Travis Trice Leads Selfless Team Oriented Spartans to Gigantic Win Over Virginia & Into the Sweet 16

Travis Trice Leads Selfless Team Oriented Spartans to Gigantic Win Over Virginia & Into the Sweet 16 Time Life Warner Arena Charlotte, NC The UVA players

Travis Trice Leads Selfless Team Oriented Spartans to Gigantic Win Over Virginia & Into the Sweet 16

Time Life Warner Arena

Charlotte, NC

The UVA players said they rooted for MSU to beat UGA on Friday. Cavalier center Darion Atkins even used vulgarity to express how he thought this game would go telling a female reporter from the Washington Post (Isabelle Khurshudyan) that the game would be a, “(Male private part) swinging contest.”

The Cavaliers should have been careful what they rooted for because the #7 seed Michigan State Spartans sent them home for the second straight NCAA tournament with a 60 to 54 win here in Charlotte, NC.

It was not a game of heroic one sided performance by any one Spartans, but the sum of the Spartan Nation together produced the season’s most impressive win. That didn’t mean that no one played great.

Travis Trice was such a monster CBS analyst and basketball ICON Charles Barkley called him, “Trice crispy.” He had 23 points in 39 minutes. True to form the humble senior didn’t want to talk about his play. He deflected the praise to his teammates. “To be honest with you, it started off, my teammates did a great job of getting me open looks. I think B.J. or Zel threw me a breakout. I got a dunk and then I got a layup from one of the two, and then Denzel hit me with a great pass on the 3. I have to give my teammates credit for that because they did a great job of finding me early on.”

Trice’s teammate since he was 12 is fellow senior Branden Dawson. He did want to praise his friend. Saying, “Just playing with Travis since AAU basketball, those shots that Travis made throughout the Big Ten tournament and shots he made in the regular season, a few of the shots he made in today's game just shows Travis is a bigtime player. He's been in moments like this plenty of times and the shot he made, I think, late, I knew it was going in for a fact. That's just what type of player he is. Big-time players make big-time plays, that's what Travis did.”

Tom Izzo praised his senior guards maturation. “So this summer, if you looked at the spring, summer and fall, he had the best summer ever and I think I wore him down a little bit by the middle of December because we just played him to death at the point and guarding the best player, and we had some injuries then when we didn't have any subs in the perimeter and he went through a little bit of a tough time when I made the lineup change. I think it helped him because Tum took some of that pressure off of him and it let him be a scorer and now he can do both. I can't say enough about the job he's done but he has done it the old fashioned way, he's earned it. He's a gym rat, his dad's a coach, his mother was an athlete. Great family. When I didn't start him, I called his dad and he said yeah, I didn't start some guys on my team, either. Everybody gets it. When he says winning is the most important, winning is the most important.”

Coach Tony Bennett of UVA had high praise of Travis as well. “Good player. He has the ability to create shots, make shots. When you can stretch the defense like that. He's complete, he can score at all three levels. Off the drive, off the pull-up or deep 3s. It was a dagger 3, the one he hit at the end of the shot clock. It looked like it was an NBA 3. We should have known that, we saw it against Belmont most of the game but he drilled one. And again, like Dawson, those two, they were the deal. Valentine, I think their big three, we did a good job on Valentine, but didn't really do the job we needed to do to be successful against Trice. And as poor as we shot and all those things, we still had a chance, and we tried to hang in there with it, but when you got a guy like Trice, making those plays down the stretch, that's what makes you advance in this tournament.”

The Spartans held UVA to 29% shooting. MSU also had an astonishing low six turnovers, but they did lose on the board 39-32. Branden Dawson was the only other Spartan in double digits scoring. He had 15 points and nine rebounds. What you didn’t see was how he impacted the game in many other ways.

UVA guard Malcolm Brogdon thought it was the Spartan team defense that was the difference. He said it looked like his team’s effort who had the nation’s best defense this season. “You know, I think they play a similar pack defense. I think they jam the lane and then they -- when we come up our down screens, which is a staple in our offense, they swipe the gap really hard, which I thought led us, disrupted us a little bit more than we should have let it. We just got a little bit out of chemistry.”

So now the Spartans move on to the Sweet 16. Tom Izzo is now 13-1 in the round of 32 and this is his fourth straight trip to the Sweet 16. Here is an even more amazing stat; this is his seventh trip to the Sweet 16 in the last eight years.

MSU plays the winner of the #3 seed Oklahoma and #11 seed Dayton game played later tonight.