This is Michigan State basketball- the season doesn’t actually begin until March.
The rule used to be that you didn’t talk NCAA Tournament resume until the end of the regular season/beginning of conference tournament time. Then Valentine’s Day became the unofficial starting point for tourney talk. Nowadays, anything goes when it comes to analyzing and forecasting this stuff.
We live in a world of “I need to know NOW!” with everything and I’m going to put as LITTLE effort as possible into finding out. Well, you’ve come to the right place as we’ll break it all down for you.
Bracket projections are year round now, and that’s good for Michigan State basketball fans, because again, March Madness is essentially the season opener in Sparta these days.
Sparty came to Chicago and absolutely obliterated Northwestern into a million little pieces last night. The Spartans held NU to 20% shooting, 17% from three-point range. With under 6 minutes to go, the Wildcats were hovering around 17% from the field. As you would expect with numbers like that, the final margin was 31 points, 76-45 MSU.
Yet in postgame Michigan State basketball coach Tom Izzo spoke as if his team had just somehow pulled out gutted an ugly one possession game overtime win.
“Found a way to get a game,” Izzo said as he complained about the team’s fouling and turnovers. MSU shot just four free throws for the game, to Northwestern’s 19.
Izzo sounded pretty disappointed for a coach who’s team led wire to wire and never actually felt truly threatened after the first six or seven minutes.
“Coach knows that a championship team looks like and what he wants to see,” Denzel Valentine said.
“So if he doesn’t see it, he’s going to hold us accountable to it, and not fake it. That’s one thing about coach he doesn’t fake it,” Valentine continued before eschewing the platitudes you always hear after a loss- “we’ll learn from this” and so forth.
So both the Michigan State basketball coach and the team’s best player sounded nothing at all like guys who just won a conference road game by 30+ points.
Perhaps that’s because Spartans standards are so high right now. Most bracketologies have them as a #3 seed right now and that shoe certainly fits. It seems like MSU is coming out of their annual midseason swoon right about now. Like ice, snow and clouds, inexplicable ugly losses have become an East Lansing January tradition.
They have that preconference signature win of all signature wins over Kansas (RPI 5) in the Champions Classic. They also have three more really nice non-conference wins over Louisville (RPI 17), Providence (RPI 24) and Florida (RPI 28).
In other words, the Michigan State basketball resume prior to the Big Ten season is about as good as anybody’s in the entire nation. Very surprisingly, they’re only 48 in strength of schedule. However, their RPI of 20 looks really good, and with that big time win over Maryland (RPI 11), they now have 5 top 30 wins.
How many teams can boast of that?
Paul M. Banks owns, operates and sometimes writes The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with FOX Sports Engage Network. The website is also featured on News Now.
Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, currently contributes to the Chicago Tribune RedEye. He also appears regularly on numerous television and radio talk shows all across the country. Catch him Tuesdays on KOZN 1620 The Zone.
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