EAST LANSING – If Tom Izzo was writing a story about his Michigan State team as it hits the halfway point of this Big Ten season, he knows what he would put at the top.

“My headline would be "consistency" with a question mark,” Izzo said.

That one word may be brief for a headline, but it cuts to the biggest issue the 25th-year Michigan State coach sees with his team right now.

Michigan State is alone in first place in the Big Ten, at 8-2, following a 29-point home win on Wednesday over Northwestern, but Izzo isn’t seeing his team play with the start-to-finish consistency that he thinks will be necessary to win the Big Ten and then advance in the postseason.

“Where we are now will not get us anywhere close to where we need to be,” Izzo said.

Wednesday’s final score masked what was an up-and-down first half for the Spartans and an example of the inconsistency that Izzo is trying to root out of his team.

Michigan State took an early 16-2 lead, then missed nine of its next 10 shots and gave up a 13-2 run and nearly its entire lead.

The Spartans rallied from there to easily win, but Izzo worries that that won’t be possible in other scenarios.

“You can get away with that against certain teams,” Izzo said. “You probably aren't going to get away with it on the road anywhere in this league.”

That problem was the inverse of what’s been more common lately for Michigan State. The Spartans have gotten off to poor starts in many recent games and had to try to claw back from behind, including when they fell behind by 10 points in the first halves at Purdue and Indiana.

And its inconsistency has gone game-to-game: the Spartans’ earlier this month went from a 16-point win over Minnesota to a 29-point loss to Purdue to a 12-point win over Wisconsin.

Izzo sees the reasons for the Spartans’ inconsistency as multiple. Start with the fact that the team has a pair of freshmen and two sophomores with little experience in its playing rotation.

The loss of Joshua Langford for the entire season and the limited availability of Kyle Ahrens – he returned on Wednesday from a three-game injury absence to play eight minutes – has had significant drawbacks in terms of experience and players who know how to put together a complete game.

He also knows the constant changing of the Spartans’ rotation isn’t making things easier. Particularly at power forward, the Spartans have had three different starters and significant changes in minutes distribution from night to night, and players constantly adjusting to different combinations.

Yet his answer for the issue is simple: for point guard Cassius Winston to pull everyone together.

“Cash has got to run this team,” Izzo said. “He’s so good and he does so many good things but holding people accountable is a hard thing for best players to do.”

Spartans forward Xavier Tillman said Michigan State tries to find consistency offensively by getting the ball to the player with the hot hand at all times. At different points on Wednesday, Tillman said, the Spartans were working to get the ball to Marcus Bingham Jr. or Malik Hall to have the best chance to score.

“Really it’s finding the hot hand and just going through that,” Tillman said.

Izzo knew he was sounding negative when he was asked to assess his first-place team at the midway point of Big Ten play and harped on its consistency after its biggest win of conference play. But as he looks through February and into March, he knows what can happen to a team that’s inconsistent.

“If we don’t get that consistency, it’s going to rear its ugly head,” Izzo said.