“We have to understand where we’re at,” Dantonio said Tuesday at his weekly press conference. “I don’t think we’re going to win the Big Ten championship this year. I think that’s the reality right now. We’ve lost three games in the conference. I think our goals need to be to go to a bowl game, regardless of which bowl game that is.”

Dantonio said winning out in November — the Spartans play Western Michigan, Purdue and Penn State — now is a team goal.

MSU (4-5 overall, 3-3 Big Ten) needs to win all three games to finish 7-5 and solidify a bowl appearance. If the Spartans finish 6-6, all 7-5 teams nationwide must be selected for a bowl before the Spartans could be considered.

Dantonio said trying to rebuild respect is something else he’d like to accomplish.

“Anytime you have a football team that is all of a sudden 4-5 after nine games, I think you begin to lose a little bit of respect. I think that’s natural,” Dantonio said. “And what we want to try to do is make sure we’re regaining that respect. I believe that’s a weekly challenge for every football team in America.

“When you don’t win, you don’t get the prize. There’s no prize for second place. You either win or you lose. You can say why you won or why you lost, all these different things and you can lay it out there, but it’s one or the other. We have to always deal with that and I think that’s very important.”

Depth perception

Dantonio did not release a depth chart Tuesday because he doesn’t know who’s going to be available Saturday.

“We’ve got some guys that are banged up, injured a little bit, so really until we get to practice, we don’t know who’s in, who’s out because we had some guys with some head injuries,” Dantonio said, declining to name injuries.

“So we’ve got to see where we’re at and also have to see how certain players are coming back, guys who have been injured previous.”

Dantonio added that there will be no depth chart changes in relation to how someone played.