Michigan
Michigan State football winners & losers: Run game favors Spartans on both sides of ball
MSU football: Video analysis of the Spartans’ 24-17 loss at Michigan
Lansing State Journal columnist Graham Couch and Detroit Free Press MSU beat writer Chris Solari break down the Spartans’ 24-17 loss at Michigan.
Free PRess sports writer Chris Solari reviews the Michigan State football players who helped or hurt their stock in the Spartans’ 24-17 loss Saturday night at Michigan.
Winners
LOOKING AHEAD: What we learned at U-M, what to watch vs. Indiana
RB Nate Carter
For a kid who grew up in upstate New York dreaming of playing for U-M, Carter ran with a personal and punishing mission statement against the Wolverines. The junior, in his second season after transferring from Connecticut, posted his MSU-best 118 rushing yards and a touchdown on 19 carries while establishing a new personal high with 56 receiving yards on two catches. It was Carter’s first time back in Michigan Stadium since 2022 with the Huskies, when he suffered a season-ending shoulder injury after running six times for 21 yards.
RG Brandon Baldwin
After playing exclusively at left tackle for two seasons at MSU, two injuries in the first three weeks necessitated the fifth-year senior’s move to the interior. Considering how entirely lost he looked in his baptism at Boston College, Saturday’s road-grading performance against U-M was an entirely different beast. Carter followed his big blocker for his 2-yard touchdown in the first quarter, and Baldwin and center Tanner Miller helped create creases off the right side for the Spartans to outrush the Wolverines, 163-119.
Run defense
For the second straight game, following the containment of Iowa star Kaleb Johnson last week, MSU’s front seven squelched its opponent’s rushing attack. The Spartans held U-M’s top rusher, Kalel Mullings, to just 18 yards on 13 carries and stuffed Donovan Edwards for 24 yards on nine attempts. MSU, however, found minimal success in stopping quarterback Alex Orji, who led the Wolverines with 64 yards and a touchdown on just six carries. The Spartans now rank 45th in the nation at 129.6 yards allowed on the ground per game.
Losers
Pass rush
While the front seven neutered the U-M running backs all night, the Spartans continued to struggle with getting to opposing quarterbacks. MSU failed to get a sack for the fourth straight game against Big Ten competition after opening the season with 15 sacks in the first four games. Some of that came from Wolverines quarterback Davis Warren throwing just 19 times, but the Spartans have not had a sack in more than a month, a stretch of 257 minutes and 53 seconds of game play. Their last came when defensive end Anthony Jones dropped Boston College QB Thomas Castellanos with 2:53 left in the third quarter on Sept. 21.
FEELING SICK: Michigan State football laments missed chances at U-M: ‘We should have won this game’
Special teams
The Spartans struggled in all three phases against U-M, but they also had issues among multiple special teams units. It started with Jonathan Kim missing a chip-shot field-goal attempt that cost MSU points on the first drive of the game. It continued with a botched fair catch call by upback Sam Edwards with Alante Brown snagging a kickoff early in the second half, pinning the Spartans at their 5-yard line. Then after a Kim field goal, the kickoff unit gave a slight tell that an onside kick was coming to tip off the Wolverines to recover (and MSU also was offsides on the dribbler). Losing long snapper Kaden Schickel to an apparently significant left leg injury could eventually become problematic, as the James Madison transfer had been spectacularly steady through the first eight games.
LB Jordan Turner
The between-periods review of Turner’s hit on an Orji run on the final play of the third quarter cost the Spartans one of their best defenders and captains. Turner’s loss was felt quickly later in that drive as the Wolverines exploited safety Malik Spencer’s aggressiveness trying to help the linebackers against the run, with Edwards delivering a halfback pass for a touchdown to Colston Loveland that ultimately proved to be the winning score. Equally as costly for MSU is losing Turner for the first half of next week’s game against No. 13 Indiana due to NCAA targeting rules.
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him @chrissolari.
Subscribe to the “Spartan Speak” podcast for new episodes weekly on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts. And catch all of our podcasts and daily voice briefing at freep.com/podcasts.
Michigan
Thunderstorms rip across Michigan damaging 2 ice arenas, other structures
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Powerful storms ripped through parts of Michigan overnight Tuesday into Wednesday morning, damaging two ice arenas and other structures, and uprooting trees near the University of Michigan’s main campus.
National Weather Service crews were surveying damage in places including Ann Arbor to determine if one or more tornadoes touched down, but none had been confirmed as of Wednesday morning. Instead, the damage appears to have been caused by a line of thunderstorms that moved into Michigan from Iowa, Wisconsin and Illinois, meteorologist Sara Schultz said.
