Twelve games into the 2024-25 season, Michigan State basketball has fans buzzing once again about the state of the program. For the past four years, there has been a dark cloud hovering over East Lansing because the hoops program has struggled to live up to its billing as a blue blood and now that some major changes happened in the offseason, things are looking up.
Michigan State lost four guys with starting experience from the 2023-24 team that began the season ranked in the top five as well as an assistant coach.
Gone were Tyson Walker, Malik Hall, AJ Hoggard, and Mady Sissoko but coming in were Jase Richardson, Frankie Fidler, Szymon Zapala, Kur Teng, and Jesse McColloch. Oh, and Tom Izzo hired Saddi Washington after he was let go from Michigan following the Juwan Howard era.
All of these additions have been massive and the subtractions haven't hurt. Some might even argue 1-2 of the losses in the offseason were really addition by subtraction.
Izzo has even stated that he has his locker room back and the team loves each other.
So with one non-conference game left and a likely 11-2 start staring the Spartans in the face before the return of Big Ten play on Jan. 3, Michigan State has a chance to go on a major run with all the momentum it has conjured and with the upcoming schedule it's facing.
Let's say Michigan State handles Western Michigan on Monday by a wide margin like we expect, it'll be 11-2 heading into a road game against Ohio State on Jan. 3.
If Michigan State can beat a decent, but not great, Ohio State team in a relatively tame road atmosphere, under Big Ten standards, it'll be 12-2 before a very winnable stretch of conference games. The Spartans will host a bad Washington team, travel to face a decent Northwestern squad, host Penn State and Illinois, go to Madison Square Garden to face a very young and inexperienced Rutgers team, and then host Minnesota and go to USC (who may be the worst two teams in the Big Ten). If the Spartans play to their potential and continue to improve, they might have a really impressive run until a road game against No. 22 UCLA on Feb. 4.
The second half of the schedule is a bit tougher with at UCLA, Oregon, Indiana, at Illinois, Purdue, at Michigan, at Maryland, Wisconsin, at Iowa, and Michigan on the slate.
Michigan State taking advantage of this incredibly favorable first half of the Big Ten slate would do wonders for the second half of the conference schedule. The conference is up for grabs and the next month will be critical to the title run for MSU.