Mark Dantonio couldn’t do much more than throw his hands up in the air and shake his head by the midway point of the fall. The Big Ten’s recent model of consistency crumbled in 2016 and crashed to a non-competitive 3-9 record.
No team in college football fell further this season than the Spartans, who won a Big Ten championship and secured a spot in the College Football Playoff a year ago. Some type of a step backward in the harrowing Big Ten East wasn’t hard to see coming with major attrition around the line of scrimmage and a program-altering quarterback heading off the NFL.