A 70 mph (112.6 kph) wind gust was reported at 1:49 a.m. Wednesday at the university’s football stadium, while gusts of 69 mph (111 kph) and 62 mph (99.7 kph) were reported at Willow Run Airport and Detroit Metropolitan Airport, Schultz said, and another round of strong storms with potentially damaging winds was moving into the area Wednesday from states to the West.
Streets and neighborhoods in many southeastern Michigan communities also were left flooded Wednesday.
Some public school buildings in Ann Arbor suffered structural damage and many lost power. “Safe passage for walkers and buses is compromised across much of the city due to downed power lines, flooding, water main breaks, gas leaks, and felled trees and debris,” the district said Wednesday on its Facebook page.
District schools and offices were closed Wednesday due to what officials say is a fiber outage impacting fire, phone and camera systems, and building access. It wasn’t immediately clear if the fiber outage is related to the storm.
Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor said structural engineers were assessing damage to a wall at the city’s Veterans Memorial Park Ice Arena. Part of the roof was torn from the university’s Yost Ice Arena.
A wall, torn off of the Veterans Memorial Ice Rink following a severe storm, is seen Wednesday, April 15, 2026, in Ann Arbor, Mich. Credit: AP/Mike Householder
Two blocks from where utility workers were dealing with the twisted pieces of metal littering the ground outside Yost, Seungjun Lee was feeling fortunate. A hulking tree outside the rented home he shares with six others barely missed his upstairs bedroom when the storm uprooted it.
“If the tree fell down a couple more feet, I would not be standing here,” said Lee, a 20-year-old junior at U-M. “I’d be in the hospital. So, I’m feeling very lucky that … the roof stopped it.”
Lee and his roommates were awakened by a siren, then an alert blasted from their phones between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m., urging them to take shelter.
“As soon as I came out, everyone else was coming out of their rooms and everyone’s like, ‘What’s going on? This is crazy,’” said Lee, of Ridgewood, New Jersey. “And then we looked out the window: This tree just fell down. So, we’re like, ‘Oh, crap.’”
Storm damage is seen at the Argus Building in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Wednesday, April 15. 2026. Credit: AP/Jordyn Pair
A friend across the street then walked over to check in.
“He was like, ‘Did you hear about Yost?’ We went, ‘No.’ We were worried about our house. So, we walked over and we checked it out and we were like, ‘That’s crazy,’” said Sam Zaruba, a 20-year-old junior from Grand Rapids, Michigan.
As for classes on Wednesday, Zaruba said he’s not going. But roommate Gautam Nigam, a 21-year-old junior, also from Grand Rapids, has to.
“I have a final presentation later today,” he said.
The storms dumped as much as 2.5 inches (6.3 cms) of rain across parts of southeastern Michigan, bringing flood watches to a big chunk of the eastern Lower Peninsula, southeastern Michigan, northern Indiana and northwestern Ohio.
An evacuation notice was issued late Tuesday to low areas in northeastern Michigan’s Cheboygan County following a levee breach in the Little Black River watershed. The breach, in an area northwest of Cheboygan and west of Lake Huron, is not related to efforts to force flow from the Cheboygan Dam toward the lake as water continues rising following days of rainfall and winter snow melt, the county’s emergency management office said on its Facebook page.
Michigan
Over 40,000 without power after storms push through West Michigan
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Over 40,000 Consumers Energy customers are currently without power after strong storms pushed through West Michigan on Tuesday.
The outages, according to a map provided by Consumers Energy, are peppered from as far east as the Lake Michigan shoreline and over to Gratiot County.
This comes as storms producing strong winds, along with severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings, push through the area.
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News Channel 3 is tracking these storms and will provide updates.
Michigan
Max Bullough brings lineage and lessons for Michigan State defense
East Lansing — It’s 6:30 a.m. but the energy is high inside Michigan State football’s practice facility as Max Bullough barks out orders to his group of linebackers who watch him with rapt attention. At 34 years old, the Traverse City native looks as though he could go through these drills himself. He probably wants to.
Now, the former two-time MSU captain Bullough returns to East Lansing. To the same stomping grounds where his grandfather Hank once plodded the sidelines for Duffy Daugherty. Where his father Shane once captained a team for George Perles. Where he and his brothers Riley and Byron each played for Mark Dantonio, including Max’s captaincy of the 2013 team that won a Big Ten championship and earned a ticket to the Rose Bowl.
A Rose Bowl he never got to play in.
With Bullough, it felt like a matter of when, and not if, a homecoming would occur on the sidelines. And with that reunion would come the inevitable question: Why did his career end a game early, suspended from the Rose Bowl his senior season?
