Welcome to excommunication.

Jalen Watts-Jackson was the last reward for decades of prayer. This year the almighty is no longer forgiving. All that’s left is the stake.

MSU football will not win. I know it. You know it. Mark Dantonio knows it. Deep down, even in the most optimistic of players like Khari Willis and Chris Frey know it, too. University of Michigan will all but leave MSU’s head on a stake Saturday.

For those with any sort of glimmer of hope about MSU football this year, please grab the nearest object and make sure it’s not made of cloud.

It might benefit you more if you woke up in heaven this week — a last-second merciful divine intervention being the only way MSU walks out of Spartan Stadium without too much of a bruised ego.

But perhaps it isn’t God MSU will have to pay, but the devil. Someone sold his soul for MSU’s victory parade last year, and now there’s nothing but an eternity in hell to pay. It’ll come, too, in every fleck of maize and blue fire.

Now we’re left with nothing but a foregone conclusion that ought to have you either drunkenly passed out by the third quarter or crying in the corner by the fourth.

Say what you will about the dubious head coach down in Ann Arbor, but he’s a winner and he shows no mercy. He showed minimal to Hawaii, barely any to Penn State and USF, scarcely to Illinois and none to Rutgers.

He’ll try and erase the existence of MSU this weekend.

Maybe he won’t even have to try.

It’s the sad kind of knowing, knowing MSU has not the talent, the experience, nor the toughness to match-up with the freight train U-M will be rolling through in. It’s the lonely caress of fading memories and lost time. But at least you’ll know you can prepare to grieve.

This game no longer means anything this year, which has caused the old Spartan fan adage to come roaring back into existence.

“If we beat Michigan, it’ll make my year.” What a pity that a fan base that expected a Big Ten title again this year would resort back to that.

Might as well rush the field if MSU hangs a point on the board.

The Maryland game all but proved it right. MSU has nothing left in its bag. No miraculous freshmen, no play calls left to pull out. The coaching is discombobulated, evidenced by a fake field goal with the wind at the back as time expired in the first half.

The players lack composure not to press, highlighted by Riley Bullough’s three personal fouls and ejection in the first quarter, Brian Lewerke’s rushed throw to Donnie Corley with nothing but the endzone in front of him and lastly Monty Madaris’ hero complex that caused him to fumble inside the 10.

Those mistakes are as much on coaching as they are on the lack of experience. In a game where points are premium, you tell your receiver to get the first and goal and go quietly to the turf and you sit your fifth-year senior linebacker until he can get his head on his shoulders.

MSU’s only chance of winning on Saturday would be to find Soviet era formula, cocoon in it and emerge a different beast. MSU will be good again, just not this year and perhaps not the next.

Basketball starts this week. That should stop the bleeding.