Michigan State-Purdue: Spartans Refuse to Lose

Every Big Ten game is important, particularly with a conference title still out there, but you could make a strong case that Michigan State needed this 21-7 victory a lot less than any other game this season. Instead, they turned the situation into yet another of many "statement" games to tell themselves and the world that the culture of this program is like nothing that came before it.

They gave up a 4-1 turnover advantage to Purdue, a team that desperately needed this win to avoid sending Joe Tiller into retirement with a very disappointing losing season. With an 8-2 record and a comfortable bowl game already secured, Michigan State theoretically had fewer motivations to overcome those mistakes.

The Spartans were also a tired and sore football team, having played a game every single Saturday of the season thus far, the only team ranked in the top 25 with 10 straight football games already in their rear-view mirror.

You're supposed to lose—and very badly—when you're tired and give up that many chances to a hungry opponent. Instead, the Spartan defense decided to crank their game into a gear nobody yet knew they had.

Shannon Shelton of the Detroit Free Press notes that no team, during all of the dozen years of Joe Tiller's spread offense revolution at Purdue, had held the Boilermakers to under 200 yards of total offense until Michigan State did it yesterday. This includes the very stingy defense that propelled Ohio State to the 2002 BCS Championship and various others.

Yet for the first three quarters and through part of the fourth, the Boilermakers were held under 100 yards. Down 21-0 in the fourth quarter, almost half of their total yardage for the day came on their only scoring drive, a 98-yard touchdown march that ended with just 42 ticks remaining on the clock.

There seems little doubt that if Michigan State's defense had needed to stop that drive to preserve the win, or just wanted a 21-0 shutout a little bit more, even many of these yards might not have happened.

The old saying goes that the game is played by "Jimmys and Joes," not "X's and O's." I noted last week that Michigan State is statistically a very mediocre team producing extraordinary results.

A legion of recruiting nerds will doubtlessly tell you that they are ranked eighth in the conference for total offense and fifth for total defense because they just didn't bring in as many four-star players as the teams ranked ahead of them. They'll say with knowing looks that this matters a lot.

Go tell Charlie Weis and Phil Fulmer.

On paper, most teams look "better" than Michigan State, but numbers cannot measure the culture. The best teams believe that they have a hundred ways to win every game, no matter the circumstances, while lesser teams have fewer answers.

There's no statistic to measure precisely where any given group is at relative to the others, but it is the most important factor in the game: Do their coaches have them prepared to play and thinking like winners?

With the turnovers and fatigue and whatnot, there were a lot of ways for Michigan State to lose to Purdue and just as many reasons why they should have when the ball started bouncing away. But win they did, and not just to get it done and escape.

Instead, they put up a dominating performance, virtually announcing for the entire afternoon that this is the kind of game that they expect to go on winning, one way or another, for a good long time.