Dantonio, who also led the Spartans to their first ever 11-win season, suffered a heart attack on Sept. 19 after the Spartans’ 34-31 overtime win against Notre Dame. For the next two weeks, MSU was without its head coach, but offensive coordinator Don Treadwell stepped up in his place to help the Spartans beat Northern Colorado and now-No. 4 Wisconsin. And after watching the game against the Badgers in a hospital bed due to a blood clot stemming from the heart attack, Dantonio said it was the proudest moment of his coaching career.

Dantonio now is the fifth MSU head coach to win the award, following John L. Smith’s receiving of the award in 2003.

“Our coaching staff has done an unbelievable job, especially in my absence in the midseason there,” Dantonio said. “This really belongs to our staff, and that’s where it will be put: It will be in our football building with our staff.”

The campaign continues

Dantonio said his latest duty as head coach is to “raise awareness” about his 11-1 football team, which is on the outside looking in for a chance to play in a BCS bowl.

MSU shares the Big Ten championship with Wisconsin and Ohio State, and under the new tiebreaker rules put in place this season, the Badgers likely will head to the Rose Bowl as the highest-rated Big Ten team in the BCS. Wisconsin is ranked No. 4, followed by the Buckeyes at No. 6 and the Spartans at No. 7. Under previous rules, MSU would have been the Big Ten’s representative for the BCS as the team with the longest Rose Bowl drought, but the conference’s coaches changed the rule last spring on a 10-1 vote.

“You know who voted against it last May,” Dantonio said at his weekly press conference Monday. “You’re looking at him.”

Dantonio compared using the BCS to decide a conference tiebreaker as outsourcing decisions made in his family.

“I wish we would have kept it in-house,” Dantonio said. “That’s the thing that’s frustrating. I thought we had the power to do that in our conference, and we chose not to do that as coaches.”