Michigan State took a 80-74 loss to Purdue March 2nd. In a highly competitive matchup between two of the best Big Ten basketball teams, the Michigan State Spartans and Purdue Boilermakers both gave epic performances scoring back and forth. This game is important for both teams as it decides where they are placed in the Big Ten and it is one of their last games of the regular season. The game was set for Saturday, March 2nd, 2024, a home game for the Boilermakers, which was a bad sign for the Spartans. This is because when the Spartans play away, they lose most of those games resulting in a 3-6 losing record when playing away.
The Michigan State Spartans are one of few Michigan college basketball teams that’s doing alright compared to the Wolverines which are doing very poorly. MSU is currently ranked 8th in the Big Ten with a regular season record of 17-12 and a conference record of 9-9. These stats show that MSU started going downhill at the end of the season because they were ranked way higher in the midseason but then they started to fall apart and lose important games. On the other hand, Purdue has been having a phenomenal season with only three losses overall in their season and being the top three college team in the NCAA. The last time when they played each other was last year on the 29th of January and the outcome was Purdue beating MSU with a score of 77-61.
When it came time for the actual game, the result was similar to their last game. Purdue won again but with a score this time of 80-74. Even though MSU lost, they did better this time by only losing by six points which is better than last year when they lost by sixteen points. This game had many top scorers from MSU that helped make a difference like Tyson Walker and Jaden Akins both scoring 27 points together. But the Purdue player that was hard to defend and outscored both of them was Zach Edey. He would be considered the most valuable player in this game because he was able to score 32 points on MSU. Zach is also one of the main reasons why Purdue has a lot of success right now. With the outcome of this game, the Spartans would need to pick up the pace of competing with harder teams knowing that they might be a team placed in the NCAA tournament where it is full of competition.