Michigan State and Maryland came into Saturday afternoon’s game on different wavelengths based on the results from Week One.
The Spartans came off a shaky, 16-10 victory versus Florida Atlantic, where things were messy and left many question marks for the team moving forward. The Terrapins, on the other hand, had a decisive, complete and dominant performance versus an overmatched UConn team, 50-7, that bolstered optimism heading into this week.
As such, Maryland entered the game as around a nine-point favorite.
It turns out the teams were a lot closer than most thought, as the Spartans outlasted Maryland, defeating the Terps by a final score of 27-24 with a last second field goal by Jonathan Kim sealing the deal. Michigan State now sits alone in first place in the Big Ten standings with a 1-0 conference and is 2-0 overall to start the 2024 campaign.
While many fans and pundits may have already written the year off as a rebuilding year for the Spartans, head coach Jonathan Smith, quarterback Aidan Chiles and the rest of the team worked on patching up holes from the prior performance and preparing for Maryland.
Chiles was honest after the game on why he was able to push the team to a victory on Saturday, dispute some mistakes.
“I didn’t play scared," Chiles said when asked about the difference from last week to this.. "Last week, I basically lied to myself and told myself I wasn’t scared — I was. I was more comfortable today because I got to play free. I didn’t think too much about where I was going, just playing football."
Chiles' 363 passing yards on Saturday rank as the seventh-best single-game performance from a quarterback in Michigan State program history, and comes in just his second game. He also threw for three touchdowns.
The performance though, did not come without some errors, and big ones. The sophomore threw three interceptions, and even joked postgame, now knowing the last one he threw counted as such. Still, in totality Chiles performance helped push the team over the edge in his Big Ten debut, and hears the outside noise that came this week
