[stupac2]

I wasn't sure about a win given the quality of MSU two years ago and my expectation that they hadn't fallen off given their victories over tOSU and Iowa.  But I see now how massively the eye test can fail.  Also, I wasn't the only one worried about Iowa--far more knowledgeable people than I were worried about the game.  Glad to see the team attacked the game early and often.

Well, sure, there's always some standard deviation about the mean. If Iowa had played out of their minds and we had a bunch of mistakes, then we could lose. It's like the Oregon, if you play that game 10 times I think Stanford wins 7 of the matchups, but we just happened to get the one where we had a bunch of unforced errors, Oregon played pretty well, and we lost. That can happen pretty much any time against team (does anyone think 2007 Stanford wins that game against USC more than 1/10 times it's played?), and so there's always some reason to worry about a game. But there's a big difference between worrying about a game when we're heavy favorites and worrying about a game when it's a tossup.

[stupac2]

I wasn't sure about a win given the quality of MSU two years ago and my expectation that they hadn't fallen off given their victories over tOSU and Iowa.  But I see now how massively the eye test can fail.  Also, I wasn't the only one worried about Iowa--far more knowledgeable people than I were worried about the game.  Glad to see the team attacked the game early and often.

Well, sure, there's always some standard deviation about the mean. If Iowa had played out of their minds and we had a bunch of mistakes, then we could lose. It's like the Oregon, if you play that game 10 times I think Stanford wins 7 of the matchups, but we just happened to get the one where we had a bunch of unforced errors, Oregon played pretty well, and we lost. That can happen pretty much any time against team (does anyone think 2007 Stanford wins that game against USC more than 1/10 times it's played?), and so there's always some reason to worry about a game. But there's a big difference between worrying about a game when we're heavy favorites and worrying about a game when it's a tossup.