BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Michigan State’s football team spent Saturday night at Indiana hanging on to the idea of true balance offensively.

That fallacy has two weeks left to live. It’d better be dead and buried by the time the Spartans pull in to Penn State on Oct. 13.

You can be stubborn and idealistic against Indiana and still keep pace. You can afford to run the ball fruitlessly on first and second down and face third-and-long on back-to-back possessions — and get nothing — and still win 35-21 on the road.

But if MSU wants to be a player in the Big Ten this season — and do more than out-wrestle the middle and bottom of the league, win eight games and play in the TaxSlayer Bowl — it’ll have to eventually let loose its gifted quarterback and receivers and give this offense a chance to be something.

The Spartans won a game Saturday night they absolutely had to win. They were poised with a ton on the line against a worthy opponent. They were devastating defensively against the run, impressive rushing the passer and dynamic through the air on one critical offensive drive. But they aren’t in this to beat Indiana. They’re in this to take down Penn State, Michigan and Ohio State.

To do that, the Spartans are going to have to quickly come to grips with who they are offensively.

“We talked about what’s our identity as a football team coming into here, who are we going to be, and we’ve got to start building our identity,” MSU coach Mark Dantonio said Saturday night.

“The identity of our football team right now, if you look at us, you’d say, ‘Hard to run the ball against, playing pretty good defense, can bring some pressures on the quarterback, got some big-play wide receivers, special teams playing pretty well considering all the things we’re dealing with.’”

Yep. So own it. Don’t give up on the running game. But don’t let it drown you, either.

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After three games and four weeks, this much has become clear: The only way for MSU to keep pace with the Nittany Lions, Wolverines and Buckeyes is to let quarterback Brian Lewerke wing it around and to let those “big-play wide receivers” make plays.

This isn’t to suggest that Lewerke throw the ball 50 times a game and operate solely out of the shotgun. That sort of predictability is suicide in a pro-style offense. But Lewerke threw it 25 times Saturday, while MSU called 34 running plays. That ought to be reversed at the very least, given what we know about the makeup of this offense. MSU’s running backs carried the ball 22 times for a combined 57 yards, never once gaining more than six yards on a single play. Same story against Utah State and Arizona State.

A quarter of the season is over. That’s what your running game is. And might be for the duration. Your passing game features four guys who might play in the NFL.

“Offensively, we’ve got some weapons on the outside,” junior linebacker Joe Bachie said of Felton Davis, Cody White and Darrell Stewart. “We used them a little bit today. That was good to see.”

MSU targeted its three top receivers a combined 17 times. They wound up with 11 catches for 170 yards. That’s not enough.

The Spartans’ best drive of the game was a seven-play, 74-yard march in 64 seconds just before halftime. Indiana knew the Spartans were throwing the ball on every down. Didn’t matter. Lewerke completed 5 of 7 passes, three of them to Davis — one of those a dazzling one-handed grab — and boom, MSU walked off the field ahead 21-7.

“We could have done that all day,” Lewerke said. “Our receivers were much better than their corners in my opinion.”

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“We should have been able to put up at least 50 points,” he continued, “just off (our) mistakes, interceptions by me and mistakes that we made that could have changed that.”

Lewerke made his share of blunders. He held on to the ball too long a couple times, threw one interception deep in MSU’s territory that makes me question everything I’m writing in this column. Putting the ball in his hands, however, and living with his mistakes is still MSU’s best shot — and its only shot in three weeks in State College, Pennsylvania.

The Spartans can run it 70 times for 250 yards next week against Central Michigan and it won’t change a thing. By Oct. 13, they have to become a team that uses balance as a facade to keep some measure of unpredictability.

The points, the productivity, the juice offensively, that’s all in the passing game. That’s your offensive identity.

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.