Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
Last year the first indication that Michigan State’s football team would be terrible, as opposed to just mediocre, came when they lost a road game to Iowa, 44-16, on October 12. Iowa won all of but one of their games after that. Michigan State would win one of their remaining six.
Today, playing in East Lansing, the Spartans scored on their first two possessions, via two tosses by Jeff Smoker, to go up 14-0.
It was 17-7 at half-time and when all was finished MSU came out ahead, 20-10, to move to 4-1 on the season -that's as many wins as they got all last year- and 1-0 in the Big Ten.
As the score should indicate, it was the defense that came up big. Despite some costly penalties, a problem that the Spartans' offense was not immune to, giving up one touchdown and one field goal to a team ranked as high as ninth in the country and which had been averaging 34.5 points a game isn't bad. The most important stats are that the Spartans gave up zero turnovers, recovered two of Iowa's fumbles, intercepted one Iowa pass and prevented the Hawkeyes from converting on two fourth downs in the fourth quarter.
Could this be the start of something big this year? Perhaps, but I suspect this is only a possibility if the offense finds a way to score more. This team isn't quite on the level of Ohio State. posted by micah holmquist at 9/27/2003 04:09:00 PM
