Spartans' Dantonio on Distinguished Career
The Michigan State Spartans will honor legendary head coach Mark Dantonio at Saturday night's game against the No. 3 Ohio State Buckeyes as he is inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame and Michigan State Ring of Honor. His name will be engraved in the upper deck of Spartan Stadium.
This weekend, we celebrate Coach Dantonio and his election to the College Football Hall of Fame as his name goes up in the Ring of Honor at Spartan Stadium! pic.twitter.com/RduzwjwBZd
— Michigan State Football (@MSU_Football) September 24, 2024
Dantonio was on campus Friday night and was able to answer some questions regarding his illustrious career and the accomplishments he achieved at the helm of the Spartan football program. In classic Dantonio fashion, he was quite humble in his response.
"I hope every one of these players that are here and everybody that really worked with us closely sees a little bit of their name up on that award because I think these are program awards,” Dantonio said. “I think these are things you don't get there without a lot of people and everybody's got to be pointing the right direction and doing their job, be excellent with their job, so when we came here we wanted to build a legacy and I think that's what we did as a program.”
The all-time winningest coach in Spartan football history (114), Dantonio changed the face of the program for the better with six 10+ win seasons, a Rose Bowl win, Cotton Bowl win, and College Football Playoff berth in 2015.
Dantonio appreciated the sense of community that he brought to the program and the importance of relationships to become to a successful team in the college football realm.
“I think it points to one of the first things we tried to do as a program, was build relationships with people and I think you have to do that because we have a shared sense of commitment, a shared sense of communication and then when you trust each other as people,” Dantonio said. “Those relationships are going to stand for a lifetime, we try to develop those and we build into those things."
Dantonio looked back on his career and the progression it took to become a national program and household name in the state of Michigan.
"In the early years in ‘07, ‘08, ‘09, we had tremendous buy-in by our players and then you went through the ‘10, ‘11, ‘12 years, and I looked at those years, and that's when we started competing for championships," Dantonio said. "Then ‘13, ‘14, ‘15, that's when we sort of hit our stride and then finishing out we won 114, lost some close games but won a lot of them too.”
The Spartans and their fans will honor Dantonio for a career that pivoted the program from average expectations in the conference to a team that had opportunities to win a Big Ten Championship and potential National Championship every year.
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