Copyright M Live Michigan
EAST LANSING — Instead of giving a pre-game talk to his roster, Michigan State basketball coach Tom Izzo played a video that the team produced in recent years called “Passion.” The film has clips throughout Spartan basketball history, featuring words from legends of the school like Magic Johnson and Mateen Cleaves. Rather than try to inspire MSU with a speech for its first challenge of the 2025-26 season against a highly-touted Arkansas team coming to Breslin Center, he wanted ex-players to send the message aided by just a few words of his own. “I said ‘This is their chance,’” Izzo said postgame Saturday night. “You have games like this so that you get your chance to develop your own identity and your own legacy.” The No. 22 Spartans had been hungry for their chance to knock off the No. 14 team in the country and proved the game was meaningful for them, even just two matches into the season, as a team effort led MSU to victory. It wasn’t a clean performance from Michigan State, shooting 7% from three and never pulling away from coach John Calipari’s Arkansas, but it was an encapsulation of a team win and has the Spartans making national noise early in the year. “We’ve been talking all week just how a team like (Arkansas) that’s better than us on paper, individually, you look at that and say, ‘all right this is going to be a game that’s won through our team and how close we are as a team,’” senior forward Carson Cooper said. “It was super important. We kind of got a taste of a nice film session after the Colgate game where we can learn and get better. At that point, we kind of knew that it was all eyes on this game and we gotta prepare like this is gonna be the staple of how we start our season.” The value of a game like Saturday’s 69-66 win can get lost in the shuffle of the long college basketball season. Teams are still developing, young players — particularly freshmen-heavy teams like Arkansas — are just starting to learn the speed at the college level and are months away from where they’ll be come the critical games of the season. But that didn’t take anything away from how MSU wanted to approach the game and why they believe they got the win. “Unfortunately, in college basketball right now, I don’t think winning’s at the top of many people’s list,” Izzo said. “Tonight proved it was the top of Michigan State’s list. I think they approached the game that way. I think they felt that way in the huddles...it just kind of proves that together we can get a lot of things done.” There was a sense of urgency for the Spartans to be up for this game. Even with their top three scorers gone from a season ago, MSU’s talent is strong as ever. Their youth had a shining moment as true freshman Cam Ward scored a game-high 18 points with 10 rebounds while fellow first-year forward Jordan Scott delivered quality minutes with six points and seven rebounds. Junior Coen Carr posted 15 points, seven rebounds and three assists as he had one of his best all-around games as a Spartan despite going through foul trouble. While going 1-of-14 from beyond the arc was troubling, getting the win, being +18 in the paint and leading for over half of the game while one element of their team was essentially removed spoke volumes. “This was, we need to get better and we need to get it better now,” guard Jeremy Fears said. “This week was really big for that. We tried to do any and everything we did, they gave us a scout report, we made sure we watched film and executed and did everything we needed to do.” Getting a team of Arkansas’ quality to come to East Lansing early in the season wasn’t lost on anyone in the building. MSU took its own trek to a hostile environment with an exhibition at UConn last month as Izzo is a regular in trying to play on other team’s home courts. He’s been espousing the value of these highlight games and scheduling home-and-homes so fans get to experience the games rather than send them all to neutral sites. Duke will be at Breslin Center in December and the Spartans already have their return game at Arkansas set for next season. There’s almost an entire slate of basketball left this year, but you can count on MSU believing this win will benefit MSU beyond an extra tick in the win column. “You get games like this, I think it helps everybody,” Izzo said. “You know, it gives confidence to our guys that they can win not even shooting it well. It makes you realize how important our fans were. I thought they were phenomenal all night.”
