Spartans Still a Factor in the Big Ten

Just over a week ago, Michigan State was 4-3 in conference play with a pair of losses to B1G debutants Maryland and not looking like Spartans teams of recent

Just over a week ago, Michigan State was 4-3 in conference play with a pair of losses to B1G debutants Maryland and not looking like Spartans teams of recent vintage. But fast forward to today, and Sparty has won back-to-back games and joins a logjam of 6-3 teams lined up behind runaway leaders Wisconsin.

Michigan State now enters a crucial two-game stretch where it faces Illinois at home and goes on the road against a pesky Northwestern, who already took the Spartans to overtime in East Lansing just a few weeks ago. If they get past those two unscathed, they would be 8-3 heading into their big home game against Ohio State.

Despite a down year by its standards, the NCAA basketball betting line listed at TopBet has still noted Michigan State as the favorite in all but two of its conference games thus far, and the Spartans will likely head into both games against Illinois and Northwestern as significant favorites.

The Spartans will be greatly aided by an Illinois team that’s so banged up that it had to resort to putting its team manager on its roster. The Illini will also be without leading scorer and rebounder Rayvonte Rice, who’s still out with a broken hand. Meanwhile, despite a bunch of close calls and near misses, Northwestern still finds itself dead-last in the conference.

Those are two teams that this Spartans team, while not the best, should still beat quite handily. The Michigan game showed they still have a way’s to go in terms of putting up consistent performances, but this relatively easy stretch will be a good test to see if this team really is capable of stringing a bunch of decent games in a row.

Branden Dawson hasn’t had too much trouble with consistency. The rugged senior has been a double-double machine (13 points and 12 boards per game) in conference play. And if fellow senior Travis Trice and Denzel Valentine find their stroke from beyond the arc, they can be very tough to stop.

The next two games will say a lot about this Michigan State team. Winning both doesn’t necessarily make them a threat to Wisconsin, but it will go some way in setting the expectation of them going forward.