Bad Betting Advice, 2025 Week 14: Run it Back

s the final week of the 2025 regular season of college football looms, there is a lot to talk about in the broader landscape. In the sections below, I will highlight conference championship game tiebreaker scenarios and college football playoffs seeding.

But in East Lansing, there will be no postseason this year. Once this week's game against the Maryland Terrapins puts all zeros on the clock, the season will be over. Michigan State Spartans fans will need to wait another nine months to see the Green and White take the field again.

We can (and will) talk about the odds that Michigan State will notch their first Big Ten win, but we might as well address the elephant in the room. When the Spartans do take to the field again on Sept. 5 against Toledo, will Jonathan Smith still be the head coach?

There are two different ways to analyze this question. The first and most important question is what will happen. But unless your name is Michigan State Athletic Director J Batt, this question is irrelevant. In fact, I would wager that Batt himself has not made up his mind.

So while there are tons of fans and media members speculating on Smith's future, everyone is essentially guessing based on vibes. Nobody actually knows anything.

This leads to the second way to analyze the coaching situation in East Lansing and that is to ask the question: what should happen?

I have been thinking a lot about this topic over the past few weeks as I run back the events of the past two seasons in my head. While my opinion carries exactly zero weight, I will go ahead and share it:

I think that Jonathan Smith should return next year as the Spartans' head coach.

This is likely not a popular opinion, but based on the preponderance of evidence, I believe it to be the correct call. Here's why.

When Michigan State went through a coaching search two years ago, Smith quickly rose to the top of the list as the Plan-A target. Smith is a well-respected coach who took a struggling Oregon State program and rebuilt it such that the Beavers were highly competitive in the Pac-12.

Corvallis is a difficult place to win. The resources, tradition, and recruiting pull at Oregon State are tiny compared to a place like Michigan State. Yet Smith was able to win there. The man knows how to coach and he knows how to build a program. Those skills are absolutely transferable to East Lansing and to the Big Ten.

The idea that Smith suddenly forgot how to coach or is now over his head are simply laughable. Some may believe that the last two almost two full season demonstrate that Smith can never be successful at Michigan State University and therefore getting rid of him sooner rather than later is the only logical course of action. 

I simply do not believe that. Two years is simply not enough time to evaluate if a rebuild is working or not. I want more data in order to make an informed decision.

I believe there are two different factors that are currently working against Smith as his team has struggled to a 3-8 record. First, Smith's process of rebuilding a team takes time. Second, Smith has not been very lucky in his two years in East Lansing.

To the first point, Smith's coaching philosophy has become clearer to me over the past few weeks as I have listened carefully to some of his public comments. His approach is one of consistent, even-keeled optimism. Work hard, follow the process, build relationships, and if you do these things right, good things will happen. His approach in Week One is exactly the same as it is on Thanksgiving weekend.

For Smith, process is everything. Good results come and go, but a robust process is what is needed for long-term success. Michigan State got a great result in 2021, but the results were not sustainable because the process was rotten underneath. The first step for Smith was to build a strong foundation. Concrete takes a while to cure.

For me, the strongest indicator that things are subtlety moving the right direction is the way the Spartans have competed over the last several weeks. After stumbling through a loss against a beatable Wolverine team on Oct. 25, it would have been easy for the team to phone it in for the rest of the season. But they didn't.

They went to Minneapolis, played a hard-fought game against the Golden Gophers, but fell just short in overtime. After the bye week, the Spartans went toe-to-toe with a much more talented Penn State squad before the dam broke late in the fourth quarter. 

Then, with essentially nothing left to play for, Michigan State got off the mat one more time, went into Iowa City, and outplayed the Iowa Hawkeyes for the vast majority of the game as 17-point underdogs. 

While it is true that the Spartans still lost in the end, the grit that the team showed was impressive. It speaks to a strong culture in the locker room in East Lansing. It shows that the foundation might be hardening. It means that Smith's long-term strategy is working.

That all said, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Michigan State still lost all of those games. But to my second point, I would argue that so far the Spartans simply have not been a very lucky football team. While it is true that good, well-coached teams create their own luck, it is also true that bad luck sometime is just that.

If we were to run back the film from the 2025 season, we could point to perhaps a dozen plays over the year that if the ball bounced a slightly different way could have changed the outcome of the game. One more play was likely all that the Spartans would have needed to get wins at Minnesota and at Iowa.

But it is also hard to discount the impact of bad injury luck on Michigan State in the 2025 season as well. Week after week the pregame injury reports issued by the Big Ten for the Spartans resembles a CVS receipt.

While injuries are simply a part of college football that every team deals with, rebuilding teams simply have less margin for error on their rosters on the injury front than most teams. Just as an example, if Michigan State were to run back the full season with a healthy offensive line, I would wager that Spartans fans would currently be speculating about bowl destinations and not the future of Jonathan Smith.

Finally, anyone in the corporate world will tell you that hiring people is hard. For those that think Smith and company should be shown the door, please tell me who you think Michigan State should and can hire. Smith was the Plan A target two years ago and beleaguered Wisconsin coach Luke Fickle was the Plan A target in 2019. 

What makes you think that the Spartans will magically make the "right" choice this time and hire the next Curt Cignetti? What makes you think that Michigan State will suddenly give that next coach the resources to completely rebuild the roster once again, which will almost certainly be necessary if Smith is fired?

Do you feel lucky? I certainly do not. 

If Jonathan Smith's future in East Lansing were in my hands, my vote is to run it back one more time. 

Michigan State Prediction

Michigan State currently holds an 11-4 edge in the series with the Maryland Terrapins. The two schools played a total of five times from 1944 to 1950, with the Spartans taking four of those five early contests.

The schools did not meet again until 2014, following Maryland's admission to the Big Ten conference. The Spartans dominated the early portion of the Big Ten series as well, winning six of the first seven games from 2015 to 2021.

Maryland did manage to win two games in a row versus the Spartans in 2022 and 2023. But the Spartans struck back last year with a Week Two win in College Park that earned Jonathan Smith his first Big Ten win.

Against the spread, Michigan State is just 5-5 versus Maryland since the series restarted in 2014. Michigan State has performed slightly better than expectation against the Terrapins, with only one upset loss in 2016. 

The line for this weekend's game opened with the Spartans as a 4.5-point favorite on the semi-home "neutral" venue of Ford Field in Detroit. Michigan State has been a double-digit favorite in half of the recent contests with Maryland. This is the third time since 2014 that the Spartans have been favored, but by less than five points. Historically, this year's spread translates to a 63% chance that the Spartans will finally get a win. 

For the first time in several weeks, my computer also feels good about this game. It predicts a final score of Michigan State 26, Maryland 24.

I personally am very optimistic that the Spartans will rise up and finally get that first Big Ten win. I have been impressed with the fight that Michigan State has shown over the past two weeks. In contrast, Maryland is currently on a seven-game losing streak and the slope of their trajectory is clearly negative.

After a September road win at Wisconsin, the Terrapins proceeded to lose the next three games by a combined total of just 10 points. But since November, Maryland is getting outscored by an average score of 40-14. The closest game in the last month was a 15-point road loss at Rutgers.

This is a game that the Spartans need to win and should win. I believe that they will get the job done.

Big Ten Overview

Table 1 below gives a full summary of the action in the Big Ten in Week 14, including my projected scores, the opening point spreads, and the computers' projected point differentials.