Meh, he did bury them. And then Dantonio played for defeat-with-dignity. Still a 2-score game and the eye test said it was less close than that. Definitely not a good team, though.
Of course, you could argue that neither 2016 (MSU was better than 3-9) nor 2017 (MSU seemed worse than 9-3) worked out in proportion to the team.
Huh?
The problem wasn't kicking the field goal, it was missing the field goal.
If he had made that FG, it would have been a 10 point game when MSU had the ball 4th and goal from the 8, rather than a 13 point game. Then MSU could have kicked the chip shot FG and made it a 7 point game. Instead cutting it from 13 to 10 was irrelevant, and they had to go for it, and not only didn't get it, but Peppers broke Lewerke's leg on the sack, ending his season.
Therefore when MSU got the ball back, and scored with 1 second to go, they were down 13 instead of 7. If they had made that FG though, then it would have allowed them to kick the FG the next possession. Now I'm not going to say they would have gone down and scored the tying touchdown, the way they did, because obviously UM defends the field much differently with a 7 point lead vs. 13. But they would have at least had a shot. Missing that FG took that shot away. It's not like it was 4th 3. It was 4th and goal from the 17. That's a nearly impossible conversion.
And yes, it was a 2 score game, because then the dumb decision he did make was to go for 2 to make it a 5 point deficit, and instead Peppers returned the 2 point conversion to make it 9, when just kicking the PAT would have made it 6.
But no, I agree with MDot, he didn't bury them at all. UM kicked the FG to go up 30-10 with 14:40 left. From that point on, UM had 3 drives, two of them were 3 and out. For the rest of the game, they had 13 plays for 41 yards and 1 first down. MSU from that point ran 30 plays for 256 yards. That is about as poor a job as closing out a game as one can have.
