Drive Time

Wow. . .

My Spartans are Big Ten champions, and earned a place in the 4-team national championship playoff, with a grueling victory in the conference championship game against Iowa Saturday night (and into Sunday morning).  That was one of the best football games I've seen in quite some time - just two really good, really solid, really strong teams going toe-to-toe for the full 60 minutes.  Another of those games that it's a shame one team has to lose.  Iowa came into the game undefeated, and while some made light of their schedule, I am never one to take lightly any team that hasn't lost a game, nor am I inclined to glibly predict that our team will be someone else's first loss.  I expected a tough, close, hard-fought game that would have my stomach in knots as the final minutes wound down, and in that expectation, I was not disappointed.

The Spartans won the game with a 22-play drive covering 82 yards, converting six first downs and using up over 9 minutes of time on the game clock, even with Iowa using their three time-outs along the way.  I mean, seriously - I don't think I've ever heard of a 22-play drive before; you couldn't use very many more plays than that, and still keep the chains moving.  I haven't seen a complete play-by-play transcript of The Drive, but off the top of my head, I can't think of any set of downs that was converted before third down, and we converted at least one fourth down.  It seemed every time we made another first down, it was by inches, rather than yards.  I'm almost as exhausted just from watching it, as the players were who executed it (of course, they're in much better physical condition than I am).

The final few plays of the drive were a high drama of sheer will.  We converted a fourth down by the length of the football, on the 3-yard line (after getting absolutely stuffed on third down), and then it took us three plays to score the winning touchdown (our only touchdown of the game) starting from first-and-goal at the three-yard-line.  On the winning score, it looked for all the world like our runner was stopped inches short of the goal line, but by some superhuman second effort, the runner surged again, stuck his hand out with the ball in it, and scored with 27 seconds left on the clock.  Just incredible.

(And I should give a special mention to the runner, LJ Scott, who will certainly go down in Spartan lore; I don't think I've ever seen a runner get so many yards on second effort, after he'd been, to all appearances, stopped dead in his tracks.  I'm a little in awe that he's a true freshman; I shudder to think of him, a year ago, playing against high school guys like my son.)

I tip my hat to the Hawkeyes; that was a really, REALLY good team, there, and it's not hard to see how they came into the game undefeated.  Their defense gave us darn little, and even by the fourth quarter, when our offensive line started to get it rolling a bit, we were getting three yards and four, not eight or ten.  And I don't think I've ever seen a defensive backfield knock so many passes out of the hands of receivers at the last instant.  And my goodness, when did Kirk Ferentz (the Iowa coach) become such a wide-open, go-for-broke coach?  There was a stretch early in the fourth quarter, where they passed deep on three plays out of five, including a picture-perfect (if you're an Iowa fan) 85-yard touchdown that put us in the position of needing a long drive to the winning score in the first place.  So hats off to our more-than-worthy opponents.

So now, we go on to the 4-team National Championship playoff.  Our first opponent is Alabama, which ought to be interesting enough, even if their coach hadn't been our coach once upon a time, and won four national championships at two schools since he left us.  I think we've gotten past wishing he was still our coach; Mark D'Antonio has had more success at MSU than Nick Saban ever did.  So God bless you, coach; we're doing just fine, thanks.  We played the Tide in a Citrus Bowl back in 2010, and they fairly well handed us our asses.  But I'm pretty sure we're a better team now than we were then.  Besides, our friends from Ohio State beat them in last year's playoff, and we've won two of our last three against the Buckeyes.  Which is to say, I expect it to be a competitive game, and I'm not conceding anything to our Southeastern friends; win or lose, they will know they've been in a football game.

And besides all that, our basketball team is #1, and looking as good as any team we've ever had.  Good times to be a Spartan, let me tell you. . .

Roses Are Green!

Final Score of the 2014 Rose Bowl:

Michigan State      24
Stanford               20

Once again, the Spartan defense just progressively choked the life out of an opposing offense, becoming more impenetrable as the game wore on.  The offense made more mistakes (and more bizarre ones) than we've been used to (what were you thinking on that screen pass for the pick-six, Connor Cook?), but on the whole, they imposed their will on the Stanford 'D' more than the other way around.

