It's time to deviate from your regularly scheduled programming of bowl previews to talk a little bit about one of the most intriguing bowls on the slate this year, the Outback Bowl. We shot some questions to Jim of A Beautiful Day for Football to get the pulse of the Michigan State Spartans going into this game. Make sure you check out their site as Jim and Ty (from The Lions of Winter) do a solid job covering Sparty. Jim hasn't seen a lot of Georgia this year but he did sit down and watch a bit of the Georgia/Florida game from earlier this year and had some interesting observations. CFBZ: The recent bowl history for the Spartans is rough. Since beating Fresno State in 2001, they've dropped five straight. Is this something to be concerned about or does it serve as more of a motivator for this team?
Spartan BDF: Hm.... I'm actually not sure it's either. I am of the thread that Mark Dantonio has overachieved greatly in his first five years at MSU. The 2008 squad that played Georgia in the 2009 Citrus Bowl finished 9-3 in the regular season and I am convinced was among the weakest 9-3 teams that year and then went on to play the first pick in the draft. In 2007, the Spartans unexpectedly went 7-5 and then had to play Matt Ryan in the Champs Sports Bowl. In 2009, when MSU finished 6-6 and snuck into the Alamo Bowl, they spent the first five games of the season flipping back and forth between Nichol and Cousins at QB and that directly cost them at least one game and possibly another. So while they didn't overachieve that year, then Glenn Winston lead the Fight Part Two and got pretty much our whole WR corps suspended for the bowl game. MSU still managed to keep it close with TTU. In 2010, they were beneficiaries of a schedule that had them play their first seven games in Michigan.
