Michigan State University Athletics
Michigan State Passes First Round Test
6/21/1999 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
March 12, 1999
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By ARNIE STAPLETON
AP Sports Writer
MILWAUKEE (AP) -- Second-ranked Michigan State prevented the smallest school in the NCAA tournament from pulling off the biggest upset by whipping Mount St. Mary's 76-53 Friday night in the first round of the Midwest Regional.
Michigan State (30-4), which hasn't lost since Jan. 6 when the Spartans were beaten 66-51 at Wisconsin, won its 19th straight game.
Sixteenth-seeded Mount St. Mary's (15-15), a school of 1,309 students in central Maryland - or 32 times as small as Michigan State - stayed with the Spartans until Mateen Cleaves scored his first points with 7:25 left in the first half.
Cleaves stripped Melvin Whitaker of the ball near his own basket, drove the floor and hung in the air on his layup just long enough to draw a foul from Eric Bethel. The three-point play put Michigan State ahead 22-16.
The Mountaineers, who got coach Jim Phelan his 800th victory last week, never were closer than that. But they did give the Spartans a good workout.
Michigan State was ahead by just nine before Andre Hutson's basket and reserve A.J. Granger's 3-pointer made it 38-24 at halftime.
Michigan State began the second half with an 8-0 run for a 46-24 lead.
Granger led the Spartans with 15 points, and Antonio Smith had 14 as the Spartans' usual point producers - Cleaves, Morris Peterson and Jason Klein - shared the workload.
Whitaker scored 13 for the Mountaineers and Gregory Harris and Aaron Herbert added 12 each.
The Mountaineers, who had to win their three Northeast Conference tournament games just to finish above .500, also made the NCAA tournament in 1995, seven seasons after moving up from Division II. But they were trounced that year 113-67 by Kentucky.
The Spartans, who went 15-1 in the Big Ten and won the postseason tournament, were 26-point favorites. They lost the opening tip and trailed 11-7 five minutes in.
But the Mountaineers' hopes of becoming the first No. 16 seed to win an NCAA men's game quickly faded.
A week shy of his 70th birthday, Phelan, who has spent his entire 45-year coaching career at the Emmitsburg, Md., campus, coached with just as much vigor as his counterpart, Tom Izzo, 44.
He vehemently argued a basket-and-foul call that he thought should have been a travel with his team ahead 14-11. Smith's three-point play tied it and the Mountaineers never led again.
As Phelan said Thursday, "We knew that we were going to face a tiger."
When the game was well in hand, the small but loud contingent of about 100 Mountaineers fans - one had a sign reading, "We were a school before you were a state," - began chanting "Hall of Fame! Hall of Fame!" for Phelan, who isn't enshrined despite trailing only Dean Smith, Adolph Rupp and Clarence Gaines in career victories.
