Hoops & December

This week SI online acknowledged what a few of us may have overlooked:  MSU has been the "best school" of the decade in college hoops.  Many of us might ask why us and not UNC, Florida, Connecticut, Duke, or Kansas, particularly if we focus on the December chapters of the past ten years.  So, while we wring our hands about November's new round of flex-and-posture, dysfunctional-football-jock-on-dysfunctional-frat (versus dysfunctional-football-jock-on-dysfunctional-hockey-jock) intramural warring in E.L., we still have one heck of a basketball story to consider.  And, SI only acknowledged the obvious:  No other team has matched MSU's extraordinary big-picture consistency on the hard court and impressive runs to the final four.

I personally feel mighty lucky and thankful for the successes.  But, I'm also a worrier when it comes to MSU's major sports programs.  A lot of us are.  And, in hoops there is this December-after-December "What went wrong?" cloud I have to work through.  Injuries plague us, and in November too we struggle even with GVSU exhibition games.  Then there are always a couple of teams on the rise, or just hot for the night, that catch the Spartans, often on a neutral court, and make us look like a beat-up mid-major for a day:  Florida and UNC this year, Maryland last year, Gonzaga in '05 in Hawaii (aka, muscle-cramp city), Texas several years ago in Puerto Rico I think, Wright State about ten years ago, etc.  With the exception of our visit to Chapel Hill, these are games we should have won, particularly looking at how we later finished and the talent on hand.

So, for sanity's sake I came into this year's November-December cycle trying to get real with Izzo's annual experimentations and our pattern of early injuries and illnesses.  Besides, given this year's road schedule I had no secure expectation that we reach the Big Ten season looking like defending national runner-ups with tons of talent.  I'd like to think we continue our recent run of wins against Texas, but nobody can bank on a W in Austin these days, so we'll see if UNC beats them up a little for us three days earlier and we steal one.  Either way, we came into the season banged up again and this time I'm casting no mental vote on MSU hoops till late February.  The angst reduction has been a good thing.