Michigan State projected embarrassingly low in preseason Big Ten media poll

Happy Big Ten Media Days week to all who celebrate. This is marks the start of the final stretch before the college football season begins, and Michigan State fans couldn’t be more excited to move on from the Jonathan Smith and Mel Tucker eras and move on to Pat Fitzgerald.

Big Ten Media Days is the perfect opportunity to hear from the new coach and his hand-picked representatives ahead of his first season with the Spartans.

That first season, however, doesn’t have many expectations.

The preseason media poll just proved that on Monday.

According to the Big Ten preseason media poll, Michigan State is expected to finish embarrassingly low in the standings this season — at least according to those who cover the conference. The poll has Michigan State in 16th place out of 18 teams.

Michigan State is projected to be the third-worst team in the Big Ten this season ahead of only Rutgers and Purdue. I’m going to vehemently disagree and say that Michigan State is only going to exceed expectations. I can see the Spartans also finishing ahead of Maryland, Northwestern, Minnesota, and even UCLA and Nebraska.

Fortunately, they’ll have an opportunity to prove themselves against a lot of these teams.

Is Michigan State really the third-worst team in the Big Ten? Absolutely not. At least I don’t believe so, but these are the types of projections the program has been seeing for years thanks to poor coaching and equally subpar recruiting.

It’s up to Fitzgerald to fix that.

Michigan State will be a bowl team this year

Ten years ago, if you saw this subheading in a post about Michigan State football, you probably would have rolled your eyes at how not-so-hot of a take this is. It would be like predicting that Michigan State basketball would make the NCAA Tournament.

Nowadays, however, this is a bold prediction.

Michigan State hasn’t made a bowl game since 2021 and Fitzgerald is taking over a roster that didn’t do all that well under Smith. He did supplement it with his own guys and trimmed some fat, but there’s still a lot of work to do if the Spartans plan on winning six games.

I believe they do that contrary to what Vegas believes.

Vegas has set Michigan State’s over/under for wins at 4.5 and I think that’s low because the Spartans have been jumping rope with that line for four years now. They’re either at four or five wins regularly.

That’s going to change this year with a 3-1 start to the season in the first month, meaning that all they need over the final two months is three total wins. Can they win three out of these games?

• at Wisconsin
• Illinois
• Northwestern
• at UCLA
• at Michigan
• Washington
• Oregon
• at Rutgers

I think there are easily three wins there, and probably more like four. Michigan State will beat Illinois and Northwestern and steal at least one on the road against Wisconsin, UCLA, Michigan, or Rutgers.

Convince me otherwise.

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