Michigan State football leads the Big Ten in key defensive stat

Michigan State football is coming off its first loss of the season to Boston College but that hasn’t impacted my feelings towards the team whatsoever. Sure, the Spartans lost the game, but they easily played well enough in my opinion to win.

But at the end of the day that doesn’t matter. There are however some positive things that we can look at to show us that there are still a lot of reasons to be hopeful for the rest of the season.

And one of those things just so happens to be that the Spartan’s defense leads the Big Ten in sacks this season.

There aren’t many more important stats for a defense than total sacks, and it just so happens that Michigan State is dominating the Big Ten this season with 15 of them so far. That is three more than the both Indiana and Northwestern who sit in second place in the conference.

The Spartans are led by Jordan Turner and Khris Bogle who each have three sacks to their name this season.

Sure there are some Big Ten teams that have played one less game than MSU, but the Spartans' gap is large enough where they likely won’t catch Michigan State when they eventually have their bye week.

To make this stat even more impressive, the Spartans are also the No. 2 team in the entire country with their 15 sacks which is just one sack shy of Miami who has 16.

And if you thought this stat couldn’t get any better the Spartans did this while playing quality competition. Michigan State has accumulated these stats while playing two road games against power four competition, something a very small amount of teams have faced so far this season. So it isn’t like MSU is bullying bad teams, they’re producing this production against some quality competition.

Now the hope is that Michigan State keeps this up because their schedule only gets more difficult from here. But if the defense can keep this up then MSU should have a chance to pull off an upset or two in the coming weeks.