Three phases to this one:

1) Defensive dominance in the first 23 minutes leads to a 46-24 lead for MSU, and the only question appeared to be how long before the Human Victory Cigars (Anthony Ianni and the rest of the walk-on brigade) would make their appearance.

2) Absolute panic from fans as Penn State went on a 23-6 run to cut that seemingly insurmountable lead to just five with 9:18 to go.

3) MSU answers with a 23-5 run of its own (featuring three and-ones and a pair of three-pointers) to put it back out of reach with three minutes to go.

The result? Possibly the most nerve-wracking 20-point win ever.

The four-factors graph:

As usual, rebounding was a huge advantage, getting nearly half of our own misses back while holding Penn State under 20%. The other key factor: Penn State fouled. A lot. We took 34 shots from the charity stripe, our highest number in conference play on the year. (Free throw shooting left a little to be desired, however - only 23 of those went in.)

Player notes:

• Draymond Green was up to his usual stat-sheet-stuffing ways: 23 points, 12 rebounds, 5 assists, and a steal. One sour note: 5 missed free throws (9-14), including two when the game was at its closest in the second half.
• Branden Dawson is on a roll (earning a shout-out from CBSSports.com as a potential Freshman of the Year dark-horse): 12 points, 7 boards, 3 steals, 2 blocks.
• Adreian Payne (12 points, 5 boards, 2 steals) and Keith Appling (10-4-7 with a steal as well) also got to double figures.
• Derrick Nix was limited to just two points and had two turnovers as well. He had more difficulty than usual dealing with double-teams inside, particularly during Penn State's run.
  
• Two near-trillions (for those unfamiliar with the concept, it's an appearance in which you record absolutely no stats except for minutes, so the box score has one or two minutes followed by a bunch of zeros - Mark Titus, former walk-on for Ohio State and now writer at Grantland (warning: the article linked contains mention of the game that absolutely did not take place last Tuesday) may have coined the term (edit: as MSUDersh points out in the comments, the term goes back quite a bit further) popularized the term among college basketball bloggers, although it was apparently in use in the NBA well before): Ianni went two minutes recording only a turnover, and Brandan Kearney nearly pulled an incredibly rare eight-trillion: 8 minutes, 1 foul, nothing else.
  

Next up: a trip to Ohio State (Saturday at 6:00 ET). Win that and we set up a likely winner-take-all (or at least "one team can win outright, the other can force a tie") finale three weeks later (not to mention establishing further separation from Wisconsin and Michigan); lose and we will have to win out and hope for a little help.

Coming off an impressive win against Michigan, MSU will now face Tim Frazier Penn State. I don't really think this is a trap game -- the Nittany Lions' best true road win is against Boston College (don't be fooled by the name, they're #254 in KenPom), and are one of the worst shooting teams in the nation. If MSU can deny clear paths to the basket, this should be an easy win; the bookies think so too as the line for this game is MSU -14.5

This is the game thread. Same rules as always: No slurs, no links to illegal game streams, and be cool to one another. Enjoy the game everyone.

GO GREEN, GO WHITE, BEAT PENN STATE.

Mr. Rexrode was kind enough to mention us on his blog today. The blurb:

Before going any further, I'd like to appease the TPS Police before they come after me (no, I'm not talking TPS Reports, I'm talking tempo-free stats). I enjoy them, believe in them, still reluctant to use them in stories and spend several grafs explaining them. Here's a glance at them. And as I've said to the folks at TOC and elsewhere, when Izzo stops citing dinosaur stats such as rebounding margin and plain old FG percentage, I'll consider doing the same.

Rexrode is apparently a closeted tempo-free fan. I agree with him that most tempo-free numbers are more complex than what the median college sports fan is looking for. Explaining points per possession or effective field goal percentage in a newspaper column probably doesn't work all that well.

But I do think there's some middle ground for using tempo-free concepts to enhance the experience of the great unwashed masses without unduly confusing them. The two areas that rank highest on my wish list:

• Report two-point shooting separately. Pointing out that Michigan State made 22 of 36 attempts inside the arc on Sunday does a much better job of communicating how well they were able to create good shots close to the rim than saying they shot 52.2% from the field but only 20.0% on three-pointers does. And the former is actually a lot easier to wrap your head around numerically.
  
• Report offensive and defensive rebounding separately. Sunday's game isn't a good example here, since MSU dominated the boards on both ends, but often times a team is very good on the glass on one end of the court but not the other in a given game (offensive and defensive rebounding are distinct skills). Giving specific numbers on one end (e.g., MSU grabbed 28 of 31 defensive rebounding chances) paints a much clearer picture than rebounding margin does.

Rexrode obviously doesn't need any journalism advice from me, a purportedly-retired blogger. (His good deed is not going unpunished, as I pick on him regarding this general topic for the second time in two months.) But I spend a lot of time thinking about the most effective way to present data to people. And I think there's room for improved reporting of basketball statistics that falls well short of dumping PORPAG figures on people. (Another sign of progress and/or shark-jumping: Dick Vitale plugged John Gasaway during the Kentucky-Florida game tonight.)

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Ask any fan of college basketball what to expect from a Tom Izzo team, and the first thing you'll hear is along the lines of "an almost fanatical devotion to rebounding". Rarely has that been better illustrated than Sunday's game.

