A team for the ages: More on the '99 Spartans

After talking with various members of the 1999 MSU football team, the biggest thing that stands out is the offseason work they put in to improve upon their 6-6 season in 1998.

Here’s a portion of my story that had to get cut that shows the type of determination that team had:

Although T.J. Duckett was new to the fold, the majority of 1999’s headliners were veterans and knew full well the talent MSU had. That talent didn’t translate to MSU’s final 1998 record, however, as the Spartans finished 6-6 and sixth in the Big Ten.

Throughout the season they were one of the most puzzling teams in the nation. They lost to Minnesota and needed two overtimes to beat Indiana, but went on the road and beat No. 1 Ohio State. The up-and-down season didn’t only confuse fans. It also didn’t make sense to the players returning, who had made a pact that 1999 would be different.

“We beat the No. 1 team in the nation, but we lose the games we’re supposed to win? That right there, we had a mind set to say, ‘Hey, if we can beat the No. 1 team in the nation and we weren’t that good, we could win the whole thing next year,’” said Julian Peterson, a five-time Pro Bowler currently with the Detroit Lions. “We had a whole mind-set that we ought to win the Big Ten — we’re not even going to mess around that we can contend or try to get close to the Big Ten. No, we decided we were going to win the Big Ten.”

It wasn’t just talk. The players worked. Amp Campbell said it started in winter conditioning, where head coach Nick Saban and the coaching staff — including current head coach Mark Dantonio as the secondary coach — worked the players harder than ever.

But winter conditioning only was the foundation. The real progress came during the summer, with the coaches in the backdrop and the players coaching themselves. During the summer of 1999, Campbell, now a defensive coach at Lane College in Tennessee, said nearly every player stayed in East Lansing to work out. The day in, day out dedication of each player formed a relationship between the Spartans that Campbell said stayed with the team into the season.

“Most of the time, Aric Morris and myself got seven-on-seven drills going and we all played seven-on-seven together,” Campbell said. “We built a bond with one another and were going to do what it took to be successful … and it showed throughout the year, and we all had each other’s back and it paid off.”

Here’s a couple other tidbits from the interviews that I couldn’t fit into my story:

— You’d be hard-pressed to find a better year for MSU athletics than 1999-2000, at least when it comes to the football team and national champion men’s basketball team. Peterson said the two teams often hung around together — and both Peterson and Hill said they still keep in contact with Morris Peterson, Mateen Cleaves, Jason Richardson and others.

Hill said he and Cleaves used to have talks about improving themselves as leaders, while Peterson said the basketball team — which went to the Final Four in 1998-99 — was a huge reason for the football team’s success that season.

“They always asked us like, ‘What ya’ll going to do?’ and they would show us their rings, and we were real tight, so seeing their rings we were like, ‘Man, we don’t have ours, let’s go get our ring. Let’s go win our national championship,’” Peterson said. “They said the same thing, and we were like, ‘Psh, we’ll see.’ It was just this friendly competition, I would say, and it brought the best out of both sides. We were all a tight-knitted family, I would say, as a university and typically you don’t see that. I know I tell a lot of guys on the different teams I’ve been on about it and they always say the football and basketball teams never got along.”

— Campbell, summing up MSU’s pregame warm ups before its 40-10 loss against Wisconsin: “It was cold; for a lot of those guys, including myself, it was rough. It was like below zero out there and we got there, got off the bus, got dressed and did our pregame and it just wasn’t good. Then we came back in the locker room and coach Saban realized we had one of the worst pregames of the season and he just ripped us a new one. He told us to take off our skull caps and our under armour-type stuff and told us to take those clothes off because we didn’t need them and wouldn’t be wearing that stuff in the game. Looking back on it, that was part of improving our mental toughness.”

— And finally, on the 10-year anniversary of Saban leaving MSU, I’ll end with a somewhat surprising quote from Peterson regarding the whole ordeal: “It wasn’t that big (of a shock) to me because I’d seen his track record before. He was in the NFL before. He did that before. He was here one day, gone the next, and he had the same pattern later on in his career. I wasn’t necessarily surprised by it.”