Michigan State’s first season under Pat Fitzgerald is drawing a brutal early forecast, and the numbers leave little room for optimism.
CBS Sports analyst Brad Crawford’s 2026 game picks and win-loss predictions peg the Spartans for a 3-9 finish overall, with a 1-8 record in Big Ten play. In a conference that does not forgive transition years, that projection paints a rough road ahead for East Lansing.
There is at least a small opening for Michigan State in September. Crawford’s model has the Spartans beating Toledo and Eastern Michigan in non-conference play, which would give them a couple of early wins before the schedule tightens.
After that, the outlook turns sharply. Crawford projects a road loss to Notre Dame and says the Spartans’ only conference win would come against Northwestern. Everything else in the Big Ten slate is expected to go sideways fast.
The projected losses include Nebraska, Wisconsin, Illinois and Rutgers, along with tougher defeats against UCLA, Michigan, Washington and Oregon. In Crawford’s view, the Spartans would drop eight straight Big Ten games.
The broader point, as Crawford put it in his conference assessment, is that change comes with a steep price in this league: "Coaching transitions at places like Michigan State add another layer of uncertainty," Crawford noted in his broad conference assessment.
For Michigan State, that uncertainty shows up in the depth chart, in execution and in the kind of week-to-week survival test that comes with facing established programs in the expanded 18-team Big Ten.
A 3-9 season would leave the Spartans out of the postseason and send the program into another round of hard questions about how quickly Fitzgerald can get it turned around.
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