Four factors:

Michigan posted a respectable eFG% and won the turnover battle decisively. Free throws made up some of the gap, but the key was clearly the battle on the glass. The numbers are incredible: 12 of 25 possible offensive rebounds, 28 of 31 (!) defensive rebounds. Draymond Green, as you might have heard, had a big influence on this: he had 16 rebounds total (the same number as Michigan's entire team), 14 on defense. His knee didn't appear to be bothering him at all in his 38 minutes, and Michigan had absolutely no answer on the glass. (Just how ridiculous was his rebounding? He got to nearly half - 47.5% - of available defensive rebounds while on the floor. I don't think that's a record, but it's got to be up there.)

Derrick Nix added six more boards, Branden Dawson and Brandon Wood four each, Austin Thornton and Adreian Payne three each. Evan Smotrycz was the only Michigan player to manage even four rebounds.

On the season, MSU now ranks 14th in offensive rebounding at 39.6%, 13th in defensive rebounding at 73.6%. That's just shy of the 2009 team's finishing ranks of 6th and 11th.

The other key to this game: defending Trey Burke and keeping him from getting drives which would either lead to a lay-up or a kick out to an open shooter. While there were a few easy lay-ups, for the vast majority of the game Michigan had to resort to bombing away with long, contested jumpers. Combine that with allowing no second chances and getting back nearly half of your own misses, and only an astronomical disadvantage in turnovers could have derailed the game.

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Full recap will be coming later. For now:

• It's the end of Michigan's short-lived winning streak over us. Michigan never got closer than eight in the second half; I wouldn't necessarily call it a comfortable win, but at no time in the second half was there cause for real panic.
  
• Knee injury? What knee injury? Draymond Green had had a lot of quiet games against Michigan before today; not anymore. He led all scorers (tied with Zack Novak) with 14 and outrebounded Michigan. That's not a typo. Green had 16 rebounds; the entire Michigan team had 15.
• Rebounding as a whole: going from the ESPN box score, we got 50% of possible offensive rebounds; Michigan got 10%.
• Held Michigan under 0.9 points per possession. Keith Appling in particular was making great defensive plays all afternoon, but the team as a whole deserves a lot of credit for contesting almost every shot. A few layups off of miscommunication, but on the whole Michigan spent the day mostly chucking up prayers and not having them answered.
• Still within a game of Ohio State for the conference lead, and we'll have two opportunities to take them down. An outright conference title remains within our own control; split the OSU games and we need a little help to share the title (the most likely help being their return trip to Michigan).

Celebrate here.

First things first -- this is the preview/game thread. Same rules as always: No slurs, no links to illegal game threads, and be cool to one another.

The question -- how does one properly preview a rematch of a game that happened less than three weeks ago? There are a few steps:

STEP 1 -- REVIEW WHAT THE OPPONENT HAS DONE SINCE THE FIRST MEETING

Michigan has played four games since beating MSU 61-60 in Ann Arbor, going 2-2. They lost to Arkansas 66-64, beat Purdue in West Lafayette 66-64, lost to Ohio State on the road 64-49, and beat Indiana at home 68-56. The Wolverines haven't strayed far from a primarily six-man lineup: Tim Hardaway Jr., Trey Burke, Zack Novak, and Stu Douglass all average at least 30 minutes a game, Jordan Morgan averages somewhere in the high twenties depending on his foul situation, and Evan Smotrycz's minutes are somewhere in the teens.

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As we have passed the halfway point of conference play, it's time to revisit the title race. Projections after the first quarter of conference play can be found here. As a reminder, these are based on my modified Bradley-Terry rating systems; the full ratings can be found here.

As before, title and first-round bye chances are based on 100,000 simulations - there are way too many combinations to do exhaustive computation at this point.

Basic (W-L only) Method

Ohio State has re-emerged as the favorite, but even they are expected to lose another 3 or 4 games - road trips to all three of the other major contenders await. Below the top four is a respectable tier of three likely tournament teams (Purdue is the only one that has any real reason for concern at the moment, due to a couple of awful losses). Minnesota and Northwestern are both in the hunt for an NCAA bid as well, although each will likely have to get to 8-10 in conference at minimum. Iowa is an extreme longshot due to an abominable non-conference record.

Win distribution chart (click for bigger):

This shows Ohio State slightly out in front, Wisconsin not far behind, and MSU and Michigan almost completely indistinguishable. Purdue, Indiana, and Illinois have near-identical win distributions as well, though not quite as nearly identical as MSU and Michigan.

Margin-aware system after the jump.

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Always focus on the bright side of life, right? Coming out of Tuesday night's stinktacular in Champaign, that's approach to life requires a pretty narrow focus. The only glimmer of brightness for Michigan State against Illinois was Branden Dawson (on offense, at least--we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the game was actually MSU's best defensive performance of the Big Ten season to date, by a decent margin).

Dawson was the only Spartan to make more than 33% of his field goal attempts (not even a 1-for-2 to be found in the box score). He just cleared that bar, making 4 of 11 attempts from the floor. Add in 4 points at the free throw line, and Dawson posted a line of 12 points, 13 rebounds (7 of them on offense), and just 1 turnover.

Over the last three games, Dawson is averaging 14.0 points per game on 60.7% field goal shooting. Those performances came following a two-game stretch--the losses at Northwestern and Michigan--in which Tom Izzo only put Dawson on the floor for a combined 29 minutes. He's played nearly that number in each of the last two games (27 and 28).

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