Lots of people on this board are in favor of playing a weaker schedule in what sounds like hopes of sustained mediocrity. I guess I'm Don Quixote on this one, but I want to fight for the belt every year because I think we might have that Rocky moment one of these days.
I swear one day some of you will make the argument to just go ahead and move on to the Sun Belt so we can win 10 every year and compete for titles.
You aren’t alone. Outside of the constant rescheduling and cancellation fiascos which were mostly unavoidable in the current climate, this season has been awesome from a competition standpoint.
I also don’t get why people think we’d be locked into a max of 3 or 4 wins against a 10 game SEC schedule. With no COVID, a competent 2nd or 3rd year coach and a roster that had fully adjusted and bought into the system, we’d be 5-5 or 6-4 at worst this season, even without upgrading the talent.
No way we’d have lost to all of UK, Arkansas, or OM, and we might have had enough to beat UGA too.
The bottom line from a pragmatic point of view is we aren’t ever winning the national title in football, probably aren’t even winning the West again in the next several decades, and the bowl games outside of CFP and NY6 are all redundant and stupid with too many of them existing to make any of them prestigious. And they offer nothing more than just an extra bunch of games to appease fans (although the added practice time is important).
So, about the only real satisfaction MSU fans will get a chance from getting from football (besides winning the Egg Bowl) is the occasional win over a big name team. So the best thing even for MSU is to maximize the chances of that happening. Do that and reform the bowl system to allow a lower win threshold, and almost everybody is happy. People will forget about the bump from “plastic wins” when nobody else has them either.