Monday afternoon, 12 hours after Michigan State dropped their second consecutive game for the first time this season, the sun was shining. It was far brighter than the

doom and gloom

that followed the Spartans' 68-60 loss to Ohio State.

"Guess what? They said the sun would shine; it's shown all day today," Tom Izzo said on his radio show Monday night. "It was bluer than blue. That's kind of not good either … but there were no clouds in the sky. Put it that way.

"We had a lot of staff meetings today. It's my favorite thing to do when you struggle: Grab a mirror, look at yourself, figure out what you did wrong, then start spreading it to other people. That's what we did; that's what we're going to do. We had a slight practice tonight because we got a long week. We had a long film session and I apologize for being two minutes late."



Izzo had been late that night. Out of breath and hurried, he arrived at Reno's East to a crowd full of fans waiting for him to tell them how to make sense of the Spartans' recent struggles. There was barely time for popcorn and orange juice.

"Be concerned, be a little upset, be whatever you got to be, but don't panic," Izzo told them. "It's not the time to panic. It's the time you do this with all your teams, you regroup. And usually you get a couple of easy games in between each one and you regroup a little easier. We're going to have to regroup under fire, but I think that will make us better in the long run.

"If you would have told me, if I would have told you, we're going to be 22-6 back about three months ago? It's like living to 90, I'll punch that card right now. I'm not sure I wouldn't punch that living to 60 card right now. But I would definitely punch the living to 90 card right now and that's kind of the way it is.

"We haven't always played well, but we have not had a bad loss like most of the teams ahead of us. We haven't had any 30-point blow outs like Duke's had, we haven't had any of these kind of games like other teams have had."

Michigan State has the week off before heading to Ann Arbor on Sunday. The two teams have both been forced to look in the mirror in the two weeks since the Spartans' 23-point win over the Wolverines. Michigan carried the embarrassing loss on their backs like a piano-sized burden and used humility to refocus their season's mission. Michigan State lost grit in the over-confident aftermath and learned their lesson in the form of consecutive losses. The rematch, unexpectedly, will be between two teams looking for redemption.

"As I told my team," Izzo said, "I am trying to take a little pressure off of them because I think some of them are feeling it. But at the same time, we win together and lose together. We didn't do a good enough job, they didn't do a good enough job, and we lost some games.

"Somebody - they must both be insane now, coaches and media - but somebody must think we're still a pretty good team. And that's kind of the way it is this year."

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