It wasn’t enough for the Nebraska football team to go into East Lansing and beat Michigan State 31-13. Earlier this week, several Husker media members went out of their way to marvel at the lack of enthusiasm around the Spartans, despite the new head coach, Pat Fitzgerald.
Back in Lincoln after their own trip to East Lansing, local radio hosts Steve Sipple, Bill Busch, and Jake Sorensen on 93.7 The Ticket discussed the crowd, or lack thereof, of Michigan State fans who attended Saturday afternoon’s game. Sipple, in particular, was unimpressed by the support for the program.
“The lack of enthusiasm and fan base for the Big Ten opener,” Sipple, who is also the Nebraska beat writer for Rivals, said. “I mean, they're not enthused. Obviously, there's not a lot of excitement about the Fitzgerald tenure. There's not. There's just flat not. There's no way you could sell that to me. Everything from, like, the scene in Lansing that morning, dead, going to the game. I mean, at the start of the game, it was okay. But then the second half, God …”
Sipple’s claims about a lack of excitement around the program are especially interesting because the narrative coming out of Michigan State is the exact opposite. There’s been plenty of talk that the new coach has brought new life to the fanbase.
Spartan Avenue expert Connor Muldowney said as much: "Second-half attendance aside, the fanbase is fired up about Pat Fitzgerald. While the student section likes to leave at half for the bar scene almost every week, the fanbase overall is excited for what the future brings under Fitzgerald and there’s a buzz in East Lansing again that’s been missing since 2021. Don’t let the Nebraska game fool you, Michigan State fans are happy with the coach they have."
Nebraska radio hosts call out Michigan State attendance and claims of piped-in crowd noise
What’s clear, at least to Sipple and other media members based on their experience on Saturday, is that if there is new excitement, it certainly didn’t show up against Nebraska.
Busch added that it looked like the Spartan fans were outnumbered by Husker Nation. To his credit, pictures of the fanbase during the game did indeed show quite a bit of red mixed in with the green in the stands. In places, sections looked completely red. The hosts also believed the noise after a play showed that Nebraska fans were the majority.
Sipple even went so far as to say another member of the Nebraska media told him Michigan State was piping in crowd noise. Sean Callahan, another beat writer from Rivals, reportedly told Sipple he could hear the noise coming from the speakers.
Muldowney had a rather funny rebuttal to that claim as well: "Oh, and they definitely don’t pipe in crowd noice. The speakers aren’t good enough for that."
Sorensen, who watched from home rather than travel to East Lansing, chimed in that on television, it hardly looked or sounded like a Husker road game: “On the broadcast, it appeared that nobody was there. It was dead. Like any sort of big play, it was Nebraska. You could hear the crowd going loud. But Michigan State, there was nothing ever.”
Whether the hosts are right about the lack of enthusiasm from Michigan State fans, it’s clear Nebraska media members were unimpressed by what they saw, heard, and felt. All of that adds quite the insult to injury as Pat Fitzgerald tries to rebuild a once-proud program.
Add us as a preferred source on Google