Michigan State Spartans Insider Podcast: Recapping Spartans' Loss to USC

No. 7 Michigan State hasn't had to respond to losses much this season, but now, it's going to need to at a critical point in its 2024-25 campaign.
The Spartans fell to USC, 70-64, on Saturday, suffering their first loss since November and first in Big Ten play.
The Trojans came to play on Saturday, never allowing Michigan State to get a lead, or even tie it.
The Spartans battled until the very end, but it wasn't enough to take the first of their two-game West Coast road trip.
Our Aidan Champion recaps the contest on this postgame edition of the Michigan State Spartans Insider Podcast. You can watch the episode below:
Below is a transcript from Michigan State coach Tom Izzo's opening statement from his postgame press conference:
Izzo: "I had an assistant that said, ‘What starts bad, ends bad.’ And the start was atrocious. Wanted to go inside right off the bat. Turned the ball over twice. We took a couple of bad shots, I think it was 9-3, and I think we only had one shot. And then, we got down 21-27, and give our guys credit, they bounced back, but USC played better than us. I thought the biggest things that happened in the game -- we got punched in the mouth. That doesn't happen to us very often, and I don't know if we responded very well. Then, before half we did a little better job. But when you don't take care of the boards like we did, even though we outrebounded them by 1 -- that's kind of a facade, they had a couple of times when they had three or four rebounds in a row and scored both times, one on the 3 and one on the 3-point play. And then, uncharacteristically, we shot poorly from the free-throw line, which we’re an 83% free-throw shooting team. And what did we end up shooting? 57% or something. Had a couple of those goofy turnovers, and that's usually the difference in the game. But give credit to USC, they played well. And I’ve been waiting to see how we would respond under some adversity, and today, we didn’t respond very well, so we’ll have to fix that quickly since we have another game coming up.”
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