Opinion: Champions Classic is for elite teams. Why are Spartans here?

ATLANTA — With each missed layup, clanked three and clumsy pass out of bounds, you could imagine Danny Hurley somewhere in Connecticut with steam coming out of his nostrils watching Tuesday’s game here between No. 1 Kansas and Michigan State while doing a full Seinfeld-meets-George-Carlin routine. 

“Champions Classic? How the (expletive) do you call that a Classic? And last I checked, aren’t we the (expletive expletive) champions?‘

To be perfectly clear, Hurley did not say this. For all we know he wasn’t even watching. But if Hurley was looking for a little early-season motivation, he could have plausibly found it here, where the supposed No. 1 team in the country slogged through a 77-69 victory over a Michigan State team that isn’t going to be the champion of anything anytime soon.

In fact, given that Tom Izzo’s one and only national title will be a quarter-century old when the Final Four comes around again this year, maybe it’s time to find a new team for this annual event that — if we take words literally — should feature teams that actually win championships. 

Maybe, you know, like the team that has won five NCAA titles since Izzo’s crowning achievement 25 years ago. 

Seriously, why is Michigan State still invited to take part in this? If the theory behind the Champions Classic is to juice interest in college basketball by getting four bluebloods in the same building for an early-season ESPN showcase, you should put the best programs in it. 

Sorry, but Michigan State no longer qualifies.  

For Izzo, who turns 70 in January, this has been a decade of decline. Oh, he’s as good as ever when he gets cranky about the culture around college athletics these days and can tee off to reporters about how things aren’t as good (for him, anyway) as they used to be.

But on the court? Well, the Spartans don’t breathe that air anymore. They’re still the hard-nosed, lunchbucket team that guards and plays physical and mucks things up a bit for more talented opponents. 

They’re just a lesser version of that now, being led by Frankie Fidler, a transfer from Omaha, and Jaxon Kohler, a junior who averaged 2.0 points per game last season.

And when you put that up against Kansas? Well, it wasn’t much to look at if we’re being honest. 

“Offensively, we both sucked,” Izzo said.

Give Izzo some credit for keeping the game competitive deep into the second half despite his team making 3-of-24 from the three-point line and shooting 35 percent overall. 

But this isn’t the ‘Lose Close and Make It Ugly Classic.’ This is supposed to be for the elite of the elite. The only thing Michigan State was elite at on Tuesday was making 18,000 pairs of eyes bleed.  

“You’ve got to grind games out like this, especially against teams like Michigan State,’ Kansas guard Dajuan Harris Jr. said.

Talk about damning with faint praise. And it was entirely predictable. This is who Michigan State is now in the current decade: Under-skilled, uninspiring and more likely to be sweating the NCAA Tournament bubble than cutting down nets. There’s nothing wrong with that. There are dozens of college basketball teams who play like Michigan State, look like Michigan State, and some will advance deep in the NCAA Tournament next March. For all we know, these Spartans may be one of them.

But that’s not the point. 

Back in 2011 when then-Michigan State athletics director Mark Hollis helped pitch this event to ESPN, it made sense to share this stage with Kentucky, Duke and Kansas. Izzo was sending teams to the Final Four every few years, and at minimum the Spartans were coming into every season somewhere around the top-10.

But Tuesday was the third time in the last four years that Michigan State came to the Champions Classic unranked, and last season they were No. 18. When you compare that to the star quality that the other programs bring to this event – and that a team like UConn could provide – how does it make any sense for the Spartans to still be here? 

For most of this event’s history, Michigan State earned its keep with consistency, if not championships. But now, it’s indisputable that the Spartans are a cut below, grandfathered in through reputation rather than results. 

Is this the Champions Classic or the ‘Three Champions and Middle of the Big Ten Classic’? 

Izzo is the kind of coach who believes you earn what you get. If Michigan State can’t live up to that standard, we don’t need to continue letting them turn this event into a misnomer.