EAST LANSING – Television networks have taken to nicknaming weeks during the college basketball and college football seasons: from championship week to feast week to rivalry week.

Tom Izzo has apparently created his own name for this week in Big Ten basketball.

“I’m looking at this as kind of a separation week,” the Michigan State coach said during his weekly press conference on Tuesday morning.

Michigan State enters this week already with a little bit of separation in the Big Ten standings, at 6-1 in conference play and with a one-game lead on the rest of the field.

But with the Spartans facing two games on the road this week against teams that are in the thick of the conference standings, Izzo sees a chance to either create more separation or see others close the gap.

“We’re either going to win some games and separate ourselves or we’re going to lose some games and not separate ourselves,” Izzo said. “I think that’s going to give us a better indication.”

Entering the week, 10 teams are within 2.5 games of one another in league play with about a third of conference play in the books in a particularly compacted year for the league.

Rutgers and Illinois are tied for second place at 5-2, a game back from the Spartans. Past that, Maryland, Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, Minnesota, Purdue, Penn State and Michigan all have either three or four losses.

Izzo said an unbalanced schedule has made it difficult to assess teams. Michigan State has played only two of its seven conference games on the road, the only Big Ten team to play that few. Every other conference team has played at least three, while some, like Wisconsin and Minnesota, have already played four.

“It’s very hard for media, fans, even players to figure out where anybody’s at right now,” Izzo said.

That disparity will start to even out this week. Michigan State will play two road games in the span of four days: at Indiana on Thursday and at Minnesota on Sunday.

The games are so close together – the Thursday game is an 8:30 p.m. tipoff and the Sunday game is at 3 p.m. ET – that Michigan State is taking the unusual step of going straight from one road game to another without coming home.

Izzo said the decision to do that had to do partly with helping senior point guard Cassius Winston, who is in the midst of a 7-for-25 shooting slump with nine assists and 14 turnovers in his last two games.

“Maybe just trying to get away from some of this stuff and try to get out of the limelight and just kind of be one of the fellows,” Izzo said.

During that weekend, Michigan State will be trying to buck the Big Ten’s trend of home success, as home teams are 42-7 in conference games – a fact Izzo calls “ridiculous.”

In working against that trend, Michigan State has a luxury that many teams in the conference don’t: a pair of players who have played significant minutes on two Big Ten title teams, in Winston and Xavier Tillman. Yet Izzo said the Spartans quickly fall off from there in terms of experience, save for Aaron Henry.

“You hope that helps you, but we're still awfully young in a lot of ways,” Izzo said.

While Michigan State has yet to prove much on the road in conference play, it heads into this road trip off of a convincing Friday win over Wisconsin that saw the Spartans get plenty of contributions from players besides Winston and Tillman, most notably Henry and Rocket Watts.

Yet like every other team in the league, Izzo said he’s still unsure of where his team is exactly. A five-day, two-game road trip will help provide some clarity – and, Izzo hopes, some separation.

“I really felt it was going to take six to eight games in the league to try to figure out where everybody was because of the bizarre scheduling,” Izzo said. “I haven’t changed my mind on that, nor have I changed it on how good the league is.”