Opinion: Michigan State’s win with Mel Tucker is a glaring loss for the NFL

ATLANTA – Mel Tucker is here now. For a long time. This is the destination job, as Tucker declared it when he arrived at Michigan State in February 2020. If Tom Izzo can put Sparty on the map as a basketball hotbed (post-Magic), then Tucker can surely envision a football powerhouse,

And lo and behold, it took less than one full season for the big donors and power brokers to demonstrate faith with a 10-year, fully-guaranteed, $95 million contract extension that sends a message that they won’t let Tucker get away like his mentor, Nick Saban, did years ago in bolting from East Lansing to LSU.

But this wasn’t always the destination job. Tucker spent 10 years in the NFL, when he became the youngest defensive coordinator in Cleveland Browns history, had a stint as an interim coach for the Jacksonville Jaguars and for a spell was on the circuit as a candidate for an NFL head coaching gig.

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