COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Jim Tressel hired Mel Tucker in 2001 with one mission: Lock down Ohio. Especially Northeast Ohio.
Those in-state high school football stars who got away and went to Michigan? If Tressel was going to turn the tide in The Game, it was going to start in recruiting. So the new coach of the Buckeyes hired an assistant who was a Cleveland native, who knew the Big Ten, and who had played at Wisconsin for Barry Alvarez and coached at Michigan State under Nick Saban. And he gave him a mission.
Get the best Cleveland high school football players to Ohio State. Keep them out of Michigan.
Done.
“I can honestly say, in my four years at Ohio State, no one ever got out of there that we wanted," Tucker told me. "Between Coach Tressel and I, we were able to partner up and get it done. I always used to say, if you can’t recruit to Ohio State, you can’t recruit. We felt we just had to get it done in Northeast Ohio. At that time, that needed to be a foothold for Ohio State.”
Tucker and Tressel built the Glenville pipeline that would yield future stars like Donte Whitner, Troy Smith and Ted Ginn Jr. for years. They made sure another Desmond Howard, the St. Joseph High School star turned Michigan Heisman Trophy winner, didn’t happen. The recruiting wall that Ohio State has built around Ohio for most of the last two decades, that foundation was laid by Tressel and Tucker.
Tucker will now try to build that same foothold for Michigan State.
Tucker told me that during an hour-long interview in November about his first head coaching job. After more than two decades as an assistant coach in college and the NFL, Tucker landed the Colorado job and went 5-7 in 2019. Late Tuesday night, he took the Michigan State job, after the desperate Spartans came back to him following a rejection from Luke Fickell.
Tucker (48) and Fickell (46) fit a similar profile, two Ohio natives who played in the Big Ten and coached at Ohio State. They both know Ohio recruiting. Fickell has done it more recently -- Tucker hasn’t coached in the Big Ten since he left the Buckeyes for the Browns after the 2004 season.
“I got an opportunity to coach for my hometown Cleveland Browns, and that was appealing to me. It was like a dream come true, because it really meant a lot for me to to coach for Cleveland,” Tucker said. “And I was able to stay in that Nick Saban-Bill Belichick tree and philosophy of coaching football and coaching details in particular.”
Tucker stayed in the NFL for 10 years, but he came back to college with Saban at Alabama in 2015. Now fully expect the Spartans to factor into Ohio recruiting as much, or even more, than they did under Mark Dantonio, the former Ohio State assistant who used three-star Ohio players to build a consistent winner at Michigan State for 13 years.
Tucker landed a graduate assistant job at Michigan State 23 years ago because coming out of Cleveland Heights High School, he had been recruited by Saban, then the coach at Toledo. After playing at Wisconsin, Tucker started his coaching career as a volunteer assistant at Cleveland Heights. Then he called Saban, by then the head coach at Michigan State, and his college coaching career was underway.
When Tressel took the Ohio State job, it didn’t take long for him to call Tucker. They built a tight relationship for four years, and now Tucker takes over a Michigan State program that has Tressel’s fingerprints all over it -- Dantonio was his former defensive coordinator and one of his best friends, and Tressel’s nephew, Mike, was the interim head coach between Dantonio’s retirement and Tucker’s hiring.
Tucker is being criticized for telling Michigan State no, telling Colorado he’s staying, and then changing his mind after the Spartans upped the offer. That’s not the first time a coach has done that, and the rules of the college game allow coaches freedom that players don’t have. So he has to face that. And, the Michigan State athletic department has issues, and the search that landed Tucker was clunky at best.
But ... while Tucker spoke last fall of the beautiful view of the Rocky Mountains out of his office window, this Clevelander, who still has family in Northeast Ohio, is a major fit with Michigan State.
Will he take Ohio recruits away from Ohio State? Not likely. Dantonio didn’t do that, but he pulled a lot of talent from the second level of Ohio high school football, the players who didn’t quite get Ohio State offers. The school that can be the second-best recruiter in Ohio can win some games that way. Tucker will absolutely fight for that.
Like Dantonio, Tucker calls Saban and Tressel two of his primary mentors. So I expect, when he gets Michigan State rolling, he’ll be a pain for Jim Harbaugh at Michigan. Tucker told me he loves building programs. He felt he did that at Ohio State with Tressel. He felt he did that when he left Alabama to go to Georgia with Kirby Smart, where Tucker was the Bulldogs’ defensive coordinator before he was hired by Colorado. Now he can do that at Michigan State, where after winning double-digit games in six of eight years, the Spartans are coming off consecutive 7-6 seasons.
Tucker may have a rough start given the circumstances of his hiring and a Michigan State athletic department that is lacking leadership and lacking cohesion at the moment. But the Spartans are paying Tucker because I think in Fickell and Tucker they saw two potential steadying forces with Midwest roots. They felt they needed one of them.
They got Tucker. When you give him a mission, he’s been pretty good at carrying it out.
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