When a team’s schedule comes out, fans at a school like Michigan State might look at a school like Samford and perhaps think it's kind of neat the university’s name is similar to Stanford, mentally chalk up a win, and move on.
Once that game arrives and Samford ends up holding a 13-point lead at one point and makes MSU work for 40 minutes to get an eight-point win, it’s also easy to guess that Michigan State head coach Tom Izzo will make his displeasure clear after the game.
Well, Samford isn’t a normal, nameless, faceless non-conference opponent, and Izzo actually seemed relatively OK with the result after Wednesday’s close 83-75 victory.
“That game was everything I thought it would be and a little bit more,” Izzo said. “I felt at the end that it was an incredible team win.”
The Samford Bulldogs are the two-time defending Southern Conference champions for a reason. They just made the NCAA Tournament and took a better shot at Kansas in March than MSU did this past Tuesday. Its head coach, Bucky McMillan, said in his postgame presser that his program had a tough time scheduling a big program (he didn’t say teams were scared, but that might be why).
“Give them credit,” Izzo said. “They’re well-coached, it’s a good team, they play hard as hell, they’ve got good players.
“This was a game that probably meant nothing to most of our fans or (the media), but it meant a lot to me because I knew it was such a difficult prep — and I give my assistants a lot of credit — it was such a difficult prep. They press you nine different ways and to (prepare for) that in two days, I thought it was a great job on our part.”
His mood didn’t really seem to lean towards happy or distressed. Izzo knows these performances won’t be good enough against better competition that will inevitably pop up at the Maui Invitational, but just being able to identify the issues is half the battle for a coach.
“As I look at this thing, we struggled,” he said.
The big one lately has been Michigan State’s inability to start fast, especially since the Kansas game. Through 10 minutes in the first half, Samford had a 21-8 lead. Against Bowling Green on Saturday, the Falcons were up 40-28 16 minutes into the game.
“I don’t know if (my team) did or didn’t respect (Samford),” Izzo said. “We worked so hard on (handling) that press for two days and the zone stuff. We had a lot of things we hadn’t seen at all and we saw them all (Tuesday).”
Fortunately for MSU, these 12 and 13-point deficits aren’t against premier competition. Samford deserves to be pumped up as a respectable mid-major, but it still lost to Cornell and got taken to overtime by North Alabama for a reason. Bowling Green lost games to Southern Miss and Davidson. These are not teams MSU should genuinely be messing around with, especially at home.
Michigan State needs to start faster, and it has until next Monday to figure it out. The Maui Invitational features four AP Top 10 teams (No. 2 UConn, No. 4 Auburn, No. 5 Iowa State, No. 10 North Carolina), all of whom will pounce on slow starts. MSU fought back from down 10 to tie it against No. 1 Kansas, but a big deficit against any of those teams might feel a lot steeper when it’s the second or third game in as many days at a venue thousands of miles away from the Breslin Center.
The first step towards starting quicker isn’t exactly ground-breaking analysis, but Michigan State needs to hit its early shots and limit turnovers. The Spartans started 0-for-9 from behind the arc and turned the ball over four times in the game’s first three minutes.
With 6:59 to go in the first half, Xavier Booker made MSU’s first 3-pointer on the team’s 10th attempt. It was the first of seven made threes the rest of the way, as the Spartans ended the game 7-for-15 from deep, that shot included. Booker only played 10 minutes due to Samford’s unusual style, but Izzo’s opinion of him certainly went up.
“I can’t tell you how big that (three) was,” Izzo said. “I’m not trying to make him feel better — I think this will be a big step for Book. I really do, and his minutes will go up, I really guarantee you that.”
The hope is that the lid comes off a lot quicker. It still hasn’t gotten all the way off for perimeter shooting, with MSU holding the second-worst 3-point percentage in Division I basketball, but it at least got a little bit better on Tuesday.
Again, writing off a coach and a program with 26 (really 27) consecutive March Madness appearances in November for two or three bad games is just alarmist. College basketball is much different than football simply because it’s a longer season with about three times as many games.
There are a lot more opportunities to show improvement and MSU gets three such shots in Maui, the first being against Colorado.
“I think (mid-season tournaments) are important because in November and December that’s exciting,” Izzo said. “You look at the teams now, I think three of the teams are in the top five or six that are in Maui and some other ones are every bit as good and there’s no (D-II) Chaminade this year, so it’s a loaded field.”
MSU’s game against Colorado is set for Monday, Nov. 25 with a tip-time of 5 p.m. ET (12 p.m. Hawaiian time) on ESPN2. The Spartans will face UConn or Memphis the next day and the day after that against either North Carolina, Dayton, Iowa State or Auburn. Times and television channels for games two and three are TBD. A bracket can be found here.
Join the discussion on this article in our premium forums by clicking here.
You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Threads, TikTok, Instagram, and Bluesky.
For video content, including our Red Cedar Radar and WE GOT IT podcasts, find us on YouTube and consider subscribing.