If you were too hung over yesterday to watch one of the best college football games of the year, you missed the No. 4 Michigan State Spartans defeating No. 5 Stanford 24-20 to bring home their first Rose Bowl title in almost 30 years. The hero of the game was linebacker Kyler Elsworth, a career backup and former walk-on whose Superman-esque aerial tackle of Cardinal fullback Ryan Hewitt on fourth-and-1 sealed the victory for MSU.
It was amazing, and there are already a hundred of these epic columns about Kyler’s rise from nothingness to national heroism with intro paragraphs like this one from CBS Sports:
Kyler Elsworth, a wrestler since he was 4 years old, used to joke with his coaches that as soon as got Cauliflower ears he was hanging up his singlet. Ellsworth went 67-0 as a senior and earned wrestling scholarships to Michigan State, Michigan and Indiana, among others. But before the Cauliflower’s formed, Ellsworth said he got “burned out” on wrestling and its grind. Instead, he opted to pursue a different passion: football. Only the former small town star from Goodrich, Michigan didn’t have any scholarship offers in that sport from the Spartans.
No matter, Elsworth did what all good wrestlers do. He scrapped and battled and kept competing.
We’re going to skip that for now and tell you about another thing Elsworth did like a good wrestler: during the Michigan State post game celebration, the entire team broke out into a YES! YES! YES! chant in the style of former WWE Champion and best wrestler on the G.D. planet, Daniel Bryan.
The money YES chant comes at the 3:50 mark, but the entire video is wonderful. It’s just a bunch of happy guys dancing around and singing and being weird. That’s what sports are all about, right? I hope the Spartans show up to next year’s Rose Bowl with giant beards, accompanied by cultist hillbillies.
MSUSpartansAthletics via Jason Kirk
