Dr. Green and White Sports Authority

It’s Week 11, folks, and MSU is playing for a Championship. Those words seem so crazy just to type, let alone say out loud, but essentially, it’s true. Granted, it is just a Division Championship, but if MSU does win it, it will be MSU and Dantonio’s 4 th appearance in Indy. If my math is correct, no other B1G coach has been there more than twice. Let that sink in for a moment. Considering what MSU, as a community, has been through over the past year to 18 months, a win this weekend in C-Bus would be flat out monumental. Furthermore, I know what some of you might say, and that is that MSU still has two games to play after this week’s clash with the Buckeyes. This is true.  However, a one-game lead over a group of 2-loss teams where you own the head-to-head tiebreaker over each means MSU would need to lose both remaining games against Maryland and at Rutgers to blow it. Possible? Yes. But, based on my projected spreads, the odds of that happening are less than 1% (barring some s...

I must admit that I am not an AC/DC fan. Not my cup of tea. That said, like any good Spartan fan, I have grown a bit of an affection for the AC/DC track Thunderstruck. As those who attend MSU home games are certainly aware, the song is an integral part of the team’s entrance ritual, the highlight of which is the equal parts awesome and ridiculous cartoon clip of the Spartan statue jumping from his stand, leaping across campus to face a legion of opposing players, culminating in a random act of vandalism on the flag that they (for some unknown reason) are carrying with them.  (That’ll teach ‘em to come to OUR HOUSE, WITH A FLAG!) But, alas this week, due to getting home late Friday night from an international trip coupled with a noon kick-off, I did not arrive in my seats until seconds before kickoff. As such, I missed Thunderstruck and the ceremonial destruction of a cartoon PSU flag. Pity. Then, after roughly 1.5 quarters of football, it became clear that my 5-yr was not dressed...

Based on my travel schedule this week and impending jetlag crash, I will try to keep this week’s preview brief. As we all know, MSU will square off with Penn State this week in East Lansing, and the spread opened at a surprisingly low value of PSU at -9. That translates to a 26% chance of an MSU victory, which is better odds than we had going into the game in Ann Arbor a month ago.  Considering that MSU’s coaching staff seems to have a particular disdain for Penn State, combined with the fact that PSU is coming off two tough games in a row, including a last-second-control-your-own-destiny-stealing loss to the Buckeyes, and maybe you have the recipe for an upset. Maybe. For that to happen, MSU will need to be much sharper than last week, but that is certainly possible. Either way, I would be pretty surprised if MSU doesn’t keep the game a little closer than our friends from Ann Arbor did 2 weeks ago. The winner, of course, will get to keep the world’s least desirable trophy, but hey...

Full disclosure, due to my business trip to Japan over the past 10 days, I did not exactly watch a lot of college football this past weekend, as the bulk of it occurred before 8 AM on Sunday morning. But, I did manage to wake up in enough time to catch the last half of the fourth quarter and OT of the MSU game, and thus I saw more than 60% of the scoring anyway. I think that like a lot of fans out there, this season has been a bit of a fun roller coaster. At first, we were all just happy to think about trying to get back to a bowl game while building towards a brighter future with a young team. Then, after rousing wins over Iowa and Michigan, I stared to believe that perhaps the Future was now. I started to chalk up wins for games not yet played, and day-dreaming about magical upsets over Penn State and Ohio State, NY6 Bowls, and maybe even a surprise trip to Indy. It all seemed possible. But, as the game this weekend in Evanston showed, perhaps we all need to go Back to the view that ...

Three weeks ago, as MSU prepared to play Minnesota, my spreadsheet suggested that the Gophers were the 3 rd best team remaining on MSU’s schedule. A week later, it seemed apparent that Indiana was likely a little better than the Gophers, and the game play bore that out. (For those of you that cannot remember what happened last week, MSU won 17-9 after trailing 9-3 late in the 4 th quarter. Your brain likely blocked out the entire 3.5 hours for self-preservation. Don’t bother to try to find the replay on BTN. Your brain has suffered enough.) Now that Week 9 has arrived and we find ourselves lined up to face a rapidly improving Northwestern team, it once again appears that this week’s opponent is likely better than Indiana, and it will take a sharp effort from MSU to earn a victory.  It seems as though every MSU-Northwestern game in recent memory has been an interesting one, especially the games in Evanston. One only has to think back to the record-setting comeback that John L’s t...

As I reflect back on MSU’s 17-9 win over Indiana this weekend, a number of adjectives and metaphors come to mind: a grind, a defensive struggle, a nail-biter, I’ve have dental procedures that were less painful, etc. But really, it was just plain old U-G-L-Y, and it frankly did not have an alibi. The weather was good, it wasn’t a night game, last week’s game was a tough test, but it should not have emptied the tank. Like many out there, I was expecting a bit of a break-through performance, especially from the QB position.  But, through about 55 minutes, it was just a messy slog of a performance in which MSU’s D kept the game close, and MSU’s O seemed to be stuck in neutral. At some point in the 4 th quarter, I tuned to my friends sitting next to me in Spartan Stadium and said, “well, Brian Lewerke has never led MSU to a 4 th quarter come-back win, so maybe today is his chance.” I honestly wasn’t that serious, but low-and-behold, he did just that. Somehow, some way, he shook off t...

As MSU crosses into the second half of 2017, a day has finally come that I am sure many of us have been waiting for.  The Spartans and us, their fans, suffered many crushing defeats last season, and one of the most heart-breaking was the slow, week-by-week pillaging of MSU’s trophy case. Of the four trophies that MSU plays for, I can say with virtual certainty that the trophy on the line once again this week is solidly in the Top 3. I am of course referring to the one, the only: Old Brass Spittoon. Now, because I care, I did a little research on the Old Brass Spittoon this week on this charming little website called “Google,” and what I found there was truly surprising. First of all, when you type “Old Brass” into “Google” it literally populated “Spittoon” for me, suggesting that it is, in fact, the most famous old brass item in the world, second, apparently, to “Old Brass Knuckles for Sale” (true story). Second, I found out that the history of the “OBS” is far, um, less interesti...