After picking up back-to-back wins against two of the lowest-ranked offenses in the Big Ten conference, Ohio State is now tasked with containing one of the top five offenses in the nation.
When Michigan State rolls into Value City Arena Sunday, it will be a very different team than the Buckeyes faced in the 2022-23 season that went 7-10 in Big Ten play. The Spartans have taken their game to another level, with three starters averaging over 10 points a game and the team averaging 89.9 points, just one point fewer than the Big Ten-leading Iowa Hawkeyes are scoring.
Under new head coach Robin Fralick, Michigan State has had several impressive outings, including against No. 3 Iowa on Jan. 2, a matchup the Spartans took down to the wire before falling 76-73. That's part of the reason Ohio State coach Kevin McGuff considers Michigan State "the most improved" in the conference.
This will be the Buckeyes' biggest challenge since falling to Michigan on Dec. 30, and their schedule only gets more difficult as the season goes on. A week from Sunday, Caitlin Clark and the Hawkeyes are set to travel to Columbus for their first meeting of the season.
"We prepare ourselves to be the best version of ourselves, and that's what we can control," McGuff said. "We're playing great teams, but we just got to make sure we're prepared, and we come out in the best version of Ohio State we can be."
With victories over Northwestern and Rutgers , Ohio State has bounced back from the loss in Ann Arbor, building some momentum before these tough games.
Ball movement keyed those two wins. OSU scored 90 points while recording at least 20 assists against the Wildcats and Scarlet Knights. There was also an emphasis on ball control. Against Northwestern, Ohio State limited the self-inflicted errors with a season-low six turnovers.
"That was definitely a wake-up call," Buckeyes' guard Madison Greene said of the Michigan loss. "I feel like we definitely put it in the work in practice, McGuff made sure that we did that, and I feel like it's showing this past couple games."
Before starting her tenure as head coach at Michigan State, Fralick was at Bowling Green. In her last year with the Falcons, her team had the best regular season record in school history and made it to the WNIT Fab 4.
McGuff saw firsthand how well Fralick ran that program as she was recruiting his daughter Keiryn last season, when she was a senior at Dublin Coffman High School.
"I know her staff really well," McGuff said. "She created an incredible culture for Bowling Green. I think Michigan State has a lot of talent, and she's really got them playing well together and played extremely hard and the results are reflective of that."
This will also be the first time Ohio State's Taiyier Parks faces her old team. Having spent four seasons with Michigan State before transferring, the graduate forward expects seeing her former teammates will be "bittersweet."
"I came in with a couple of the girls. So just seeing them, it's more like nostalgia," Parks said. "But we've got to handle business at the end of the day."
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Ohio State women prepare for a more difficult stretch in the schedule
