The Michigan State Spartans concluded a very successful season just over a week ago. They rode a two-seed past the defending champions, the top overall seed, and a supremely talented Connecticut squad before falling to the obvious best team in the nation, the NCAA champion Tar Heels.
After a brief rest, the Spartans will eventually get back to work in East Lansing, and it won't be a rebuilding project. It will be a reloading one. They did lose Goran Suton, Travis Walton and Marquise Gray to graduation, but there's plenty left for Tom Izzo to make another Final Four run -- one that would be his sixth in the past 12 years.
DETROIT -- On command, when a local kid named Durrell Summers lifted off and nearly decapitated Stanley Robinson with a vicious dunk, a moving wave of green-swept humanity rose and rocked. Yes, your honor, this was a ridiculous homecourt advantage, a home-FIELD advantage of about 45,000 local crazies in a 72,500-seat football stadium, an advantage in ways freakishly unprecedented in the fiercely neutral extravaganza known as the Final Four.
Ford Field is guilty as charged.
And not a soul with a conscience should complain about it.
Here's a question to nibble on between games: Where would Michigan State have finished in the Big East?
Remember the Big East? The monster conference of all-time? The beast? The 16-team behemoth that grabbed three of the four No. 1 seeds in this tournament? That just 10 days ago had a chance to have four teams in the Final Four?
Well, the champions of the Big Ten have just taken out two of those No. 1 Big East seeds en route to the NCAA title game, in which they will play the winner of tonight's Villanova-North Carolina game Monday night. They've done it with grit and toughness and hard-core rebounding -- qualities we normally associate with the Big East but of which Michigan State has brought truckloads to this tournament.
From an individual standpoint, this season has been an absolute nightmare for Raymar Morgan. The Michigan State junior came into the season with a chance to get into lottery pick position, as long as his game kept progressing.
Instead, he regressed.
Every regular statistic across the board is down for Morgan this year. He averaged 14 points a game as a sophomore. Since January 17 this season, he's only gotten 5.5 a night. If you would have told Tom Izzo coming into the season he'd be heading to the Final Four with this low of an offensive output from Morgan, he would have thought you were nuts.
Tom Izzo has coached the Michigan State Spartans for the past 15 seasons. It took him two years to get the program where he wanted it. In those last 13 seasons, they have gone to the NCAA Tournament all 13 times, the Sweet 16 eight times, the Elite Eight six times and the Final Four five times. He's never coached a player for four years without taking him to a Final Four. That's as impressive a resume as anyone in college basketball has.
Yet, if you asked non-Big Ten fans to rank the four coaches in this year's Final Four, he'd likely come in third place -- behind Jim Calhoun and Roy Williams -- for most of them.
No, it was most certainly not pretty. Until the second half of the final minute, Michigan State never looked like it had this won. It had trouble all night finding somebody other than Goran Suton to give them any consistent scoring, and in the first half Kansas beat the Spartans at their own game -- pushing them around on the boards.
But while Kansas proved to be a more worthy defending champion than anybody imagined it'd be, Michigan State has more.
After a horrifying stretch where it dropped six of seven games, USC caught fire at the right time of the season. They won five straight games, including a Pac-10 tournament championship, to close out the regular season. They followed that up with a very decisive beatdown of Boston College (from the vaunted ACC) Friday in their NCAA Tournament opener.
Sunday, Michigan State finally put an end to the impressive Trojan streak. The teams traded leads for much of the very physical contest, but the depth of Michigan State propelled them to victory.
The NCAA Tournament is so close we can smell it, so FanHouse's college basketball experts took some time away from their busy schedules to talk about who will come out of each region First up, the Midwest Region.
Among the big story lines from Sunday's filling out of the NCAA basketball tournament field, discussions of conferences who are "overrated" and "underrated" dominated the discussion. Specifically, fans of so-called mid-major teams cried foul, and the masses proclaimed the selection committee was biased in favor of the Big Ten and Pac-10 conferences.
When Tom Izzo told CBS he didn't believe his Spartans were worthy of a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament, he apparently knew what he was talking about. Though they headed into the game with a realistic shot at a top seed, Michigan State was worked over, especially in the second half, by Ohio State in Indianapolis Saturday.
In fact, the Spartans looked bad enough that their previous hold on a No. 2 seed could now be in danger. They came into the game with a lofty RPI (fourth), but you could easily argue there are eight better teams right now.
The Michigan State Spartans concluded a very successful season just over a week ago. They rode a two-seed past the defending champions, the top overall seed, and a supremely talented Connecticut squad before falling to the obvious best team in the nation, the NCAA champion Tar Heels. 
Here's a question to nibble on between games: Where would 
From an individual standpoint, this season has been an absolute nightmare for 
No, it was most certainly not pretty. Until the second half of the final minute, Michigan State never looked like it had this won. It had trouble all night finding somebody other than 
After a horrifying stretch where it dropped six of seven games, USC caught fire at the right time of the season. They won five straight games, including a Pac-10 tournament championship, to close out the regular season. They followed that up with a very decisive beatdown of Boston College (from the vaunted ACC) Friday in their NCAA Tournament opener. 
When 
