Maurice Ager helped the Spartans shed their label of underachievers by scoring 14 points in MSU's 78-68 win. AP

AUSTIN, Texas -- The way Tom Izzo talks about "the past few years," you'd think his team had endured consecutive 20-loss seasons, probation or some other unbearably miserable fate.

"I apologized to [the players] in the last meeting I had with them," said Izzo. "I feel like I've let them down sometimes."

For the record, Izzo's Michigan State Spartans entered Friday night's Sweet Sixteen game against Duke having won more than two-thirds of their games the past four years, reached an Elite Eight and a Sweet Sixteen. So high was the bar set by predecessors like Mateen Cleaves, Morris Peterson and Jason Richardson, though, that the Spartans' current core of Alan Anderson, Maurice Ager, Paul Davis and the like were, until Friday night, widely considered underachievers. No Final Fours. No Big Ten titles. Oh, the horror.

Now, no matter what happens during the rest of the NCAA tournament, these Spartans will finally be able to say they accomplished something not Cleaves, Magic Johnson nor any other modern Michigan State hero can: They beat Duke. And they did it in stunning fashion, knocking off the Austin region's top seed 78-68 to claim the school's first win over the Blue Devils in five tries under Izzo and the first of any kind since 1958.

"Sooner or later, you have to stand up and get something done," said Izzo, whose program will play its fifth Elite Eight game in the past seven seasons Sunday against either Kentucky or Utah. "They're always hearing about what their predecessors did, but I told them [before the game], this is your chance to do something your predecessors haven't done."

They got it done, all right, and in classic Izzo fashion -- ugly. A middle-of-the-pack defensive team most of the season, the Spartans have turned it up considerably during their first three tournament games, culminating Friday when they helped cause 22 Duke turnovers (several of them, granted, were completely unforced), and held the Blue Devils' two premier outside shooters, J.J. Redick and Daniel Ewing, to a combined 11-of-30 shooting night. It marked a complete reversal of the teams' Nov. 30 meeting in Durham, an 81-74 Duke victory in which the pair hit a combined 10-of-16 3-pointers and each scored 29 points.

For once, Izzo's penchant for using nearly his entire bench paid off, wearing down a Duke team that's skated by all season with the thinnest of rotations.

"We played the game just the way we wanted to play it," he said afterward. "We felt we had to keep the pressure on them. The guys just did a whale of a job [on Redick and Ewing]."