Dave Bartoo says

[The Situation]

He sure as **** wasn’t a “good” recruiter

He certainly stole a few guys from us.

 

[HD6]

It's pretty simple when you think about it.

It boils down to us having typical MSU talent everywhere, but a stacked JUCO class on top of an upperclass heavy team in general. A lot of that overlap was on defense, obviously. That explains why the defense was #1 but we were still considered an 8 win team.

Remember, we had the #1 ranked defense in 1999 and pretty high again in 2000, and went 9-2 (10-2 in the modern era because we'd have had an FCS opponent now that we didn't have back then) and 7-4 (8-4). Of course, that schedule in 1999 was really easy SEC-wise, I think we drew Vandy, winless South Carolina and Kentucky that year. 2000 was more like 2018. Everybody thought we were national contenders then too, but we proved to be pretenders.

State was 54th in total defense in 2000.