Yesterday afternoon, the Men's hoops team knocked off Michigan basketball 64-54 at the Breslin. An excellent win against a Michigan team who has been solid at home and kind of flaky on the road this year. Beilein is doing good things in Ann Arbor. Chris Vannini says about the Michigan State win.

While the Izzone chanted "little sister" as the final seconds counted down, don't expect "order to be restored," as it were. As I said before the game, this U-M program is still on the upswing, as is MSU (18-5, 7-3). The rivalry won't be like the old days, but this was an old-time performance by MSU.

Quick Soapboxing. I hate the "little sister" chant. It's inference of course being that being little sister is worse than being little brother. The little brother chant is juvenile, arrogant and priggish and you only hear it from the crappy Wolverine fans. The little sister chant is priggish, unoriginal(it's derived from the "little brother" chant) and sexist. Don't give the wolverines the satisfaction of making our fan base unoriginal and sexist.[/Soapboxing]

Update: In rereading you might get the impression I was picking on Vannini for pointing that out, I wasn't. I only pick on him about recruiting.

How did MSU win so well? It never hurts when Draymond "Rickety Knee" Green outrebounds the entire Michigan "We did not want to dirty our hands getting boards" Basketball team. 16-15. So the remainder of the boards picked up by MSU, 23 more to be exact, could be applied to drop the whoopings as necessary.

That wasn't all the good news though in terms of beating our friends down the road, the Lady Spartans knocked off the Lady Wolverines 65-63 in Ann Arbor yesterday. Porsche Poole was in beast mode as she dropped 23 points, grabbed nine boards and had five assists. Good win for the women as they improve to 14-9 and prepare for postseason action.

But wait, there's more... The Michigan State icers swept Ohio State on OSU's way to a ten game winless streak Hockey rankings confuse me, I do not understand how OSU could lose or tie eight straight prior to last weekend and still be ranked 10th. The wins sounded pretty convincing and prevented Spartan tailspin.

Update 2: Just found a new blog out there called the The Munn Minute. They obviously are not covering golf. Stop by and welcome them if you're into Hockey.

Football News. Congratulations to Devin Thomas and Greg Jones on winning their first of hopefully many Super Bowl rings. That was a doozy of a game was it not?

Gerald Holmes a big bodied running back out of Flint Carmen-Ainsworth committed to MSU as the first member of the class of 2013. He chose MSU over an offer from Central Michigan writes the Little Brother Blog. I've said for a while that unless Darien Harris sticks at RB MSU has no big backs after Bell. That changes with Holmes "commit". A more substantive "Here's Your Shield" later.

Are you missing football already? Tomorrow we have the Outback Bowl defensive film review coming up, c'mon back for that. Today head over to College Football Zealots and check out the 2011 Exit Survey I did for them.

Outback Bowl Film Study: The Only Colors has it. The always excellent Heck Dorland does an outstanding job breaking down a third quarter drive in MSU's comeback win against Georgia in the Outback bowl. Required reading if you miss MSU football.

Divination, Tea Leaves and Real Estate Speculation: The class of 2012 was officially signed, sealed and delivered to MSU this week. If you want an excellent and quick overview check out the Little Brother Blog's write up on 2012 MSU Defensive Recruits and 2012 MSU Offensive Recruits.If something a little more official is your bag, MSU Spartans, has all the quotes about athleticism, change of direction and toughness you could want to read. If you want the super deep dive on MSU recruits hit that link for all of the write-ups we did this week. It's lame to link your own stuff in a links post, but there are some people who only read on the weekends. Chris Vannini points out that making predictions for the class of 2012 is not possible. He also hates freedom, joy and puppies. However, he wisely points out that a retrospective recruiting ranking would be more accurate. Luckily, if you're interested in such a thing, it exists. Spartan Nation examines a retrospective ranking of the class of 2008.

Urban Warfare(Pt. 2)

This is not 'Nam, Urban. This is recruiting, there are rules.

Bret Bielema thinks that Urban Meyer is "OVER THE LINE!" So, he's going to have Alvarez talk to "the league office. I don't know maybe have them forfeit the match." The point I was trying to make in yesterday's post was if you want to say the B1G has a Gentleman's Agreement, fine.When people don't adhere to that agreement, they are not gentlemen. That's fine too. But to publicly complain that decorum has been broken but no actual rules were violated makes you look less gentlemanly.  Also, the reason so many villains are southern gentlemen is because they do their dirty work behind closed doors.

