The Spartans were down 13-9 with half a minute to play when L.J. Scott lunged forward and stretched the ball over the goal line for a touchdown to push the Spartans past No. and 4 Iowa in the Big Ten championship game.
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Scott carried on 10 of the Spartans’ final 11 plays, the exception a two-yard carry by quarterback Connor Cook on a fourth-and-two play that gave Michigan State a first-and-goal from the Iowa 3-yard line. That was when, with a 9-6 deficit in a muddled game of which Michigan State had assumed slight control, junior quarterback C.J. Beathard backed up to his own 5-yard line on second and 20.
By winning his second Big Ten crown in three years both against previously unbeaten teams – and giving the senior class a record-breaking 43rd career win, Cook and his teammates can turn now their focus to their season-long goal, winning the school’s first outright national title since 1952.
“That was the drive to win the game and be champions”, said Cook, who became the first two-time recipient of the Big Ten Championship Game Most Valuable Player award. But Michigan State hasn’t played for a national championship. Regardless, they got through a tough schedule with one loss, including a win over OR, and a road win against Ohio State with two backup quarterbacks. “It just goes to show the toughness we have, the grit we have, the fact that we’re not going to be denied”. We didn’t have any huge runs the whole game, but you saw the Iowa front seven get more and more exhausted, and that’s what fuels us. Scott punched in the go-ahead score from the 1-yard line, and Iowa’s last-second drive went nowhere. “There’s a lot more to do, we’ve got two more games, two more (teams) to play”. Head coach Mark Dantonio raised the Big Ten championship trophy, stealing a championship hat away from one of his players in the process.
“We gave it all that we had”, Lomax said. Michigan State played a great game.
“I hope we stay grounded in who we are as a program and continue to just stride and do a little bit better than we’ve always done, and move a little bit farther”, Dantonio said Friday, when asked if a win would elevate his team from blue-collar underdog to national blue blood.
“Queze said it to us, I think maybe before the game”, Calhoun recalled.
And as it stages the first unofficial play-in game in the brief history of the College Football Playoff, it counts as a triumph for the kind of football that used to define it – hard, disciplined, airtight. “No matter what the score is, no matter what the circumstance is, we’re going to go out there and play, and if we’ve got to go 22 plays, we’re going to go 22”. “Our football team knows how to win”.
With three teams ranked in the top six and five in the CFP’s top 15, the discussion has now turned to whether the Big Ten deserves two spots in the playoff – a subject neither coach was willing to touch.
It’s fair to wonder how much of Michigan State’s defensive improvement was because of the opposition.
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It took the longest pass completion Iowa has made all year to put them ahead, and then it took the most time consuming drive the Spartans have assembled all year to win the game.
