Back in September, when the Michigan State football team was riding an 8-win wave under Jonathan Smith and UCLA had just fired DeShaun Foster , CBS Sports floated Smith as an early candidate in Westwood, citing his Pasadena roots and turnaround work at Oregon State.

That speculation, though not recent, framed him as a rising commodity. Now the conversation around Smith looks very different, with Michigan State mired in a skid and absorbing stiff NCAA penalties tied to the Mel Tucker era.

It has been a brutal season in East Lansing, and last week stacked misery on top of losses. On Wednesday, the Spartans were hit with NCAA sanctions stemming from violations between October 2021 and March 2023.

By Saturday, they had dropped a seventh straight game, this time to Penn State. After that

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