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ANN ARBOR, Mich. – I have no idea what prompted several Michigan State football players to attack Michigan defensive back Ja'Den McBurrows in the stadium tunnel on the way to the locker room after Saturday night’s game. 

It doesn’t really matter. It’s an awful look for MSU’s program, which, as of late Saturday night, appears to the world as a group that lacks discipline and the maturity to control their emotions.

That might be unfair to 90% of MSU’s team. But those who were captured on video roughing up McBurrows are the ones driving the perception of the Spartans, who are right now seen as a program unraveling.

The only the way to show otherwise is for Mel Tucker to hold his team and those players accountable, to put culture and character above trying to win next week at Illinois or make a bowl game. Regardless of the results of the police investigation, MSU’s response to this is so much more important than who’s on the field the rest of this season. This will set a tone for Tucker’s program. And I don’t think it’ll be Tucker’s decision alone. 

At his press conference late Saturday night — in a room just a few steps from where the melee occurred, parts of it recorded by reporters from the Detroit News and MLive — Tucker said he didn’t yet have an understanding of what had happened. He will have by Sunday morning. 

No one on MSU’s side of things was in a good place leaving the field Saturday. The Spartans lost an emotional game, 29-7, to their rival, a game in which they were both competitive and reminded that they’re just not quite good enough, a loss that further sank a once-hopeful season. And, after 100,000 souls in the stadium and a primetime ABC television audience saw the state of things on the field, things got chippy.

Then, in the tunnel, things got ugly.

That tunnel seems to be a place where fracases happen. Penn State and Ohio State have had run-ins with the Wolverines in the confines of that narrow path to the locker rooms. Teams shouldn’t be walking in simultaneously. McBurrows shouldn’t have been skipping away from his teammates and into the throng of MSU players exiting the field, the behavior of an antagonist.

But he also shouldn’t have been physically attacked.

Fights happen in sports — in locker rooms, practice courts, sometimes in competition. So the tunnel after a game isn’t some sacred place. The problem isn’t the fight so much as the appearance that it was "10 on 1," as Jim Harbaugh described it. I don’t know that Harbaugh had the correct information in the immediate aftermath, either. He probably knew what his players told him. In the video taken by the Detroit News' Matt Charboneau, there are a number of MSU players, maybe 10, around McBurrows as he’s being pushed violently and reportedly punched and kicked, though that's harder to tell from the videos. It's not clear how many were actually taking part. Three for sure. Harbaugh also said there was a second Michigan player who was “assaulted.” That’s not part of any video that’s emerged.

I know there are people who want the MSU players involved in this to be booted from the program. To send a message. That seems like a heavy price. Leadership isn’t making examples out of people for the sake of public lust or making them pay for a school's or program’s previous sins. Leadership does, however, mean holding players accountable. And it’s reasonable to suggest that anyone who’s found to be a primary culprit in Saturday night’s fight shouldn’t play again this season.

There were a lot of frustrated MSU fans and alums Saturday night. I’ve heard from several of them. They’re frustrated by what’s happening on the field, by losing to Michigan in a game that, for a while, felt winnable, by losing for a fifth time in six games this season, by not looking more crisp and creative coming out of a bye week.

But they were embarrassed by what took placed afterwards, in that tunnel. 

Follow Graham Couch on Twitter @Graham_Couch.