Mel Tucker
Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 1-0
2021Peach BowlW 31-21
Report card
Defense carries it: 66th percentile defense, below the median offense at 34th.
Michigan State, every completed season graded against the whole field, then averaged.
Offense
Defense
Each season is his team’s percentile among every team with that stat (the share it beat), averaged over his completed seasons here; a mid-season takeover year and the season in progress aren’t graded. Letters: A+ 90th percentile and up, A 80, B+ 70, B 60, B− 50, C+ 45, C 40, C− 30, D 15, F below.
Fans
No fan talk about him on our list yet. His record is on Career.
Stats
Big games
Pick a job to see its years on their own.
The big-game ledger
How he does in the games that matter most — rivalry record, performance broken out by real opponent tier, one-score games, and his toughest historical matchup.
2-1 against his rivals at Colorado.
Signature games
Tags describe each game; they aren’t scores. The weighting that picks these games is still being tested.
The big-game ledger
How he does in the games that matter most — rivalry record, performance broken out by real opponent tier, one-score games, and his toughest historical matchup.
3-3 against his rivals at Michigan State. Winless in 3 tries against Ryan Day.
Signature games
Tags describe each game; they aren’t scores. The weighting that picks these games is still being tested.
The big-game ledger
How he does in the games that matter most — rivalry record, performance broken out by real opponent tier, one-score games, and his toughest historical matchup.
5-4 against his rivals. Winless in 3 tries against Ryan Day.
Signature games
Tags describe each game; they aren’t scores. The weighting that picks these games is still being tested.
ATS is his record against the spread: did his team beat the closing betting line, winning by more than it or losing by less? Lines start in 2013; a dash means fewer than 6 of those games had one. One-score games carry no spread record: a big favorite that wins a close game has almost always failed to cover, so that number would say nothing about the coach.
How he plays
Run/pass mix, by field position
Passed more than the situation called for under Johnson.
2,091 run and pass snaps at Michigan State, 2020–2022, his own games, one row per offensive coordinator. Each cell is how much more often he passed than the rest of FBS did in the same situation (field zone, down, distance, score, quarter, same season), in percentage points.
Pass rate, stint by stint
Where each stint’s offense sat between run-first and pass-first, and how far it moved from one season to the next, against the FBS-wide average of 41% pass. The band is that stint’s real season-to-season range, not a fixed-width box.
Season-to-season pass-rate range for all 449 FBS coaching stints with at least three covered seasons, 2004–2025.
Building the roster
Six numbers on how he actually stocks a roster, from signing day to draft day.
His recruiting, really
His 2 ranked Michigan State classes of his own have averaged #34 nationally — best #24, worst #43.
Colorado
Michigan StateAcross every program: 2 ranked classes of his own, averaging #34 nationally.
His class — he had the full signing cycleTransition — he was hired mid-cycleInherited — signed before he arrived
Rank is each signing class’s national recruiting rank (#1 is best). Only a class he had a full signing cycle to build counts as his; inherited and mid-transition classes still show here, faded, but stay out of the average.
Followed him here
Colorado→Michigan State2020Players who transferred from his old program to his new one through the portal in the same year he made the move. Name-matching across data sources misses some, so every count is a floor, not an exact number.
Roster ownership
Roster ownership
of his 2023 roster arrived on his watch — 45 of 117 players. The other 72 are holdovers from before he was hired.
Of his own players on this roster, 31% came through the transfer portal; the rest are non-portal arrivals (high-school signees, JUCO transfers, walk-ons).
Everyone he has brought in, 2020–2023Counting players who have since left: 24% of the 82 arrivals we can classify came through the portal.
This tenure spans the 2021 transfer-portal tracking floor: seasons before 2021 structurally cannot be classified portal-vs-not (they land in 'unknown' below), so the portal-share figure understates how many pre-2021 arrivals might have been transfers under the pre-portal-tracking transfer rules.
“His own” means the player arrived while he was head coach; “inherited” means a predecessor brought him in.
