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EAST LANSING - The pressure was all on the Spartans, a truckload of it considering what was on the line, who they were playing and who was sitting three rows behind their bench - past champions and Michigan killers extraordinaire Mateen Cleaves and Charlie Bell.
It never showed. Focused and aggressive from the start, the Spartans dumped all their angst on the heads of the rival Wolverines and walked out of Breslin Center on Sunday with a share of their second straight Big Ten championship.
"I could have cut (the pressure), wherever I was, with a knife," MSU coach Tom Izzo said of the build-up to Sunday's game. "Whether it was my house or my car or my office. But I didn't sense my team felt that, which was good. I wanted so bad to win another championship and kind of prove that we could fight through some adversity, and we did."
Then they cut the nets, raised a banner to the rafters and honored outgoing seniors Raymar Morgan, Isaiah Dahlman and walk-on Jon Crandell.
The 64-48 victory was a defensive gem, a laugher by halftime and an ideal way to send off Morgan - whose day included a season-high 22 points, 10 rebounds, steals, dunks, smiles, snarls, chest bumps, the traditional floor kiss and a fast-break lob to Dahlman for a crowd-pleasing layup.
It wasn't quite the Michigan demolition of 10 years ago, when Cleaves had 20 assists, Bell scored 31 points and the Spartans clinched a share of a title by a final of 114-63.
It was lopsided enough, though - a 29-point game with 14 minutes left before U-M chipped away for a more respectable final.
"It was over real early," said U-M coach John Beilein, who dropped to 0-4 against MSU in the Spartans' 18th win in the past 21 games in the series overall and 11th straight at Breslin.
No. 11 MSU (24-7 overall, 14-4 Big Ten) finishes in a three-way tie for the championship with Purdue and Ohio State. It is Izzo's sixth championship in 15 seasons as head coach - making him the sixth Big Ten coach to win six or more - and the school's 12th.
"It'll probably go down as the rewarding-est of the six championships, just because of all the things we battled through this year," Izzo said. "Every year has its own group of issues and good things and bad things, but this year, we just kind of kept punching forward and I give my assistants a lot of credit for that. There's a couple guys there that probably deserve head jobs. And I give my team credit."
The Spartans will be the No. 3 seed in the upcoming Big Ten Tournament in Indianapolis. MSU will play about 9 p.m. Friday at Conseco Fieldhouse against the winner of Thursday's game between No. 6 seed Minnesota and No. 11 seed Penn State.
Sunday's clincher came three days after the Spartans nearly blew the opportunity in a heart-stopping 67-65 win over Penn State. After that game, Izzo angrily promised the Spartans would respond "the right way" after a "fun" couple days of practice.
So how fun were those practices?
"It was a lot of fun, man," Morgan said, laughing. "It was cool, though. Coach just wants us to play hard, man, and we came back and responded and had some great practices. We were just ready to play."
Whatever exactly took place on Friday and Saturday, the Spartans were ready Sunday. A 14-1 first-half run, with all 14 points from Morgan and Delvon Roe (10 points), opened things up for good.
It took U-M (14-16, 7-11) nearly 14 minutes to reach 10 points and 26 minutes to reach 20 as MSU "checked as well as we've checked all year," Izzo said.
U-M stars Manny Harris and DeShawn Sims came in averaging 35 points combined but managed just 13. Harris, draped by MSU's Chris Allen, had a season-low four on 1 of 10 shooting, and Sims had nine.
Kalin Lucas was MSU's third double-figures scorer with 10. He forfeited a breakaway layup in the second half and instead threw the ball off the glass for Dahlman, who dunked it for his third and fourth points.
Dahlman, Morgan and Crandell all kissed the block "S" at center court upon leaving the game, a tradition started by Shawn Respert in 1995 and revived by Cleaves in 2000.
They got their send-off, the Spartans got their championship and Izzo got a look at how he'd like this team to play for the rest of the month.
"Right now we're better than I give us credit for," he said. "We're not as good as I think we can be. ... Are we gonna vault forward or are we gonna sink back?"