I'm done talking recruiting until camp season or the next commit.

The BasketBOWL is Sunday and MSU really needs a win. Luckily Draymond appears to be ready to go. I wouldn't count on him at full strength. No previews are up on either side yet. Go Green. Beat the Wolverines.

Two days after my wife and I got married, we took our honeymoon. The first night after arriving we sat down to dinner and I offered a toast. "To two happy days of marriage, may there be two more." It was meant mostly as a joke and approximately 4.3 percent seriously in that we should not take a moment of our marriage for granted. Last night after Tom's four hundredth victory at Michigan State I tweeted, "Congrats to Tom. What a wonderful 400 wins, let there be 400 more." It was in honor of that toast, previously an inside joke to me and the Mrs., that I framed the tweet that way.

For Izzo, it's easy for me to look back on last night's milestone and remember a time where maybe the toast "To 200 wins, may there be 200 more." would have seemed premature. Indeed, as he approached win number 200, this from the State News.

Coach Tom Izzo will have a chance to notch his 200th win as MSU's head coach against Iowa on Wednesday.

Izzo, who is in his ninth year on the job, was asked if he'll be around for another 200 wins at MSU.

"No, I won't be around that long," he said. "I'm not saying that I'm done tomorrow, but I don't see guys going 25 to 30 years at the same place very often.

"I think coaches wear out their welcome. I don't think that's a negative, I just think that's the way it is."

Izzo seemed discontent with Michigan State at the time and perhaps we were a bit discontent with him too. At the time he was a couple of years removed from his last final four and Izzo was 10-8 on the season with an NCAA tourney bid no sure thing. He had his crack at the big time but had not yet converted it to guaranteed long-term success. It would be easy for someone to decide they could walk away and move to more fertile recruiting grounds, but that's not who Izzo is. Izzo is the kid from Iron Mountain who can jam out on the accordion.

Four short years passed which included the improbable 2005 tournament run and he notched win number 300. A more contented Izzo said:

"I wanted to tell the crowd I still have 600 wins to go to catch (all-time leader) Bobby (Knight)," Izzo said with a smile before adding he might quit at 339 to keep Heathcote No. 1. "The thing that pleased me most was having all the guys come back. More than the wins, I'm happiest that we've never backed down from playing a tough schedule."

Then in 2010, MSU alum and Dan Gilbert brought in an armada of money trucks to East Lansing and offered Tom Izzo a job. Gilbert's offer of 5 years and 30 million dollars was something that MSU or any college basketball program could not match. Izzo is a competitor and my boy Ty wrote a piece on his blog about how even though Izzo loves MSU he has the itch to slay the Balrog.

No one would have blamed Izzo a bit for leaving. The old cliche says opportunity rarely knocks twice but here for Izzo it had. The Cavaliers had MSU alum Gilbert at the helm and a chance to retain one of the most physically gifted players to play the game, LeBron James. In a parallel universe, Izzo has led James to the NBA finals and lost (James even chokes in parallel universes). Izzo knew this was his last chance to leave East Lansing for the pros and he had a decision to make.

Izzo decided that day that he was "a lifer". There will be no NBA titles for him and no dealing with overpriced crybabies. Instead, a life full of graduating young men who go on to play in the NBA, a fanbase who is honored to have him as their coach and celebrating milestones of racking up victories by the hundreds and NCAA tournament wins by the dozens.

As our friends out at State College bury their legend this week, it's important to me that we take a few minutes to celebrate ours. Even if 400 wins isn't among the most special accomplishments Izzo could count on his trophy shelf, it's coinciding with the events in Pennsylvania serve as a reminder of how lucky we are to have Izzo and what a steady hand he's been at MSU. While the idea of Tom coaching another seventeen years to get another 400 wins seems a bit unlikely I raise my figurative glass and toast to 400 wins, may there be 400 more.

I've felt since 2008 or so that UM Basketball and MSU football have some things in common. Both are being led by coaches that have a plan. Both programs have restored their good name from the muck of mediocrity and to be honest I like both coaches. Both programs have knocked off their hated rivals too many times in a row for it to be an accident anymore. Both programs have risen and have returned to a status that is no longer embarassing but is in fact something to proud of from a university sports perspective.

