Bleeding Green

Hoops and "Sports Therapy"

I'm glad hoops season is about to take over MSU sports headlines after a tough senior day in Spartan Stadium.  That "Ouch!" feeling -- with a light case of "What next?" paranoia -- from the second-half debacle with PSU is starting to recede with help from a rock-solid Izzo team set to overtake Jud Heathcoat's MSU total-wins record this weekend.  Great therapy for an improved attitude and confidence regained in the Spartans.

Moving on to one fantastically promising hoops season, Florida this Friday will probably be nearly as challenging as Gonzaga last week.  Then on Saturday MSU will play either UMASS or Rutgers.  The four teams' records are (with opposing teams' current records in parentheses for some clue about the quality of competition):

MSU (4-0) - MSU v. Florida Gulf Coast (0-3) W 97-58, v. Gonzaga (3-1) W 75-71, v. Toledo (0-3) W 75-62, v. Valpo (1-3) W 90-60

Florida (3-0) - UF v. Stetson (1-3) W 74-46, v. Georgia Southern (1-3) W 69-49, v. Troy (2-1) W 80-58

UMASS(2-2) - UMASS v. UCF (4-1) L 84-67, v. Cornell (2-1) L  74-61, v. Arkansas-Fort Smith (no ESPN.com web page, campus web site shows 1-1 record) W 94-68

Rutgers (2-1) - RU v. Marist (0-2) W 74-67, v. Drexel (0-3) W 58-56, Vermont (2-1) L 77-71

It looks like all four team were scheduled to beat up on light early-season competition and only MSU-Gonzaga jumps out as a worthy challenge given the in-conference competition they'll all  face in January.  My guess is that MSU-Florida will parallel the Gonzaga game where Spartan depth outlasted a solid competitor.  UMASS looks wobbly on the surface with sizable losses to UCF and Cornell.  And, Rutgers seems to compare with IU or Iowa -- in rebuilding mode as they struggle against modest competition. 

How do you see the weekend unfolding?

Football, hoops & hockey

Grid iron: A 7-5 record was my minimum goal for the regular season. IF we have an A-game night against Penn State as with Michigan (till the last four minutes), then we win. The crowd is often awesome for MSU-PSU at night. But, if the sieve reemerges in the Spartan secondary, I may have to go find a big redwood to bang my head against, while I ponder if I’m ready to fly to Phoenix or San Antonio to play an Oklahoma or such in the Insight or Alamo Bowl. (That’s making the very reasonable assumption that UM doesn’t win against OSU and we’re not Detroit-bound.)

Hoops: Did you see that first half against Gonzaga? Coach Few must have modeled that start after UNC’s in the NCAA final: Punch the daylights out of MSU in the first half and hope they don’t wake up till deep in the second half. I thought I'd been teleported back to Ford Field. It came way too close to working for Gonzaga and I don’t doubt for a minute that Coach Izzo is pumping up our new centers with every resource he can find to stop the madness and make sure we're the ones hitting hard in the first half. It’s going to be interesting to watch this sort out prior to the Big Ten season.

Hockey: Hasn’t this been a timely and fun early season? My Spartan world was due for a big lift. And, I can hold a huge grin inside for a couple of months when we beat up on UM like last weekend…twice! Spartan fans, and now maybe even USC (football) and Duke (hoops), have learned to be cautious with their enthusiasm for the sake of their sanity. But, I am really happy as clams that this team has bounced back so astoundingly and quickly, after a 2008-2009 season we all want to forget.

Where among these possibilities are you putting your Spartanism these days? Got any high hopes you think are defendable?

Replacing Seniors

A while back we saw an article about how defense will keep this version of the Spartans from cutting down the nets.  Most of that talk as come along with how much we are actually losing from last year's seniors defensively.

Spartan basketball talk; Coble out

I remember listening to Kevin Coble give an interview after Northwestern beat MSU last year about how he practices "those shots."  Come on, you remember how every leaning circus bank shot fell on a night that Northwestern was obviously destined to win.

Coming out of a dark and deflating Halloween night…

This week I’ve watched some of the football recaps and commentaries on BTN regarding a dark night in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. I get the feeling that the BTN crew is as mystified by MSU’s strange, volatile, and often flat-footed night in Minneapolis as our fans and the coaching staff were. Then there was that rather full moon overhead, with a thousand ghouls in the bleachers, and suddenly Spartans everywhere are wondering if next year we can possibly get stabilized at the top of the Big Ten.

However, the dark side of things is always a slippery slope, so I’m going to try to look up a bit toward Izzo and hoops, as well as the future of the Dantonio era. And, there’s some very good early-season success on the hockey rink too with a 6-2-0 record and respectable ranking, so I actually do find myself breathing easier again.

Getting back to the grid-iron front, I’ve looked back at our recent trend in recruiting and saw that the Spartan class of 2010 is looking balanced and could still collect as much talent as the 2009 class. This means, building on the change of culture over the past three years, the future really could be very bright. Nonetheless, it’s apparent that we need to pick up some receivers and will continue to look for a four-star running back. I’m really happy with the class and its balance at this point and am confident we’ll have another top-25 class by early 2010. Still, I’m not so pie-in-the-sky that I’d suggest we’re where we need to be on pass defense. "Ouch!" for the season. That’s got to get fixed and fast, just like our first-and-goal "offense."  Double ouch!

On the hoops side of things, of course, we’ve had some injuries and flu, but nothing to take any of our richly talented guys out for long. Naturally, I’m getting ready to flip my Spartans switch over to the Brez’ by Thanksgiving. As with last year, even in an increasingly talented Big Ten, this looks like a very promising season filled with tough, but beatable, competition. It should be a gas to watch.

Finally, on the recruiting front Izzo and staff have taken it to Calipari and Kentucky twice in a week and we’re off to the start of a great 2011 with Bandan Kearney committed to MSU. And, Adreian Payne’s commitment last week should put us in the top five nationally for 2010. So, I’m pulling out my Sparty cap for the gym again and thinking we’ll survive 10/31/09. I’m expecting the Spartans will look like they've come out of the stupor too on Saturday versus WMU and then get ready for a very, very volatile Purdue.

OK, after the darkness, is anyone else starting to catch a silver lining in the big picture here?