Couch: 3 quick takes on MSU basketball heading to the Superior Dome and Spain and MSU football's special strength
1. The Superior Dome in Marquette is another memorable setting for MSU basketball
EAST LANSING – Michigan State’s basketball program has played in some spectacular and cool places over the years — two aircraft carriers in San Diego, an aircraft hanger in Germany, a small gym in Maui, a historic ice arena in Boston, football domes in Final Fours.
The Superior Dome in Marquette will be right up there. Maybe not quite the sun setting over USS Carl Vinson, but pretty dang awesome. The Superior Dome, where Northern Michigan University plays its home football games, is known as the largest wooden dome in the world. It’s a sweet building, on the shores of Lake Superior, walking distance from a beach and a working ore dock and not that far from the trailer that Tom Izzo once shared with Steve Mariucci when they were in college at NMU.
MSU will play Division-II Northern Michigan in an exhibition at 1 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 13, during MSU football’s first bye week, the school announced Thursday. The Spartans haven’t played at NMU since Dec. 16, 1974, when sophomore Tom Izzo went scoreless for the Wildcats. MSU has never played at the Superior Dome, which was built in 1991 and seats around 8,000 for football games. It’ll have to be adapted for this basketball game and could actually seat more.
Izzo has wanted to do this for a while and, earlier this summer, wasn’t sure if it would happen this year, but had it on his radar.
If you get the chance, it’s worth the trip. I’m biased because my dream is to buy the local newspaper there, The Mining Journal, and blissfully run it into the ground, before retiring in a house with a back yard that overlooks Lake Superior. But even if you have different dreams, the almond poppyseed muffins at Babycakes downtown are alone worth the drive.
2. An ideal year for MSU’s basketball team to take a foreign trip
Madrid is no Marquette, but it’ll do as the backdrop for MSU’s first of three games in Spain later this month. MSU plays in Madrid on Aug. 15, Valencia on Aug. 18 and Barcelona on Aug. 20.
It’s no hot take to say this appears to be the ideal group to take on a late-summer foreign trip. There’s so much potential on this roster, but also so much to prove, both with new players and players in new roles and needed development from certain guys.
“All of a sudden, Jaden (Akins) has got to be our leading scorer. We've got to do a better job getting the ball inside. We've got to do a better job getting fouled,” Izzo said this week. “We have some new guys, looking at the freshmen and two transfers. So all in all, I think it was the right time to go. I almost went last year, but a veteran team, I didn't feel the same way.”
A foreign trip wouldn’t have changed last season’s team's trajectory. This season, though, with Akins in a more prominent role, with Jeremy Fears coming back from surgery after a gunshot and hoping to start at point guard, with transfer Frankie Fidler on the wing, with Xavier Booker counted on to be a factor as a 4-man, with a center position that still has a lot of the questions it did a year ago, with new leaders and with a number of other players figuring out their roles …
Being thrown into some competitive situations against overseas professionals is a great way for this group to learn about itself, to figure out what needs work, who can be counted on right now and who plays well together — and then take that information back to the lab in September.
Izzo said he’ll start different lineups, perhaps every half of every game. This is not about winning and losing. It’s about getting a read on things.
“I want to see who plays well, too,” Izzo said. “I want to get something out of this trip. It's not just to go. It’s not just for the enjoyment. It’s not for the wins and losses. It's to see who plays well together, who plays under some stressful situations, all that kind of stuff.”
This is a big year for MSU’s program — perhaps not with the preseason hype of a year ago, but with plenty of hope, a high ceiling and the reality that it’s hard to see how MSU’s team a year from now (minus Akins, Fidler and likely Booker) is better than this one.
MORE:Haslett's Blake Lampman hoped to one day be on Tom Izzo's staff at MSU. Well, that happened quickly.
3. On an MSU football team with thin margins, one advantage
When MSU was picked to finish 16th in the 18-team Big Ten this year by my media brethren, there were a couple reasons to think that such analysis was likely off base. One, most reporters in other markets can’t name three MSU football players right now. Not in July, when they come out of the lake to check their email and realize their ballot is due. I can’t name three guys on Purdue or Illinois’ roster today, so how the heck do I know how they’re going to finish. With a few exceptions, the same goes for folks evaluating MSU.
Secondly, if MSU is somewhere in a large third tier of Big Ten football this season, the Spartans have one potential edge that could separate them — the kicking game. Both redshirt sophomore punter Ryan Eckley and sixth-year kicker punter Jonathan Kim, a former transfer from North Carolina, are back. On a team that’ll probably need every field goal and ounce of field position, having Eckley, a second-team All-Big Ten selection last season, and Kim, an honorable mention all-league pick, back in the fold could be the difference in several games.
Eckley, the latest in a line of superb Spartan punters, averaged 46.8 yards per kick last season, his first on scholarship and in the starting role — and on a team that punted a lot. A Tampa, Florida-area kid, Eckley has designs on an NFL career. He chose MSU understanding that the NFL weighs heavily punters that can deal with cold weather, when the ball feels like “a rock,” as he said Thursday. Punters don’t tend to leave school early — the NFL is brutally competitive at the position — so MSU could be set again at the position for another three seasons.
Kim, who didn’t miss inside 45 yards last season and made four field goals of 50 yards or more, gives the Spartans a chance to separate themselves at a position a lot of college programs struggle to find consistency.
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: MSU basketball heads to Spain, U.P.'s Superior Dome: 3 quick takes