So that's why it completely chaps my ass to hear some MSU fans dismissing UM's basketball team out of hand. Your UM Brother-In-Law does the same thing to MSU when MSU delivers the beatings on the gridiron. Neither set of fans can have it both ways, either a rivalry is important or it isn't.

If I wanted to whine about how MSU is having a down year, I'd be perfectly in my rights to. MSU returns 1.5 starters in Appling and Green from the 2010-2011 cancer-ridden squad of "me first". As close to a diseased team as Izzo has had in his time at MSU. We could talk about how only five of the guys on the team even averaged more than 5 minutes a game last year. So even with all that UM managed to squeak out a one point win, despite leading the whole game, despite some of the worst late game clock management I can recall from Tom in a long time. All of those things are true.

That's not what happened here though. What happened is that the team who played a better game won. They won. That sucks. I hate it when they win. I hate it even more when we lose because of some pretty iffy gamesmanship at the end. UM fans, feel free to gloat with them braggin' rights, you earned them, until February 5th anyway. But the next time I hear a UM fan talking business about how MSU basketball is going down and how the tide has turned and I ask them about football and get the "Richrod mumble, mumble, mumble" answer, I'm done being nice about it.

Either your team won or they didn't and now the braggin' rights are yours or they aren't with no qualifications. I think this is something on which real MSU/UM fans with respect for their rivals can agree.

Basketball isn't totally my thing. I love watching our team and I've always said that if Izzo shot someone at midcourt during a basketball game he wouldn't get in trouble until he did it the second time. Some of my fondest MSU memories are of attending MSU hoops games. I knew I was on the right track with my wife when she started talking about playing inside/outside ball and preaching why Izzo should play zone instead of man.
However, as I started out saying, I'm happy to watch basketball passively instead of critically and it's for that reason I'm starting out with the disclaimer right now. If you want cogent or frequent basketball analysis this isn't going to be the place for it. If that's what you want and you're not already reading The Only Colors you should be. They do work. That said, on with the show.

Here comes the rain, the cold, the yuck. Where football season and tailgating starts to get a bit raw, where you come home from every game and changing back into just a shirt after wearing seven clothes makes you feel like you lost 20 lbs in seconds. As I sit and write, it's pouring cats and dogs outside and there's 25 mph winds. This is normally the time of year I pick up a Sports Illustrated and see MSU B-ball is ranked in the top 5.

This year though, Izzo enters the season ranked 28th in the Coaches Poll which isn't even really ranked. He suffered the loss of Delvon Roe several weeks ago, Korie Lucious & Garrick Sherman last season, Chris Allen the offseason before that. We graduated Kalin Lucas, Durrell Summers and Mike Kebler. We've lost six players since last year that contributed significant minutes to our 2010 MSU basketball team.

This might be the best thing to revitalize MSU basketball in a long time. What's Izzo ranked today? He isn't. He opens against #1 UNC and follows that up that by playing #6 Duke. So even if he opens 0-2 then he's still not ranked, he mulligans and he starts over. Can't lose there, you're playing with house money. He's going to be rotating in freshmen this year and lots of them. He has young players in Payne, Appling and Nix who have experience playing, but are far from savvy veterans.

He basically gets to blow up the team and start over with young, inexperienced and most importantly talented players that are malleable. A coaches dream for winning championships in the future. Who's gonna help old Tom whip this whippersnappers into shape? Draymond Green.

I've called Draymond Green in the past the Drew Stanton of Michigan State Basketball. He can do it all and sometimes does things a person would never think to do usually good, occasionally bad. He is tough, he works hard, he's a good kid and he can flat out ball. He manages to be a shining star of the team while still putting the team first. He's exactly what you want to teach all of the young pups to be and this is his team.

This is the first year in quite sometime Izzo has been freed of top 10 expectations by writers who forget that Izzo is brilliant in March and is still learning his guys in November. Izzo is free to experiment, to build, to have more teaching moments than usual. This is a year where if MSU basketball finishes in the top 3 of the Big 10 it's a joy, not an expectation. With reasonable expectations, this could be a great year for MSU basketball.