Tag: Michigan State Spartans football

The USC Trojans and Michigan State Spartans should have a longer and fuller football history, but they don’t.

USC won’t play Michigan State on the gridiron until 2025. The series is tied at 4-4 all-time. The last meeting between these two teams was back in the 1990 Sun Bowl with the Spartans winning by one point in El Paso.

It is surprising to realize these teams haven’t met in 33 years, and never did meet before 1963.

Paul Myerberg of USA TODAY Sports offers this note about the series:

“Not counting Maryland, the Spartans are the only Big Ten team with a non-losing record against the Trojans. The four wins include the 1988 Rose Bowl and a 17-7 win on Oct. 3, 1964, against the then-No. 2 ranked Trojans.”

About that 1964 game: Michigan State wasn’t an especially strong team that year, and neither were the Trojans, who lost two of their next four games after that loss to MSU. They finished 7-3, a very ordinary and unexceptional season by Trojan standards, despite their historic upset of No. 1 Notre Dame in the season finale.

Michigan State-USC in football is a series of missed connections. USC won the national title in 1962. Michigan State finished in the top two of the polls in 1965 and 1966, then struggled in 1967. Yet, the two teams met in 1963 and 1964, when neither side was particularly strong. They met in 1967 one year after Duffy Daugherty produced his best team ever in East Lansing.

USC had great teams in the early and late 1930s under program patriarch Howard Jones. Michigan State fielded great teams in the mid-1930s, from 1934-1937, when USC was not at its peak.

USC made several Rose Bowls in the mid-1940s under Jeff Cravath, but Michigan State’s best four-year run as a program came from 1950-1953 under Biggie Munn, Daugherty’s predecessor as MSU head coach.

Even when the two programs were generally good, something happened to take away a little bit of the luster of the occasion. Michigan State’s 1978 team was ineligible for the Rose Bowl, so it didn’t earn a rematch of a regular season loss to USC that season. In the 1987 season, the two teams met in the Rose Bowl at long last, but USC was not uniquely powerful that year. The Pac-10 had a down year and the Trojans were the best of the lot.

USC was tremendous, as we all know, during the Pete Carroll era in the 2000s. When Carroll left, Michigan State became great under Mark Dantonio in the 2010s. These schools simply haven’t been able to be great at the same time, and meet in a bowl game under such circumstances.

We will see how the histories of these programs change in the Big Ten.

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