I won't bore you with a recap of what I posted a couple weeks back; suffice it to say that my Spartans have earned their way back into consideration as one of the top football programs in the land.  As presently constituted, we aren't what we've been since the late 60s - an average program, occasionally good, which could produce wonderful moments, but stumble at least as often, and never rise to the level of 'elite'.  No, this is a damn good team, right now, and the wonderful moments are more the norm than the exception.  And I must say, we're loving it. . .

(I am recalling a conversation I had a couple years ago with some friends of mine from our sister school an hour down the road - Big Sister, if they insist - in which they all asserted that, what with Big Blue hiring a new coach, we Spartans would soon be relegated once more to our rightful position looking up at them, sighing wistfully, and wishing we could be like them.  At the time, I said, God bless coach Hoke and all, but I didn't think that Coach D and the Spartans were planning on going anywhere, and maybe they should get used to the idea of us being better than they'd like us to be.  It's fun to be proven right. . .)

Roses!

I'm sorry to inflict yet another sports post on you all (or at least, on those of you who drop in for reasons other than checking in on my rooting interests), but this has been an autumn of exceeding wonderfulness for my favorite sports teams.  First, my Tigers advanced to within a game or two of the World Series, and now my Spartans are Big Ten football champions, having defeated the Buckeyes of Ohio State in the Big Ten championship game last night (and just for the sake of wondering, the fact that the Big Ten conference has twelve teams in it is passing curious, no?  And even more fun, the Big Twelve conference has ten teams in it; yes, these numerically-challenged conferences are composed of universities charged with educating young adults to take their place as future world leaders; should we be worried?)

It has been a good year for the football Spartans, mainly owing to a superior defense which, at its best, could just suck the life out of opposing offenses.  OSU was definitely the best team we had faced all season, and their offense tested our defense in ways that no-one else had.  Even so, the Spartans charged out to an early 17-0 lead, and things were looking good in Spartan-land halfway through the second quarter.  Of course, the Buckeyes didn't arrive at last night's game undefeated without knowing how to throw a counter-punch (figuratively speaking), and by the middle of the third quarter, they had taken a 24-17 lead.  But at that point, my Spartans managed to blunt the Buckeye momentum and threw a few (figurative) counter-punches of their own, and when it was all said and done, we had a 34-24 victory and the 2013 Big Ten football championship, which comes with a free trip to Pasadena on New Year's Day, to play the Stanford Cardinal in the Rose Bowl.

GO GREEN!  all over again.

It has been a stunning year for my Spartans.  Last year's team finished with a record of 7-6, having lost five games by a total of 13 points, largely due to an especially, uh, challenged offense.  And most of the best players from last year's offense graduated, so we weren't necessarily expecting this year to be leaps and bounds better than last year.  And in fact, for the early, non-conference portion of the schedule, our offense continued to struggle mightily, even while our defense took up where last year's suffocating defense left off (after the first three games, the defense had actually scored more points than the offense had, leading some of the more cynical Spartans among us to suggest that we should take to punting on first down, since that would give us more opportunities to score).

But gradually, as the season wore on, the offense slowly came together to where it was more of an asset than a liability, and the defense just stonewalled everything in sight.  We completed the conference schedule undefeated (our only loss all season was a non-conference game against some Catholic school from just across the Indiana state line; we'd love to get another crack at that game, but whatcha gonna do?), and earned a spot in the conference championship game for the second time in the last three years.

And this time, we won.  We're 12-1 heading into the Rose Bowl, a school record for wins, and the third time in four years that we've won 11 games or more.  It's only the third time in my lifetime that we're in the Rose Bowl; the last time was 26 years ago, back when Jen and I only had two kids (and 3M was 'in the oven'). Much as I said about my Tigers earlier in the fall, we haven't been accustomed to quite such lofty and sustained success.  But we are sure as heck enjoying the ride. . .