3 Most Enraging Moments from the Past MSU Football Season
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It might be difficult to bring Michigan State's past football season down to just three bad moments.
The Spartans just finished 4-8, and the season was bad enough for MSU to fire Jonathan Smith after only two seasons and quickly replace him with Pat Fitzgerald. Spread across those eight defeats, these three things seem to linger the most.
1) 38 Unanswered for UCLA
This was the true "beginning of the end" for Smith in East Lansing, and certainly the biggest dud of the season for Michigan State as a whole.
MSU had lost two straight entering its homecoming game against UCLA, but those were both road games as double-digit underdogs. The Bruins were 1-4, coming off their upset win over then-No. 7 Penn State. Even with that result, the thinking was that this was a game the Spartans absolutely should win.
Michigan State didn't just lose; it got humiliated. The Spartans scored first to go up 7-0, but UCLA then rattled off 38 straight points en route to a blowout victory.
To rub it in, former MSU running back Jalen Berger outscored the Spartans by himself. He reached the endzone three times, thereby scoring 18 points to Michigan State's 13. It has not helped that UCLA ended up finishing 3-9.
2) Flat against Michigan
If UCLA was the "beginning of the end" for Smith, the Michigan game was when things truly felt final. It was the last real chance for Michigan State to truly turn its season around by going for broke against its biggest rival.
UM rolled through East Lansing with relative ease. It was not a blowout, but there was no point in the game where it felt like MSU was in any real position to grab Paul Bunyan. Michigan State was just... flat. The Wolverines didn't even play very well, and that was enough to win by two scores (really three, excluding a garbage-time touchdown) in Spartan Stadium.
3) Blown Opportunity at Minnesota
Something interesting to think about is just how close Michigan State actually was to bowl eligibility. There's no other way to go about it; the Spartans blew those games against Minnesota and Iowa. According to ESPN's live win probability chart, MSU had as high as a 92.5% chance to beat the Golden Gophers and a 92.0% chance to beat the Hawkeyes.
These are not really independent events, but if they were, that would be an 85.1% chance of winning both games, thereby eventually getting to six wins. There was only a 0.53% of losing both games, which is exactly what Michigan State ended up doing.
We'll say that Minnesota is probably the more annoying one, since the Golden Gophers got crushed by Iowa, 41-3. It was also first, and there had been so much promise from the starting debut of Alessio Milivojevic.
Some of the miscues and questionable calls made it worse. Kicker Martin Connington missed a 23-yarder with about five minutes left. There were some questionable calls and no-calls during the overtime period as well. MSU did not draw a flag while Rodney Bullard's shirt was clearly being held on a third down, but Minnesota did get one on its own third-down play that led to the Gophers scoring the winning touchdown.
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A 2025 graduate from Michigan State University, Cotsonika brings a wealth of experience covering the Spartans from Rivals and On3 to his role as Michigan State Spartans Beat Writer on SI. At Michigan State, he was also a member of the world-renowned Spartan marching band for two seasons.
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