Josh Metellus on postgame message to MSU: ‘They didn’t deserve to be in our stadium’

Josh Metellus has played in his fair share of Michigan-Michigan State games at this point in his career and walks out a victor in his senior season after a 44-10 win over the Spartans on Saturday.

The alternate captain and defensive back did not hold back in his comments after the game, saying that his Wolverines are a classier football team and that he took issue with some of the cheap shots on the field.

“I’m pretty pleased because I feel like we are way more classy than them,” Metellus said. “You know, they try to take it to a level that wasn’t playing football. We play football over here. I don’t know what they do over there. We play football, and it showed today.”

Metellus expanded on those comments, saying that when the Spartans started to feel the physicality of the Michigan defense, MSU resorted to dirty tactics and hits when nobody was looking.

“On our side, it was really physical,” he said. “I felt like this defense...especially, you know, um...we made a statement today. We were playing really physical and they tried to...it was to the point where we were playing too physical and they tried to do stuff after the play when we weren’t looking and stuff like that and it just showed today that we were the better prepared team and we came out and we wanted to execute more than they did.”

At the end of the game, there were some words exchanged between the two teams. Metellus said all that was spoken was the desire for MSU to leave the stadium and that they were unfit to share the field with them.

“I was telling them to go home. It was time for them to leave,” he said. “They didn’t deserve to be in our stadium. And I was just trying to wave them goodbye because some of them wanted to stay on the field and it was our time to shine. We came out with the W so we were just telling them to go home.”

The message that a handful of Michigan players had put out there all week was that this rivalry renewal was not one that they had to sweat out as long as they executed and made plays. Metellus said they knew that they would have a chance to blow them out if they were prepared and able to dictate how this contest was going to go.

“Going through how they played this season and how we’ve been playing these past couple of games, we knew we could do it,” he said.” It doesn’t have to be close. It’s football and if you execute the right way every play or the majority of the plays, you win by big margins like this. We focused on executing these last two weeks and it showed today.”

Metellus gave the Wolverines the pre-game speech on the field and also shared what his message was to the team.

“I was just telling everybody to play their heart out. It’s a big game and we needed everybody on the sideline and everybody on the field to play as hard as they could and just tried to make sure everybody was focused and willing to do whatever to win this game.”