MSU basketball players needed frank talk among themselves after last weekend's 53-46 home loss to Illinois, their sixth defeat in 10 games. The Spartans' scoring was The Spartans' 46 points were a season low.
Free Press sportswriter Joe Rexrode, who spoke Tuesday with four teammates, reconstructs Saturday's sit-down:
"We didn’t tell Coach to get out but he kind of got the hint and he was like ‘All right, I’m leaving,’ and everybody else [on staff] came with him,” sophomore center Matt Costello said. . . .
“We were all confused. We’d had three good, hard practices in a row and then we came to the game and just laid an egg. And we know it’s down to crunch time right now. It’s down to winning time and we haven’t done that recently.
"So we just hashed it out -- everybody’s concerns, everybody’s frustrations, and we got most of the stuff figured out.”
That F-word (frustrations) also comes from senior Adreian Payne, a forward:
“We got to . . . get our frustrations out . . . and just try to get everything out so we can get on one page.”
Branden Dawson, a junior forward, tells the paper:
"Guys started blaming each other and this and that. We just can’t do that. . . . We just told each other we need to pick it up.”
As for the coach, Rexrode pointedly notes that Tom izzo derides players-only troubleshooting or pep talks as "the biggest joke in athletics."
