Tom Izzo will not be breaking Bob Knight’s Big Ten victories record in the house of John Wooden — not after Izzo’s No. 7 Spartans suffered a 70-64 upset Saturday at USC.
That keeps Izzo at 352 Big Ten victories, one shy of the record owned by the late Knight. A win Saturday and another Tuesday at UCLA would have given the Spartans’ 30th-year head coach the mark. Instead, the earliest he can do it would be Feb. 8 against Oregon at Breslin Center in East Lansing.
That will come at some point. But the grip the Spartans (18-3, 9-1 Big Ten) have on their conference race and a high NCAA Tournament seed could be fleeting. MSU came in with 13 straight victories, but seven of the nine Big Ten wins came against the bottom six teams in the league, and the Spartans have yet to play the five teams closest to them in the standings.
This is the Spartans’ first loss outside of Quad 1, but they also have just two wins over teams that would be safely in the field today, Illinois and Ohio State. A top-20 team in terms of efficiency on both ends of the floor, MSU has depth, shares the ball, defends and rebounds, but also lacks a clear go-to player on offense.
To that point, the Spartans didn’t have a double-figure scorer Saturday until Jeremy Fears Jr. hit a free throw with 2:14 remaining. He ended up with 12 points and Jaden Akins finished with 11. MSU scored just 0.955 points per possession against the Trojans and had one field goal in the final 3:22 of play.
There’s a lot to learn in the weeks ahead about Izzo’s team. And there’s still plenty of opportunity for Eric Musselman’s first USC team (13-8, 5-5), which now has a gigantic resume booster to go with recent Quad 1 road victories against Illinois and Nebraska. Six more potential Quad 1 wins await on the rest of the Trojans’ regular-season schedule.
Point guard Desmond Claude is leading the way for the Trojans, and the Spartans struggled to keep him out of the lane. Claude had a game-high 19 points despite leaving briefly in the first half with an apparent knee injury.
(Photo of Tom Izzo and Jeremy Fears Jr.: William Navarro / Imagn Images)
