MSU Red Cedar Message Board

I totally respect all the negative rants. It's totally understandable for fans to be upset after a tough loss. I think all the hindsight coaching could be curbed a little, of course it's easy to rant about what we shoulda, coulda, woulda done, but I feel like you still think we're going to win a National Championship. We're not a #2 team in the country. That preseason ranking totally kills people during the season because they expect that we're #2, we're going to win it all this year...for the entire year.

Unfortunately this year we're not #2, we're not even top 20 so it's going to be really hard to beat a team like Illinois @home. You need to lower your expectations of this team. If you just start to think to yourself that it'll be nice to see the Spartans the second weekend of the tournament, I assure you that your anger will subside if we lose to Purdue. Then come March if we lose the 2nd game you won't be as mad, you might even be pleasantly surprised if we get to the 2nd weekend.

My first year of college, we won the national championship, by far the greatest night of my life. The bar was set pretty high from there on out. When Chris Hill, AA, Torbert, Paul Davis came to town we were still supposed to be dominate...then it never really panned out. Year after year, Torbert never developed into what he was so highly touted to do, I never understood why Tom played Chris Hill at the 1, Paul Davis was Paynesque his first year, the team showed brilliance at times but most often our expectations kept going down year after year. 2003 I think we were like preseason 2 or 3 and if you thought this year was bad, that year was BAAAADDDDDD. We lost to about every good team we played, much like this year. I remember being angry after games wondering why these guys aren't playing like they should. In the end we just weren't that good that year.

The next year comes along and we had a pretty lofty preseason ranking that year. I remember that I wasn't going to get caught up in preseason rankings. The whole year I was skeptical of this team and guess what? In the end the team totally surpassed all my expectations in March and got to the Final Four. I got tear gassed that night on Albert, I didn't care. I was already crying about the loss anyways. But long story short is after those two years, I ignore all the preseason hype and try to just enjoy the show. Sometimes it's not enjoyable, sometimes it's great, March never seems to amaze me. But please, don't hate Tom Izzo. He can't have teams go to the final four every year, he's the best in the biz and still only goes 50% of the time over the last 12 years. I hope this year humbles you as a fan. It'll make this March and every year after that much more of a surprise.