Iowa City, IA - In the first half Thursday night, Iowa went on a 22-2 run to open up a 14-point lead on Michigan State. A perhaps half-full crowd at Carver-Hawkeye Arena sounded a lot louder than that, and the Spartans looked very much like a team that was well-aware that they had already clinched a share of the Big Ten crown and that archival Michigan was next up in a few days.

But, just like the Spartans have done multiple times now following shaky first halves, they banded together and found a way to win, taking down the Hawkeyes 91-84 to clinch the program’s first outright Big Ten title since 2018.

“When I came up in this league, winning the Big Ten championship was the greatest thing in the world,” MSU head coach Tom Izzo said after the game about the importance of this, his 11th Big Ten conference championship. “It’s sad, because you go through 20 games … and that’s the grind, because you can win three games in the (conference) tournament, get lucky, because you can win four games and get to a Final Four. It’s impressive, but it aint like the grind of the twenty games that we just got done.”

Senior guard Jaden Akins was happy to have won the title.

“It's great," he said. "It was definitely one of my goals to start the season, so I’m happy to be able to check that off and now be able to move forward to other goals.

After the game, junior forward Jaxon Kohler looked back on how far he and his teammates had come, with the end result being immortalized with a banner in the rafters of the Breslin Center.

“It’s a lot to think about," he said. "It’s a lot to express with words only. With all the ups and downs of the last two, three years, some of us have come such a long way in terms of getting this championship. We are honestly so happy.”

It’s a title that will represent all the pieces coming together - Izzo digging back into what’s worked and he and his team proving doubters wrong.

MSU was initially projected to finish fifth in the conference in the Big Ten preseason media poll and there were plenty of concerns about if Michigan State was going to be able to get back to its previous championship levels.

“I just went through a three-year period where everybody wanted to ship me out,” Izzo said bluntly.

This team's goals don't end with a regular season conference championship.

One of the first things Izzo talked about in his postgame press conference was about how Iowa and Fran McCaffery had outplayed and out-coached his team for 75% of the game, well before he talked about his latest accomplishment.

“Am I happy I won the Big Ten?" Izzo said. “I'm ecstatic. I’ll be ecstatic when I walk out of this building, until I get to the plane … but I’m not gonna sit here and sugarcoat and tell you I’m excited with how we played just because we won, because that’s not going to get you where I think we can go and need to go.”

Jase Richardson agreed with his coach.

“We talked a lot in the preseason about what we want our goals to be,” Richardson said. “And for us to get to our goals, we’ve got to work as hard as we can. Our goals aren’t really done. This is just one of four goals that we have all season. I can’t speak for everybody on the individual goals, but as for the team goals, we’ve still got three more things that we want to do.”

What makes MSU capable of making a run at those three additional banners — Big Ten Tournament Champion, Final Four, National Champion — is its consistency. It’s very, very difficult to line up quality Big Ten teams and just keep knocking them down, one after the other.