Spartans vs. Tigers with a Final Four on the line
Act three of Michigan State-Michigan won’t take place after all.
Instead, Michigan State will face Auburn on Sunday in Atlanta with a trip to the Final Four at stake. Auburn, of course, downed Michigan 78-65 after a big second half spurt in an otherwise close game. Michigan led 48-39 with 12:26 to go before a 20-2 Auburn run sunk the Wolverines over the next five minutes.
Johni Broome led Auburn with 22 points to keep the Tigers in it early. Denver Jones added 20 and Tahaad Pettiford scored another 20 off the bench and was a key in Auburn’s game-defining run.
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Auburn, the number one overall seed in the NCAA tournament, defeated Alabama State 83-63 in the opening round and then ninth seeded Creighton 82-70 to get to Atlanta.
The Tigers earned the top seed after spending much of the season ranked #1, or at least close to the top, of the polls. Auburn won the SEC regular season title with a 15-3 record and went 28-5 overall.
However, the Tigers were just 1-3 in their last four games prior to the NCAA tournament. They fell at Texas A&M and then returned home to close out the regular season with a 93-91 overtime loss at home to Alabama. Auburn advanced to the SEC tournament semifinals but fell 70-65 to Tennessee.
The one win in that stretch? It was 62-57 against Mississippi in the SEC quarterfinal. Earlier in the year, Auburn crushed Ole Miss 106-76 at home in late February and also beat them on the road by ten earlier in the season.
Other common opponents with MSU include Memphis and North Carolina in the Maui Invitational as well as Big Ten teams Ohio State and Purdue. Auburn went 4-0 in those games, winning each by double digits, including a 91-53 thrashing of the Buckeyes.
Broome leads Auburn with 18.4 points per game so his performance against Michigan was not surprising. Pettiford and Jones, however, were well above their season averages in the regional semifinal. Both of these guards average around 11 per game. After Broome, two more guards, Chad Baker-Mazara and Miles Kelly average around 12 per game.
Auburn is a solid three-point shooting team at close to 37%. Jones leads the team at nearly 42% from deep but Baker-Mazara, Kelly, and Pettiford all shoot it in the high 30’s from deep. Equally impressive stats include scoring nearly 84 points per game, good for ninth nationally coming into Friday’s game, and only turning it over 9 times per game.
Veteran coach Bruce Pearl is in his 11th season leading Auburn, where he has two SEC regular season championships to go with two conference tournament crowns. This is Pearl’s second-deepest tournament run with Auburn so far. He took the Tigers to the 2019 Final Four but, other than that, had not taken the Tigers past the second round in the NCAA tournament.
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Prior to Auburn, Pearl spent a couple of years away from the bench and on TV after five years at Tennessee where the Volunteers went to three Sweet 16’s and the 2010 Elite Eight, where the Volunteers fell to MSU.
Keys to the Game
Let’s try not turning the ball over on the first possession and falling behind by double digits in this one. The Spartans, obviously, have shown great resilience and fight numerous times this year. They also thrived through a brutal Big Ten schedule down the stretch. But they haven’t faced Auburn yet. Sure, Auburn may have tripped down the stretch a bit, but each of their three late season losses were against tournament teams, two of which are still dancing.
I wouldn’t put anything past these Spartans but wonder if digging a hole in this one would be too much to overcome. As good as this team has been, we haven’t seen 40 minutes of solid basketball yet in this tournament, or even in many of the games in the stretch run of the regular season. Tomorrow would be a great time to finally witness this.
Also, I’m not sure MSU can lose the rebounding battle to Auburn after Ole Miss had a surprising 33-29 advantage on the boards yesterday. It seemed like that should have been an area where the Spartans had a decided advantage. Let’s not do that again tomorrow.
Finally, it will be interesting to see how MSU defends Broome and Auburn. Do they try to slow everyone else down and just try to hold their own against Broome? This seems to be what happened against Michigan and Vladislav Goldin this year. Tom Izzo has also used that strategy against Zach Edey and Purdue in the past.
But there have also been games where MSU has really limited the opposing team’s best player – see the regular season game against Wisconsin where John Tonje had just 11 points on 3-13 shooting. They also held Oregon’s Jackson Shelstad to just eight points in the Big Ten tournament quarterfinal win.
Predictions
Mike: an instant classic, similar to the 2019 regional final against Duke. 76-74 MSU.
Steve: This is a lot of my own Spartan basketball superstitions when this far in the tourney, obviously hoping I’m very wrong, but: 70-63 Auburn.
O: 73-71 MSU. Not predicting a high scorer this time. I am expecting great defense on both sides of the ball.
What do you think, TOC? Will Vegas get the spread correct or can Michigan State (-5.5) pull off the win as underdog ? What are your keys to the game and predictions?