Is it a good bye or goodbye for the Spartan gridders?

That question and many more will be answered come Saturday when MSU takes the field in Iowa City, Iowa, to match up with the ever-talented Old Gold and Black inside Kinnick Stadium.

And the battered-and-bruised players enjoyed time to reflect on their questionable first half of the season with time outside Spartan Stadium, healing from grueling games against Notre Dame and California.

The Spartans are 26-16-2 lifetime with at least 14 days of rest, dating way back when to 1896.

I brushed off the dust on a few volumes of Spartan statistics to find that one.

Yes, the gridders tied twice - a Nov. 3, 1928, pairing against Mississippi A&M and a Nov. 22, 1930, contest against Detroit.

But the weight of those stats - 6-point and 0-point ties, respectively - means as much as IAH 201 does for an MSU education, as this comes from a time when the Spartans pounded Chicago, Detroit and Port Huron YMCAs.

We’ll forget about the 0-119 loss to Michigan in 1902 here, too. The Spartans beat Albion 22-11 after the bye week that year.

Ouch.

So let’s fast-forward the highlight reel to 1993, when Joe Pa’s Nittany Lions joined the Big Ten.

The Spartans didn’t have an off week during the regular season from their national championship season of 1951 until the 11th addition to the conference in the early 1990s.

Since then, the bye week hasn’t been the best indicator for the remainder of the season, as the Spartans have split 12 games with six wins and six losses.

But with Spartan whistle-blower and clipboard-holder Bobby Williams standing on the sidelines, the Spartans are an undefeated 2-0.

Both victories came in 2001, once against the Hawkeyes (31-28) and the other against Missouri (55-7).

However, last weekend’s bye might have come at the best possible time in the season.

The Spartans’ talent has been overshadowed by sluggish starts and poor execution.

The team had an extra week to heal, recover and think about how to light the fire under their spandex.

“It was a good time for us going into the meat of our Big Ten schedule,” Williams says.

But Williams is quick to note, “You get out of the routine of game week and playing on the weekend and timing, and things like that tend to get disrupted.”

Hopefully, their timing will be a little shaken up. The offense needs to light up the scoreboard on its first drive.

The green-and-white gridders have had their difficulties on the Field of Nightmares. The last Spartan victory there came on Oct. 7, 1989.

And it’s time to say good-bye to that Spartan dry spell.

Goodbye to extending the sack tally of 14 for 90 backward yards.

Goodbye to a struggling ground game and its 168.6 yards per game.

Goodbye to not scoring a touchdown on an opening drive.

Or it’s time to say goodbye to a bowl, a Heisman Trophy for junior wide receiver Charles Rogers and, most importantly, a victory on Nov. 2 in Ann Arbor.

Kevin Hardy, State News associate sports editor, can be reached at hardykev@msu.edu.