It’s been a successful season so far for Michigan State basketball, starting the year 16-2 overall and 7-0 in the Big Ten with 13 regular-season games remaining. Plus, the Spartans just won their biggest game of the season, downing Illinois 80-78 in East Lansing.<\/p>\n
Experts lauded it as one of the best games of the season. Still, there was a lot of doubt left by officiating (even though it was even) because Illinois’ star player, Kasparas Jakucionis, fouled out in just nine minutes of action. Fans wanted to see what a full game of the star freshman would look like and luckily there will be another matchup in Champaign in February.<\/p>\n
Michigan State still made a statement with the win and distanced the Illini further away from the No. 1 spot in the Big Ten standings. Realistically, if Michigan State is going to win the regular-season conference title, it will need to go 10-3 or 9-4 from this point on.<\/p>\n
Weekly bracketology has been interesting to monitor this season just to see where the experts see Michigan State ending up. Early in the year, it was an 8\/9-seed range and now it’s much higher thanks to this team exceeding expectations.<\/p>\n
Here’s where the experts have Michigan State projected in the latest bracketology:<\/p>\n
ESPN (Joe Lunardi):<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0No. 3 seed in the East vs. Akron The experts are very high on the Spartans after beating Illinois and this is the first time since 2019-20 that they’ve been projected this high in the NCAA Tournament. That’s what happens when Michigan State basketball gets back to the basics.<\/p>\n Tom Izzo has a legitimate title contender on his hands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Where do the experts have Michigan State?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":20654,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187],"tags":[59,190,189,504],"class_list":["post-20653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-basketball","tag-featured","tag-michigan-state-basketball","tag-michigan-state-spartans","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20653","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nCBS Sports (Jerry Palm)<\/a>:\u00a0<\/strong>No. 2 seed in the Midwest vs. Quinnipiac
\nBleacher Report:<\/strong><\/a> No. 3 seed in the West vs. Cleveland State
\nAndy Katz:<\/strong><\/a> No. 3 seed in the Midwest vs. Norfolk State
\nTeam Rankings:<\/strong><\/a> No. 3 seed<\/p>\n