The last time Michigan State started a season 7-0 was a decade ago. The 2015-16 team started the year 13-0, and it put together one of the best regular seasons in Tom Izzo’s tenure. We won’t talk about what happened in the postseason because I don’t want to ruin anyone’s day, but the Spartans reached the 7-0 mark on Thursday night with a 74-58 win over North Carolina.
Michigan State fought off a couple of North Carolina second-half surges to really put the game away in the final minutes, thanks to some spectacular play from Jeremy Fears Jr.
The Spartans now have three ranked wins on the season, and there’s only one game remaining in the non-conference gauntlet that they’ve seen, and that comes next Saturday against a really good Duke team which is ranked No. 4.
Now let’s dive into some observations from the 16-point win.
1. Jeremy Fears Jr. is playing at an All-American level
Jeremy Fears Jr. was playing a rather quiet game early on, scoring about five points with five assists through the first half, but it looked like he got bumped out of the way by a North Carolina free throw shooter in the second half, and you could tell he took that personally. From that point on, he was an absolute monster, scoring a game-high 19 points with seven assists and five boards.
Down the stretch, Fears really took over. He was hitting just about everything he threw up, and he fed off the crowd’s energy. He finished the game 8-for-10 from the floor and hit his only three.
The sophomore is playing at an All-American level.
2. MSU is scary defensively
When the Spartans entered the season, they saw games against Arkansas, Kentucky, and North Carolina, and knew that the team would have to bring it defensively. Given the size of all those teams, defense was a small concern, but man, the Spartans continue to prove people wrong.
Michigan State allowed just 66 to a high-octane Arkansas team, 66 to Kentucky, and then just 58 to North Carolina which averaged nearly 90 points per game coming into this one.
The defensive effort has been scary through the first month of the season, and that’s a big reason this team is 7-0 with three ranked wins.
3. Tom Izzo may have trimmed the rotation
Tom Izzo usually figures out his rotation by early-to-mid December, and it looks like that’s already happened as he played eight guys 10-plus minutes on Thursday while Jordan Scott and Jesse McCulloch were the odd men out.
While we could still see more from Scott and McCulloch, it feels like Divine Ugochukwu, Kur Teng, and Cam Ward are going to be the main guys off the bench this season.
An eight-man rotation isn’t necessarily a bad thing.