Nearly every sports team has at one time or another claimed to be overlooked, underappreciated, insulted. Right now, though, few teams can more legitimately claim that the world is withholding the respect they deserve than Michigan State. The fifth-ranked Spartans have amassed double-digit victory totals in four of the past five seasons, and they have ended the last two campaigns ranked in the top five. Last season, they won the Cotton Bowl. The year before, they beat Stanford in the Rose Bowl.

Yet a casual disrespect seems to plague the program. Last December, the College Football Playoff selection committee quietly slipped Mississippi State from two spots behind Michigan State to one ahead in its final rankings even though neither team had played a game after the previous rankings. More recently, prognosticators have praised Michigan State and then mentioned, in the same tone with which one tells a dog he is a “good boy,” that the Spartans’ national title chances are faint because to make the four-team playoff, they must defeat No. 1 Ohio State, the defending champion, in Columbus.

The Spartans’ inferiority complex is compounded — this year and always — by the Wolverines. The rivalry contains the typical resentment of the self-effacing land-grant school against the glamorous flagship state university, and it is aggravated by Michigan’s view of itself as eternal front-runner (its fight song is called “The Victors”) and confirmed by Michigan’s status as the winningest program in college football history.

Even the official name of the Wolverines’ home field must be irritating to the Spartans — Michigan Stadium, as though it were the only one in the state.