Mark Dantonio's Spartans (and his name) sure are hard to pin down

— -- ARLINGTON, Texas -- On one sideline in the College Football Playoff Semifinal at the Goodyear Cotton Bowl on Thursday night will be Nick Saban, who is two games away from leading Alabama to its fourth national championship in seven seasons. On the other sideline, coaching Michigan State, will be that taciturn guy with an El Chapo of a name -- it just keeps escaping people.

"How Mike Dantonio Rebuilt the Spartans," read the headline on the cover of a special Sports Illustrated issue released on Dec. 17.

"A colossal showdown between the supreme ruler of the college football galaxy (Nick Saban) and his onetime assistant (Mark D'Antonio)," wrote The Wall Street Journal on the same day.

For the record, the Michigan State football coach is Mark Dantonio, not Mike (which is his younger brother's name), and not Mike D'Antoni, the pro basketball coach, who this week became associate head coach of the 76ers. If he were D'Antoni, might just have been at AT&T Stadium as a guest of Michigan State athletic director Mark Hollis.

"We ought to get that done," Hollis said in his office a couple of weeks ago. Mischief, masquerading as a smile, spread across his face. "I'm going to see if I can get him to come to the Cotton Bowl."

We are not here to pick on SI, which reprinted about 35,000 magazines with a corrected cover, although Dantonio made sure to procure one of the originals to give his brother for Christmas. Nor are we here to mock the Wall Street Journal, which actually got the name right, albeit two generations too late.

"When my grandfather came through Ellis Island, obviously, they dropped the apostrophe," Dantonio said, "they" being the gatekeepers.

Botched names are not limited to print. On the telecast of the Big Ten Championship Game, Fox labeled a photo "Mike Dantonio." Last summer, an ESPN studio host introduced Mike Dantonio to the viewers. No, we are not holier than thou.

So what does a guy have to do? He has won two of the last three Big Ten championships and averaged 11 victories over the last six seasons. All I'm saying is that 50 years ago, people knew the difference between Vince Lombardi and Guy Lombardo. One of them led his men with discipline and precision, and the other one coached the Packers.

The bandleader -- that would be Lombardo -- was known as Mr. New Year's Eve, a title that Dantonio would like to earn Thursday night. The way his brand is going, soon enough someone would call him Mr. All About Eve.

"If someone gets your name wrong, it's kind of a disrespect," wide receiver R.J. Shelton said. "That's just another thing to throw in the tank and go to work with."

Michigan State advocated "Go Green" long before wind and solar power, but disrespect is fueling a lot of Spartans these days. Dantonio doesn't subscribe to the idea that his team plays with a chip on its shoulder, a phrase that connotes anger at being treated unfairly and a feeling of underlying insecurity.

"Insecure?" co-offensive coordinator Jim Bollman repeated with a chuckle. "That's one word that, in talking about the guys around here, has never come up."

Maybe not in the football office, but anyone with a sense of Spartan history would understand.

"Michigan State, for years and years, has been surrounded by what are three of the greatest brands in college sports, with Notre Dame, Ohio State and Michigan just a short drive away," said Hollis, a 1985 graduate who returned to the athletic department 20 years ago and became athletic director in 2008. "If you look over decades, there has been that situation of never really rising to the level ... [of] the other two that are not only in our conference but now in our division."

Michigan State won the national championship in 1952 and, after a long slog of a campaign, became a member of the Big Ten the following year. The Spartans shared the title with Alabama in 1965. They went to the Rose Bowl twice in their first three seasons in the Big Ten, and twice more in the next 58 seasons.

That history is the backdrop for Mike Hart's "little brother" witticism, the bubbly that christened the USS Spartan in 2007. Since the Michigan tailback made that remark, the Wolverines are 1-7 against their cross-state rival. Eight years is a long time -- Hart, the running backs coach at Western Michigan, will be 30 in a few months -- but it's nothing compared to decades in the shadows.

Dantonio knew all the shadows. He had been an assistant coach in the 1990s for Saban. And it fit right in with his philosophy, which, he explained, has nothing to do with a chip on your shoulder (OK, last year he did hand out a black poker chip to each player the week after Michigan State lost to Ohio State. The Spartans responded by beating Maryland, 37-15). No, every day, Dantonio implores his players to be better than they were the day before.

"This is a tough man's game," Dantonio said. "This is an emotional game. It's a game of attention to detail, toughness. It's got every aspect of society in there, you know? Or human spirit. So I think you gotta try and harness this human spirit."

And you do that by saying that whatever you have done up to this moment is not good enough for the next moment. You have to be better. It sounds dark -- maybe a coach could use it to spur a team to victory. Maybe a parent could use it to send a child into years of therapy.

"It's not dark," Dantonio said. "We're trying to go places we haven't been before, which we now are doing. And we're always trying to do that. I think that's, philosophically, that's the human spirit. To go to the moon and go beyond. Or do things like that. It's always re-challenging ourselves to try and do better. One of the things I've said to our football team, and I truly believe this for myself as well, you gotta overachieve, and to do that, you've always got to be better than you were. That's not going to happen, but you have to strive for that."

If Bollman is right, if it's possible to be hungry and comfortable in your skin at the same time, that is what makes Dantonio and his players tick. You have to prove yourself every single day, and this coaching staff finds talented recruits who arrive wanting to do that.

"The culture is built around guys who didn't grow up Michigan State fans," said senior offensive tackle Jack Conklin, a walk-on named to two All-American teams this year. "It's a lot of guys from Ohio who didn't get offers from Ohio State. A lot of guys from Michigan who didn't get offers from Michigan. It's sort of the ragtag crew that has come together and has a lot more potential than people saw."

"I was a Badger for sure when I was little," said Shelton, a native of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. "My mom played [basketball] there. My dad played [football] there."

Did Wisconsin offer you a scholarship?

"They did after Michigan State offered me," he said.

When Dantonio worked for Saban at Michigan State in the 1990s, he coached the secondary, Saban's specialty. Saban has discussed how he doesn't allow himself to enjoy his nearly unprecedented success for fear of losing his drive. Most coaches have a 24-hour rule about victories. Saban has one about national championships.

Dantonio, who was the defensive coordinator for the 2002 Ohio State national champions, remembers a moment in the locker room after the Buckeyes won the crystal football. He and head coach Jim Tressel, another of his mentors, stood alone. "I thought we would win it," Dantonio said. "I did not think we'd win it after the second year."

"Yeah," Tressel said. "We got a meeting next week."

If you have to get better every day, where is the finish line? Dantonio insists that he does not think that way.

"You define your football team at the end of the season," Dantonio said. "For me, it's not always about wins or losses, even though we've won a lot right now. It's about how hard we worked at it."

That drive explains why Dantonio continues to roll out teams laden with seniors whose talents are peaking. It explains why the three biggest wins this season came against incredible odds: the last-play miracle at Michigan; the victory at Ohio State without senior quarterback Connor Cook; the 22-play drive to beat Iowa with :22 to play. It makes you wonder how Michigan State could be a 10-point underdog to Alabama or any team.

If destiny has laid its mike on this team -- sorry, make that mark -- and the Spartans win the school's first national championship in 63 years, you have to hope that Dantonio comes to the postgame press conference, says, "The name is Mark Dantonio," then turns and exits.

It would be the ultimate Mike drop.