“Yeah, you’ve been dying to ask that one,” Bullough said. “Here’s my answer to that one:
“That was 13 years ago, right. So my focus and my energy and my attention is on the 2026 Spartans, and my beautiful wife, Bailey, and my four boys Rocky, Teddy, Banks and Murphy. We’ll leave the past where the past is. It has nothing to do with what we’re doing moving forward, and so let’s talk about the 2026 Spartans.”
Now that that’s out of the way.
As much as Bullough doesn’t want to talk about the past, it’s what his very hire harkens back to. He’s here to help revive a storied program that means so much to him that he has “Spartans” tattooed across both arms. He gets to raise a family where his family has played and coached, and where his grandmother, Lou Ann Bullough, still gets to every Michigan State basketball game she can. What would it mean for his grandfather to know he came back to join the coaching ranks?
“I don’t know how much he would tell me or not. You never got that much out of him that way,” Bullough said. “But I think at the end of the day, I think it would mean a lot.”
The first thing you notice about Bullough is his intensity, especially for Michigan State football. At least that was the case for new head coach Pat Fitzgerald, who had Bullough wrap up the first team meeting of the year for a new group trying to rise above 4-8 mediocrity a year ago.
“I gave him 90 seconds, I think he went 15 minutes,” Fitzgerald said Feb. 4. “Getting to know Max through the evaluation process when I was putting the staff together, you could sense very quickly his pride — beyond the double bicep — for the Spartan football program, the state of Michigan, his time here, and what he wanted to bring back, and that was toughness.”
Bullough’s part in an illustrious past for this program — in four years he went 40-12 and captained the Spartans his junior and senior years, an honor that means a great deal to him — is a major cultural building block for a staff trying to reestablish principles of the era of Dantonio, who is around more often since Fitzgerald got the job. Thankfully it all worked out, Fitzgerald says.
“He’s got a bright future ahead of himself in his career, and we wanted to make sure,” Fitzgerald said, “coming here is obviously easy to say of course, he’d want to come home. But it also had to fit looking at his three-, five-, 10-year plan for his career.”
Bullough was brought in for the next two seasons on a contract paying him $750,000 per year. When he stepped on campus as an assistant coach was only the second time he’d stepped food on campus since he graduated. The other time was when he was an honorary captain in 2015.
“There’s a lot of new buildings, this whole place,” Bullough said. “That’s the question y’all should ask. This place looks completely different.”
In Bullough, though, there’s a connection to history that feels further and further following four straight losing seasons.
“He’s brought energy, brought enthusiasm. He brings a lineage,” defensive coordinator Joe Rossi said April 7. “He understands what it means to be a Spartan, not only him but his family. So it’s been awesome.”
As an understudy to Rossi, Bullough is listed as a co-defensive coordinator in addition to his role as linebackers coach. Not only does that free up Rossi to “roam” around practices and observe his entire defense (last season, Rossi filled that linebackers coach role), Bullough also gains experience for later in his coaching career that has been impressive through stops at Notre Dame and Alabama. He’s a riser, of whom coaches and players speak highly.
Playing for Mike Vrabel while with the Houston Texans watered the genetic coaching seed in Bullough. It was at Notre Dame that Bullough really fell in love with being a college coach.
“Once I was able to get to Notre Dame and have my own room,” Bullough said, “which is where the magic comes for me, like when you’re able to coach your own room and have your own guys. Like the connection that you’re able to build with guys that are this 18 to 22 years old, especially when we’re able to bring (our) own guys in. Watch them come in, watch them develop, and see what they turn into in terms of football players and in terms of men.”’
Men who make mistakes, like he did with whatever incident caused him to be suspended for the biggest game of his career, as perhaps the most important player to that team. That’s not an incident he uses as an example for his players who face trying times, he says, but he does use his life experience as a model for the young men following him, including linebacker Jordan Hall, who likely will be a two-year captain just like his coach this upcoming fall.
“The message to Jordan is, people are drawn to you, brother, what energy are you giving back?” Bullough said. “Because you gotta be on it all the time. There isn’t any time where you can where it’s like you can be down. You have to be on it all the time.”
Bullough said there was one incident early in spring ball that Hall was frustrated he got pulled for a teammate to play. He got frustrated, didn’t handle it well. The next time it happened, Bullough says Hall became an asset on the sidelines.
“I think that’s a testament to the kind of guy he is and the teammate he’s striving to be,” Bullough said. “… He made a mistake the one day, and he got better from it. He’s helped me a lot. And, I mean, I can admit that. I know he and Coach Rossi are very close and that he knows Coach Rossi’s defense like the back of his hand. I have no problem asking ‘Jordan, how do y’all see this? How did we do this last year?’”
“If you guys notice, any of the drills he’s like right behind us, almost mirroring everything that we do,” Hall said March 17. “Very passionate. I mean, just a great ball-knower.”
cearegood@detroitnews.com
@ConnorEaregood
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