The Michigan State hockey team is riding high as it heads into its bye week. The Spartans just swept the No. 11 Michigan Wolverines this past weekend, beating them 5-1 in Ann Arbor<\/a> and then 3-2 in the Duel in the D<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the latest college hockey rankings, the Spartans jumped all the way up to No. 6 in the country. Michigan State is also the second-highest-ranked Big Ten team, behind only No. 4 Wisconsin.<\/p>\n Speaking of the Badgers, things are really starting to heat up in the race for the Big Ten championship and it appears to be coming down to the final weekend.<\/p>\n With three weekends remaining in the regular season, the Spartans hold a narrow five point lead atop the conference standings. Wisconsin is the only team in striking range, and they likely will catch up this weekend.<\/p>\n Michigan State has the weekend off while Wisconsin plays last place Ohio State twice. With two wins, the Badgers will take a one point lead over MSU. But that isn\u2019t the end of the world for Michigan State. The Spartans then take on Ohio State the following weekend of Feb. 23-24 in their last home series of the season. They likely will get two more wins themselves and will be at worst just one point behind Wisconsin.<\/p>\n This is when the fun really starts. The last regular season weekend series will see MSU travel to Wisconsin. Both teams likely will have a chance to win the regular season title this final weekend, so these will be two games you won\u2019t want to miss.<\/p>\n The Spartans have never won the Big Ten since the conference created a hockey league about a decade ago. This is their now best shot to do so which would earn them the No. 1 seed in the Big Ten Tournament and a first-round bye.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three weeks left in the regular season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":14178,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[234,189,504],"class_list":["post-14154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-more-sports","tag-michigan-state-hockey","tag-michigan-state-spartans","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14154\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Big Ten championship update<\/h3>\n