With the college basketball season distilled into a month of whistles and buzzers and live CBS cutaways to the upset du jour, there is a tendency to believe that if it doesn’t happen in March, it doesn’t happen.
From that perspective, Tuesday night’s showdown between No. 4 Michigan State and No. 7 Illinois in Champaign amounts to a hill of soybeans. It is, after all, only Feb. 6. Granted, the top seed in the NCAA’s Midwest Regional might be at stake. But the NCAA selection gods tend to place more emphasis on the Big Ten tournament than regular-season results. Besides, if Midwest’s top seed gets shipped to Dayton, Ohio, for the first two rounds, what’s the reward?
The Spartans are smart enough to know this game probably won’t matter much in March. But they’re proud enough to understand it could matter for a long time after that. A victory would give Michigan State command of its own fate in the Big Ten race. By sweeping its remaining games, MSU would hang a Big Ten title banner from the Breslin Center rafters for the fourth straight spring.
And that, to borrow a phrase from Dick Vitale, is awesome, baby.
The Big Ten handed out its first men’s basketball title in 1906. Since then, only three teams have managed to finish first four years in a row.
“It’s very hard to do in this league,” said Purdue coach Gene Keady, whose Boilermakers won three titles in a row in the mid-1990s. “You’re the hunted, first of all. Other teams want to beat the champion.” The Indiana Hoosiers won four straight league championships from 1973-76. The last of those teams went 32-0. No one has gone undefeated since.
Ohio State strung together five straight championships from 1960-64. And the University of Chicago won four straight from 1907-10.
Here endeth the history lesson, before the kid in the back row starts drooling on his desktop. Today’s players have barely heard of the Fab Five, forget about Kent Benson and Jerry Lucas. Still, Spartans coach Tom Izzo has made sure his players realize how close they are, as he puts it, “to doing something special.”
“To be honest with you, we have talked about it a little bit,” Izzo said Monday. “I think it’s something that, whenever you get a chance to do something that few have done, you can look at it one of two ways. Does it put too much pressure on, or is it a goal?”
Izzo has tried to frame the quest for four straight as a tribute to battle-tested seniors such as guard Charlie Bell and forward Andre Hutson, who inherited leadership roles when Mateen Cleaves, Morris Peterson and A.J. Granger graduated last year.
“We don’t labor on it,” Izzo said. “What I try to preach to the rest of these guys is [the seniors] have really been the staples to this program, and they’ve really helped build this program back, and we’ve just got to make sure we give enough effort to give them a chance to end this thing on an incredible note.”
Izzo may be grasping for ways to cure the Big Ten winter blahs, otherwise known as a trip to Champaign in February. Truth be told, Izzo would swap a cabinet full of Big Ten trophies for the right to snip down the nets April 2 in Minneapolis as back-to-back NCAA champs.
But conference crowns must count for something. Why else would the Spartans trade high fives when they learned that Penn State had dropped Illinois into a virtual tie with Michigan State and Iowa?
“Now it’s on us,” Hutson said. “We’ve talked about [winning four straight titles], and now we’ve got to walk the walk.”
In their last two games, the Spartans blitzed Michigan and Purdue with runs of 24-0 and 22-0, respectively. Freshman Zach Randolph has been every bit as good as advertised. Jason Richardson, a born leaper and scorer, has begun to defend and do the little things that make Izzo smile. And MSU still goes after rebounds like dogs chasing pork rinds. The Spartans outrebound foes by an average of 17.1 per game, best in Division I.
Michigan State will need each of its impressive weapons if it hopes to hand Illinois its first home loss this season. It might not be March, but don’t think it doesn’t matter.
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“A lot of people have been waiting for this game for a hundred years,” Izzo said. If the Spartans win, people in East Lansing might remember it for another hundred.