Size up front
Size up front
Offensive linemen on his Michigan State rosters have averaged 6 lb heavier than the FBS average (2020–2022) — heavier than 81% of FBS coaching runs since 2010. In the three seasons before he arrived, Michigan State’s line averaged 6 lb heavier than the FBS average.
Average listed weight of every offensive lineman on each season’s roster, holdovers included, against every FBS roster that season (2010 on; a program needs 3+ seasons under him to appear). Weights are the ones programs publish, and programs list differently. This describes size only — not scheme, and not quality.
Where he recruits
is his biggest recruiting state: 23 of 76 signees (30%) across his 2020–2023 tenure, drawn from 23 states in all. Next: GA (9).
38% of his signees come from MI and its 3 border states (OH 4, IN 2).
- median hometown distance
- 349 mi
- within 100 mi
- 37%
- within 500 mi
- 54%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 22%
The map counts signed recruits across his tenure; the distance figures cover his current roster, transfers and walk-ons included. Two different groups, kept separate on purpose.
The NFL pipeline
The NFL pipeline
players drafted into the NFL off his teams here. Most were someone else’s recruits: 5 arrived under Mark Dantonio; 2 he brought in himself.
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | R2.19 | Jayden Reed | Wide Receiver |  Green Bay Packers | recruited under Mark Dantonio |
| 2023 | R6.15 | Bryce Baringer | Punter |  New England Patriots | recruited under Mark Dantonio |
| 2023 | R6.37 | Ameer Speed | Cornerback | New England Patriots | |
| 2022 | R2.09 | Ken Walker III | Running Back |  Seattle Seahawks | |
| 2022 | R6.12 | Jalen Nailor | Wide Receiver |  Minnesota Vikings | recruited under Mark Dantonio |
| 2022 | R6.30 | Connor Heyward | Fullback |  Pittsburgh Steelers | recruited under Mark Dantonio |
| 2022 | R7.40 | AJ Arcuri | Offensive Tackle |  Los Angeles Rams | recruited under Mark Dantonio |
A pick counts toward his tenure when the player’s final college season was one he coached, a checkable rule rather than a claim about who developed the player. A blank note means the player is on a verified roster and arrived on his watch. “Estimated” means no roster record, so the final season is assumed to be the year before the draft.
News
No outlet on our list has written about him by name yet. His record is on Career.
Career
Coaching career
The arc of his career is on Now.
Steady no large move in either direction on our stature ladder
9th-best Michigan State tenure of 16 by the numbers.
Followed Mark Dantonio (2007–2019) · succeeded by Harlon Barnett (2023).
| Season | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||||
| Record | 2-5 | 11-2 | 5-7 | 2-0 | |
| Postseason | — | W bowl | — | — | |
| Coordinators | |||||
| OC | Jay Johnson | Jay Johnson | Jay Johnson | — | |
| DC | Scottie Hazelton | Scottie Hazelton | Scottie Hazelton | — | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||||
| Offense | 4 | 59 | 32 | — | |
| Defense | 69 | 56 | 20 | — | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||||
| 1st-down pass% | 46.1 | 41.1 | 45.5 | — | |
| Red-zone pass% | 54.2 | 41.7 | 36.9 | — | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 37.5 | 45.5 | 59.4 | — | |
Underperforms his recruiting talent on offense and performs about as expected for his recruiting talent on defense.
Brings in bigger-than-position-typical players than most.
Recruits older, more experienced transfers than most.
Coach of the Year: Big Ten Dave McClain Coach of the Year/Big Ten Hayes–Schembechler Coach of the Year (2021)
3 player-seasons honored (All-America / national award): Jayden Reed (2021), Kenneth Walker III (2021), Bryce Baringer (2022)
Followed Mike MacIntyre (2013–2018) · succeeded by Karl Dorrell (2020–2022).
Underperforms his recruiting talent, on both sides of the ball.
3 NFL Draft picks: Laviska Shenault Jr. (2020), Davion Taylor (2020), Arlington Hambright (2020)
Was he good?
The data leans negative: every conclusive reading points the same way.
-4.4 pts at Michigan State · #973 of 1290 · bottom quarterModel fit as of 2026-09-04.