Michigan State football stock watch after Western Michigan win

Michigan State football opened the 2025 season with a 23-6 win over Western Michigan, and here’s your first stock watch.

Game one has come and gone with a tale of two different halves for Michigan State football. We saw the offense and defense dominate, and then we saw the former go stagnant.

While the game and score weren’t exactly what fans were hoping for, there were some stocks that rose and some that fell. Whose stock went up and whose stock dipped in the opener?

Stock up

• Omari Kelly

For a lot of the offseason, there was hype about Omari Kelly and that hype seemed to live out on Friday. In Friday’s game, Omari had the most receptions and yards out of the wide receiver room. It seemed like he was all over the field making plays and catching balls to move the sticks. Kelly was a guy that really stuck out to me and if he continues this play, him and Nick Marsh is going to be electric WR1 and WR2 duo.

• Caleb Gash and Ryan Eckley

What a night for these two. If you want to talk about two studs on special teams, these two earned it. Gash started the game with his presence being felt on the field laying down the hammer twice on back-to-back kickoffs. He truly set the tone for this game and didn’t hold back when on the field.

Eckley was absolutely spectacular, but is anyone surprised? He was the best punter in the country last year and he showed why he’s going to be a Ray Guy Award finalist. He had multiple punts downed within the 5-yard-line with one of them resulting in a safety.

A great night for both special teams stars.

• Defense

This was the defensive performance that fans were looking for. They shut down the offense for Western Michigan and when they gave up big plays, they buckled down and got stops. They also got their hands on a few balls and an interception by Wayne Matthews III as well. The pass rush was able to get home a few times, the run defense was good, and the coverage in the secondary was solid, for the most part. One thing that they do need to get better in a little bit is making a play on the ball in coverage, but outside of that, this was a great performance.

• Makhi Frazier

In his debut, Makhi Frazier made his presence felt with hard-nosed running, resulting in over 100 yards on the ground. This is the first time this has happened since Nate Carter at Michigan. If the question going into this game was at running back and who was going to make an impact, the answer was Frazier and if he can keep this up, he will continue to be that answer.

Stock down

• Second-half offense

Another game where the offense doesn’t do anything in the second half. This was a similar issue that we saw last year when the offense got stagnant and didn’t put up any points. This is something that cannot continue if Michigan State football wants to improve their win total this year and you saw some signs of life but we need to see more of that — especially against Boston College.

• End of game situations

The end of game was not what fans were looking for. Not only was there a pick-six, the onside recovery team allowed Western to recover a fumble late. Now, this did not hurt Michigan State, and there was never truly a chance that the Spartans would lose this game at the end, but this is something that needs to get fixed going forward or it could come back to bite Jonathan Smith.

• Pass protection

The pass protection at times did look alright but there were other times that they didn’t look good. One example of this was during the first half two minute drill. When it was time that Western Michigan knew Michigan State was going to throw the ball, they were able to tee off and get to Aidan Chiles. There were other times that Chiles was able to make plays with his legs, but he did have to improvise because of the pressure.

The pass protection is going to have to get better especially going into next week.

This was a game that you took good and bad things away from the final result. There were individuals that performed very well but other times there were units on this team that didn’t. You also saw old issues pop up and those aren’t great either. This was a game with a mixed bag of results but even with that, Michigan State football was still able to get the win and start the season 1-0 heading into next week’s game against Boston College.