Spring game preview: Michigan State
The Spartans will look vastly different from 2025, from the head coach to the offensive line to the offensive scheme.
Michigan State’s spring showcase kicks off on Saturday at noon in Spartan Stadium, the first glimpse of the new Pat Fitzgerald-led MSU program.
It won’t be an out-and-out scrimmage, Fitzgerald said earlier in the spring, but it will be the first time these Spartans show what they’ve got in front of fans. It’s a heavy dose of new to the roster along with the coaches, with 30 transfers and 15 freshmen joining the team through the winter and spring.
And before getting into some spring game things to watch for, catch up on Mitten Football’s MSU reporting this spring.
Andrew Graham
Andrew Graham
Let’s dig in.
Who plays offensive line
The offensive line has been a bugaboo for the Spartans for years now, and it’s a group in flux through this offseason for MSU as a cadre of transfers mixes in with a handful of seasoned returners.
MSU returns four linemen who played in 2025: Conner Moore, Rakeem Johnson, Rustin Young and Luka Vincic, who made one start and suffered a season-ending injury. And MSU added four transfers: Ben Murawski (UConn), Trent Fraley (North Dakota State), Nick Sharpe (South Carolina) and Robert Wright Jr. (Georgia Southern).
Those eight players are the core group to form an OL, and a few less-seasoned returners like Antonio Johnson, Andrew Dennis and Drew Nichols could be in the mix.
Murawski and Wright both have starting tackle experience and could just slot in to those spots and free up competition at guard. Fraley, an FCS All American center a year ago, seems to be penciled in as the starting center at this point. Players have cross trained various positions this spring, too.
Can the Spartans get to the passer?
Pass rush was a problem for MSU in 2025. The Spartans finished No. 86 nationally with 22 total sacks, fewer than two a game.
With defensive coordinator Joe Rossi back for 2026, the structure of the defense will be very similar but the talent on the front seven has shifted. MSU lost a lot of starters to the portal, but added a lot via the portal to the edge rusher group, in particular.
MSU added Trey Lisle, Keahnist Thompson and Kenny Soares Jr. to a room that returned Anelu Lafaele, Isaac Smith, Kekai Burnett and Cal Thrush. Luke DeJager and Jaxson Wilson also return for MSU.
Lisle and his 6-foot-7 frame jump off the page and stand out on the field, but whether it’s him or any of the others in the group — perhaps not Lafaele right now, who is banged up — MSU needs something more from the edge rushers in 2026.
Saturday won't be the perfect lab for that, but it's a key group to watch, even though they won't be hitting any quarterbacks.
What does the offense look like?
Fitzgerald’s nascent offenses at Northwestern featured a lot of the modern sideline-to-sideline, read based option with quick passing to athletes in space horizontally than down the field. It’s a style that served the Wildcats well playing in a league where every other opponent, basically, had an advantage in terms of depth and athleticism.
Such will not be the case at Michigan State. The roster isn’t to the level of an Ohio State yet — dust of your wallets, donors — but Fitzgerald and Co. can recruit a higher cut of athletic ability and talent to MSU and, presumably, play a little differently than he has in the past.
The first way this seems to manifest, apparently, is power football. The offensive linemen that MSU signed are pretty big fellas, and Fitzgerald knows as well as anyone that the top of this league wins by being the biggest and strongest more than anything else.
And how that merges with offensive coordinator Nick Sheridan, who served under Kalen DeBoer at Alabama most recently — where they struggled to run the ball in 2025 — will be interesting to watch develop.
For this writer, the prediction is that MSU leans into more of a power run-to-play action type of offense with plenty of heavy personnel and getting under center — think the Jon Gruden Raiders with Derek Carr — while sprinklings of some of the more spread out, shotgun passing offense make their way on to the menu.
