Marcus Bingham Jr., Aaron Henry and Joshua Langford talk to their coaching counterparts during the second half of the game. The Hawkeyes crushed the Spartans, 88-58, on Feb. 13, 2021.
—Before MSU suffered a brutal 88-58 loss to Iowa at home, Head Coach Tom Izzo said it would be beneficial for his team to know they could hang with Iowa. They only lost by six in Iowa City just two weeks before. Their confidence was expected to be high.
But instead of claiming redemption, the Spartans claimed their worst home loss in the Izzo era.
“I’m embarrassed," Izzo said after the game. "That was a poor performance."
Junior forward Gabe Brown echoed that feeling.
“It is embarrassing, 30 points at home is horrible,” Brown said. “It is embarrassing to go out there and play like that ... but it’s not over yet. We’re still fighting, and we still believe that we can make this run and we’re going to.”
Statistically, the Spartans didn’t hang with the Hawkeyes like they once did.
Iowa’s 52% accuracy from beyond the arc toppled MSU’s 28.6%.
Michigan State, a team known for tough defense and rebounding, grabbed just 37 boards next to Iowa’s 46.
The team did what they wanted to with National Player of the Year contender Luka Garza, who was held to his first single-digit scoring performance of the season on Saturday but they were still driven out of their own court by Iowa’s perimeter shooting.
“Today was an ambush," Izzo said. "It's one game — it’s not good — but it’s not been indicative of how we’ve played. We know what our goal is and what we have to do, so many games we have to win and we have eight left to do that.”
Despite the loss, graduate student guard Joshua Langford said nobody is throwing the season away.
“We don’t have time to hang our heads," Langford said. "We still have some of the season left, and we still have the chance to try to do some things, so at the end of the day we have to just keep learning. This is not the time to be throwing in the towel. I’m not throwing in the towel. I don't think my teammates and my coaches aren’t throwing in the towel, nobody’s giving up. That’s not what we do at Michigan State.”
But it'll take leadership and heart for the Spartans to move on, one Izzo will look to Langford to present.
As the final minutes wound down in the Breslin Center against Iowa, Langford and Izzo sat in the second row of the bench and talked.
“At the end of the day I think me and coach's relationship has really grown a lot, and we were just kind of talking about the game,” Langford said. “He was just talking about how as a captain, you have to set the standard.”
With six games remaining and the team knowing what's at stake, MSU will look to redeem themselves, in whatever way they can, with little time to breathe after their blowout Iowa loss.
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