Here's the Price for MSU after Mammoth Purdue Win
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The mental side of sports doesn’t get talked about as much as the physical side.
It’s a lot easier to discuss the X’s and O’s of Michigan State basketball and break down why a play worked, rather than maybe some of the other, more complex factors that might explain why No. 13 MSU beat eighth-ranked Purdue on the road on Thursday, 76-74, but not 10-12 Minnesota a couple of weeks ago.
There is sense to it. No one can look into Jeremy Fears Jr.’s mind and pinpoint what’s going through his mind during the opening tip and compare it to another game, except for him. What we can be pretty sure about is the emotions everybody was feeling when Purdue’s Braden Smith’s long three-point shot glanced harmlessly off the rim at the final buzzer on Thursday night, finalizing a 76-74 Spartan win: happiness.
“Everybody says, ‘Well, you haven’t won there very often,’” Tom Izzo said after the game. “I’ve got news for you: who in the hell has? Who in the hell has?”
Senior Carson Cooper described it as a top-2 Big Ten win in his four-year Spartan career after the game. That’s somebody who has experienced five wins over rival Michigan and plenty of other big wins over his time in East Lansing.
This is the type of win teams are supposed to bask in for a bit. Mackey Arena had been so horrifying to Michigan State that UCLA had a win over the Spartans in that place (2021 First Four) more recent than MSU’s last win over Purdue (February 2014). The only problem is that the Spartans have another road game to prepare for against Indiana on Sunday.
The Great Mental Shift
Michigan State’s trip to Indiana is going to be the textbook “hangover” game. MSU just emptied the tank on Thursday, both emotionally and physically. Sometimes, it’s easier to get back up for the next game after a loss, because it’s an opportunity to get back on track again. When you do that and beat a projected NCAA Tournament 2 seed in their own building, it becomes much easier to then look at another road game against a bubble team and then relax your shoulders a bit.
That’s how you get bitten. The Spartans’ trip to Bloomington is a tough game in a vacuum. IU is currently 39th in the NET rankings, as of Friday, meaning this game borders on Quad 1-A territory (facing teams in the top 37 on the road is Q1-A, anyone in the top 75 classifies as Q1). Michigan State is 7-5 during Quad 1 games this year; these are the games that build a team’s NCAA Tournament resume.
What makes it a mental challenge is the juxtaposition to a road game at Purdue. That game is a Quad 1-A game and then some. When you go and slay the dragon at Mackey for the first time in 12 years, playing at Assembly Hall doesn’t seem so bad. The only problem is that MSU has lost its last two games there and hasn’t won with fans in the stands since Cassius Winston’s senior season in 2019-20.
Simply put, it’s the old sports cliche of “always respect your opponent.” This is Indiana’s best chance to add an impressive win to its resume that it hopes will be enough to get a March Madness bid. The Hoosiers will especially be playing desperate after taking a bad home loss to Northwestern on Tuesday. Playing desperate teams is no fun.
How MSU is Handling It
Immediately following the game Thursday, it seemed like Michigan State had a relatively firm grasp on the situation at hand: it’s a great win, but there is still lots of work left.
“We’re not going to worry about Indiana on the flight home,” Izzo said. When I get home, I’ll worry about it. I’m going to try this because, as we all know, I’m not a statistics guy, but statistics say we haven’t won here much. We’re going to try and enjoy the win.”
Well, the flight from West Lafayette to East Lansing is not very long. Using publicly available flight tracker data, a plane left Purdue University Airport at 11:35 p.m. ET on Thursday night and landed in Lansing at 12:17 a.m. ET early Friday morning. That’s 42 minutes of party time. The game officially ended at about 10:02 p.m., so maybe make it a little more than two hours, actually. Cooper gave himself and the team some more time than that.
“This one feels really good, but we're not gonna --- I feel like Coach [Izzo] probably told [the media] --- but we're gonna feel really good about it for the next five hours, and then we're gonna think about Indiana,” he said.
Well, by the time you, the reader, are seeing this, those five hours have been over for some time. MSU undoubtedly took a big step in the right direction by exercising its Mackey demons, but that can all be washed away if it veers off in another direction against the Hoosiers.
There is still much to play for here: that triple-bye to the Big Ten Tournament quarterfinals is huge, for one. Also, the Spartans probably want to try and move up or stay solidly on the 3-seed line, which would allow them to avoid facing a 1 seed until the Elite Eight.
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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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