By Ryan Burnett

 

• What a difference a month makes. Four weeks ago the Spartans women’s basketball team got waxed by the conference-leading Buckeyes. In that game the Spartans turned the ball over 24 times and couldn’t seem to find an answer for the league’s best pressure D. But on Friday, without their starting PG Brittany Thomas, it was the Spartans that managed wreak havoc on defense and manage an upset of the nation’s 14th-ranked team. Looks like there might be more than one quality team in the league after all.  
  

  Sophomore G Chris Allen and the Spartans prepare for Rivalry Week.

 

• Mark Dantonio might have been out-recruited to by Rich-Rod as far as Rivals and Scouts Inc. are concerned, but Dantonio can hang his hat on one fact: He absolutely routed Rich-Rod in the race for securing home-grown talent. Seriously, the Spartans landed seven Great Lakes State’s top ten highest rated recruits. The Wolverines? Two. Fans of Rich-Rod will tell you that as long as he’s landing talent it shouldn’t matter where they come from. But I believe that the reason Michigan was able to land a class full of Floridians is that the Michigan well had been poisoned. All these kids heard all season long in Michigan was blanket coverage of just how much Michigan sucked and analysis of everyone of Rich-Rod’s curious coaching decisions. In Florida, not so much. So kudos to Rich-Rod for finding a “work-around”, but lets see how it plays out in the long run.

 

• This week is Rivalry Week on ESPN and the Spartans will travel to Ann Arbor to lace-up against the Wolverines. The matchup would have been less interesting a week ago, but Big Blue seems to have gotten back on track with wins against Penn State and a pretty damn spirited road effort against the number one team in the land, UConn. I actually like Mee-chigan in this one, but our in-house hoops analyst (Jackson) likes MSU.