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EAST LANSING – As Montorie Foster flashed back to his first game as a Michigan State football player, a flood of memories returned. Along with a realization.
His first college experience came against Rutgers in a near-empty Spartan Stadium in 2020. His final home game will be Saturday against those same Scarlet Knights.
And the senior wide receiver does not want it to be his last game as a Spartan.
“We gotta go out with a bang,” Foster said Tuesday. “We want to make a bowl game, so it all comes down to us executing and doing our job at the end of the day.”
Michigan State’s Montorie Foster Jr., left, celebrates his touchdown with teammate Ashton Lepo during the first quarter in the game against Purdue on Friday, Nov. 22, 2024, at Spartan Stadium in East Lansing.
MSU (5-6, 3-5 Big Ten) enters Saturday’s regular-season finale against Rutgers (3:30 p.m./BTN) needing one win to reach a bowl game for the first time since 2021. Lose, and it all but certainly means the end for the seniors.
And Foster wants to ensure that his long and winding journey at MSU does not come full circle to that opening game of 2020 that began his career with a loss.
The Cleveland native and fellow fifth-year senior linebacker Cal Haladay, among others, arrived in 2020 as part of Mark Dantonio’s final recruiting class. They never got to play a game for the all-time winningest coach in program history, who retired suddenly in early February that year.
MSU hired Mel Tucker to replace Dantonio. Then COVID hit, shutting down spring practices and putting the season in jeopardy before the Spartans and others played in front of empty seats that fall.
The Spartans lost the 2020 opener to Rutgers, 38-27, and went 2-5 in Tucker’s debut season, missing the postseason for just the second time since 2006. They followed by pioneering portal-era roster…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/michigan-state-football-seniors-want-201212308.html
Author : Detroit Free Press
Publish date : 2024-11-26 20:12:00
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