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 defeat, Smith finally addressed the punishment, saying the school had been in a long process and negotiation and that he echoed Michigan State’s leadership in wanting to “get something behind us so we can move forward.”

The NCAA found that, under Tucker, Michigan State provided more than $10,000 in impermissible recruiting inducements and benefits. Tucker, later fired after sexual harassment accusations, was cited for failing his responsibilities and hit with a three-year show-cause order, as were former staffers Saeed Khalif and Brandon Jordan. Smith was not involved in the violations but is living with the fallout, as noticed by On3.

Michigan State accepted three years of probation, a $30,000 fine plus 1.5 percent of the football budget, reduced official visits across the 2025–27 seasons, 30 lost recruiting days, and a six-week communication ban through 2027–28. Wins from 2022–24 were vacated, stripping five victories from Smith’s ledger and dropping his official mark to 3-14.

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He noted the program had already been proactive, taking recruiting limitations in spring and fall because they knew sanctions were coming, and stressed that the staff and players have taken “body blows” without lacking effort. Smith also said he does not agree with all of the penalties and echoed the school’s view that the NCAA needs to modernize how it enforces them.

Those vacated wins underscore how deep the damage runs. In a joint statement with the NCAA, MSU acknowledged that former staff arranged impermissible inducements, unofficial visit perks, and contacts, leading to a three-year probation that includes financial penalties, strict recruiting restrictions, and the formal removal of 14 victories due to ineligible players.

For a program that has already fallen out of Big Ten relevance and is scrambling just to reach bowl eligibility again, the sanctions threaten to slow any rebuild Smith is trying to engineer.

For now, he is focused on salvaging what he can from a lost year. That means trying to stop the slide, starting with Iowa next week, while steering a roster through sanctions he did not create but now has to overcome, even as older rumors tie his name to other jobs.