Michigan State coach Mel Tucker details practice format for 2023 Spring Game
East Lansing, Mich. – Michigan State head coach Mel Tucker announced on Monday that the Spartans’ annual Spring Game will again resemble a practice rather than a traditional Green versus White game.
“We are going to have more of a practice type of format with some scrimmaging as opposed to a game,” Tucker said. “That’s worked for us in the past just with our numbers. It’s actually going to be more competitive. We can get more out of it as opposed to trying to split the team up and create some type of game.
“It will be uptempo. It will be organized. We’ll get a chance to see guys play fast and see players go good on good, ones on ones, twos on twos, which is really how we practice pretty much every day. So you get a chance to see guys grind and kind of compete and see some of the new guys that you haven’t seen go full speed. So I think that will be good.”
Last year, Michigan State did not have enough healthy bodies available to field two separate teams for a traditional Spring Game. That was especially true for the offensive line, which only had seven players available to practice. Two of those seven were converted defensive linemen.
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This year, Michigan State began the spring with 19 healthy offensive linemen.
But Tucker said that defensive line availability has been an issue over the last few weeks of spring practice. That’s one of the reasons why dividing into two separate teams would have been difficult for this year’s Spring Game.
Tucker also prefers evaluating players in a practice setting.
“If we had more defensive linemen healthy and ready to go, we might be able to divide the squad up and have a competitive kind of game, but that’s not the case,” Tucker said. “When you split a squad up, sometimes it’s not going to be hyper competitive, then it’s not very fun for coaches to evaluate guys. It might be a little more fun for the fans to see guys going up and down the field but for us we need to see guys compete and strain and work really hard to win their one-on-ones on each play. That practice format with scrimmaging is good. And when you’re really trying to evaluate, and we only get 15 of them, we don’t plan on wasting a day. We’re going to get something done on Saturday.”
The 2023 Spring Game, which marks the end of Michigan State’s spring training camp, will be held at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday at Spartan Stadium. Gates will open at 12:30 p.m. and admission is free. Michigan State Athletics will offer a variety of free promotional opportunities before the game as a part of its Spartan Football Kickoff event.
