Mark Dantonio
Mark Dantonio
Mark Justin Dantoniois an American football coach and former player. He is the current head football coach at Michigan State University, a position he has held since the 2007 season, presiding over one of the most successful eras in the program's history. He's led the Michigan State Spartans to three Big Ten Conference championships, and seven victories over archrival Michigan in eight years. In 2013, he coached Michigan State to its first 13-win season and the program's fifth trip to...
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth9 March 1956
CityEl Paso, TX
We'll challenge our players in a couple of ways. We'll talk to them about what TCU did to Oklahoma. We'll talk to them about what Air Force did to Washington.
We are excited about getting a player like Lance to join our program. He went back and forth on which sport to play, but decided on football after the signing date and we are pleased that he will be in the fold this coming season. I really like what I see in him and so do all of our coaches.
Dave is an individual I have coached with in the past, and someone who I have the utmost respect for as a coach and as a person. He has a tremendous amount of experience at coaching offense at the Division I level, and has ties to the BIG EAST Conference as a player and a coach.
Last year, almost whatever could go wrong, went wrong.
We need to protect the passer and run the ball better on offense, but we did make some plays down the field with our tight ends. Defensively, we played pretty well at the point of attack, but gave up some big plays that hurt us.
It was very bad for our players. It had a tremendous impact on the game, huge. We're about to score, then they go 98 yards very quickly and it's 18-7 instead of us leading 14-12. I firmly believe that if we had gotten it in the end zone there it's a football game. I don't know if we would have won, but it's a game. Even at that, we were still in it at halftime. But we weren't the same team in the second half.
We had three or four wide receivers out. And we had some (passes) dropped. That will make a difference. But the defense played well.
I don't think our confidence was shaken at all, I think we came out in the second half prepared to play.
We're going to ask that people reach out to (Ruffin) and make a donation to the University of Cincinnati Hurricane Katrina effort. We also have Mike Brown, whose family is living on the second floor of their home right now. The first floor is flooded. So let's try to do what we can for our own and help them move forward with their life.
They've got an exciting quarterback who can take a bad play and make it a good one. He's special. And they've got a tailback that's elusive.