan State debut meant to him, Tucker couldn’t help but crack a smile. He thought about those text messages and the voicemails he’s still getting. He thought about the people who helped him get to this point. Now that the moment is almost here, Tucker knows this is everything his team has been working for. That an opportunity like the one that awaits him is everything he’s been working for.
He doesn’t take it for granted.
“This is a dream come true for me, to be able to represent this great university and Spartan Nation as the head football coach,” Tucker said. “I’m really looking forward to it. Playing in Spartan Stadium, coaching in Spartan Stadium, it’s special. I do remember the feeling of — as a graduate assistant — coaching in that stadium. It’s something that I’ve always cherished. I really can’t wait to get back out there.”
(Top photo: Michigan State Athletic Communications)
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