EAST LANSING – When Nick Sanders checks into a game, that’s usually a good sign for the Spartans.

The walk-on senior guard burying a 3-pointer immediately after getting on the court was the final exclamation point as No. 17 Michigan State (5-0) rolled to an 84-56 win against Detroit Mercy on Friday night at the Breslin Center.

Here are notable quotes from coach Tom Izzo and players following the victory:

Izzo on following an 83-66 win against No. 12 Kentucky on Tuesday in the Champions Classic with a victory against the Titans: “I just didn’t think we played as good as we can play so we’ll get better.”

Jeremy Fears, who scored a career-high 18 points to go with 11 assists, on sparking the team with his shot and passing: “Somehow, someway making sure we get a bucket kinda to stop the bleeding, stop their run.”

Izzo on Fears, who put together his second double-double of the season: “I think he’s just starting to come into his own.”

Coen Carr on scoring 11 of his 13 points in the first half after scoring only six against Kentucky: “I was definitely trying to be aggressive in the beginning. Fears set me up for some nice plays, I got two open 3s. … I was just trying to be confident in myself, that’s all they’ve been telling me.”

Izzo on his team putting up some ugly misses: “We airballed some wide-open shots, I mean airballed them. If you ask me, the guy that should be upset is Fears not me, he would have had 15, 16 assists tonight if they just hit regular shots.”

Sanders on knocking down a 3-pointer immediately after checking in late in the second half: “Coach gives us the opportunity to play at the end and we try to take advantage of those moments.”

Carson Cooper on Sanders taking a shot: “We said we were going to beat him up if he came in one of these games like this and didn’t get aggressive like he does on scout team when we play against him because he scores so much on scout and he hits shots on scout team.”

Izzo on Cooper and Fears connecting on alley-oops: “Him and Jeremy are lethal on that lob stuff.”

After a 10-6 win over Harper Woods in the Division 4 regional finals, Dearborn Divine Child coach Chris Laney delivered an impassioned speech.

He told his players how proud he was of every single player on the roster, how the only belief the team needed was inside the locker room and how the road continues into the state semifinals against an undefeated Goodrich team defending its state title.

At the end of the speech in the south end zone at Westland John Glenn High School, with a crowd of family and fans sitting behind him, Laney finished his message with the three most popular words of the 2025 Michigan high school football season.

“We not done,” Laney said, leading to his players mobbing him in celebration.

Divine Child players were singing “We Not Done” over and over after pulling off the upset of the playoffs. The phrase comes courtesy of Detroit rapper 42 Dugg, who released a hit song called “We Not Done” in May.

John Glenn officials in the press box played the song during the halftime break, causing both sidelines to erupt with energy as Dugg’s signature whistle and the one-of-a-kind voice started bumping through the school’s speaker system.

The night before, Detroit Cass Tech students who bused down I-94 to watch the Technicians beat Saline 42-28 in the Division 1 regional finals chanted “We Not Done” throughout the win as senior C.J. Sadler dazzled with a four-touchdown, two-interception performance.

“Our student section, our student body around Cass is, it’s just we’re not done,” senior linebacker/nickelback Marcus Jennings said Friday. “We’ve got to finish what we started.”

The song has become the anthem of the 2025 football season in metro Detroit for players and students. The song’s title and oft-repeated hook share the same message as what coaches and players preach throughout the summer and fall as they vie for a run in the single-elimination playoffs to reach the state title game at Ford Field.

WE NOT DONE: 2025 Michigan high school football playoff bracket: State semifinal matchups, locations

In the playoffs, players and coaches are fighting against elimination in a 48-minute battle on the gridiron. The victorious team celebrates gets to spend one more week preparing for another battle with its brothers, lining up with the message of “We Not Done” that 42 Dugg says 22 times in the 2-minute, 55-second song.

In the Division 2 district finals between Orchard Lake St. Mary’s and Birmingham Brother Rice, the suit-and-tie-wearing Brother Rice student section chanted “We Not Done” throughout the first half of the Catholic League rematch.

By the end of the game, which St. Mary’s won 35-14, the Brother Rice students dispersed and it was St. Mary’s assistant coaches singing the song’s hook to themselves and laughing after dealing out a dose of revenge against their rivals.

For Cass Tech, it has been a subtle reminder from the players, starting in the summer during seven-on-seven competitions all the way up to the state semifinals. The Technicians are the defending Division 1 champions and on a 22-game winning streak, but have loftier goals they are still fighting for.

So if you were wondering where one of the main messages from the 2025 Michigan high school football season originated, it started with one of Detroit’s own.

Nominate a high school athlete for the Detroit Free Press boys and girls athlete of the week.

Jared Ramsey covers high school sports for the Detroit Free Press. Contact him at jramsey@freepress.com; Follow Jared on X or Bluesky.

Kim Barnes Arico had plenty of questions about her still-very-young Michigan women’s basketball team heading into last Saturday’s game against then-No 18 Notre Dame, and the Wolverines answered every last one of them.

Michigan was more than ready for Notre Dame, walloping the Fighting Irish, 93-54, at Wayne State Fieldhouse in Detroit, for arguably the signature regular-season victory of Barnes Arico’s 14-year tenure in Ann Arbor.

Now it’s on to the next test ― and, well, this one makes Notre Dame look like a pop quiz.

No. 6 Michigan (4-0) plays No. 1 Connecticut (4-0), the defending national champion, in the Basketball Hall of Fame Women’s Showcase at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut at 8 Friday night. The game will air on Fox, the latest taste of national exposure for a Wolverines team whose win over the Fighting Irish was on NBC.

“It’s really exciting. I think it’s a great opportunity for us,” Barnes Arico said earlier this week. “Our kids want to be in this situation and they want to match up against the best.”

This game marks the first meeting between Michigan and Connecticut, the 12-time national champion, in women’s basketball. But it’s not the first meeting between Barnes Arico and Connecticut legendary head coach Geno Auriemma. When she was coaching at St. John’s, her team beat Connecticut on Feb. 18, 2012, to snap the Huskies’ 99-game home winning streak. That was one of just 22 losses for Connecticut in a 13-year span.

This will be the fourth time Michigan ever has played a top-ranked team, and third time in the last two seasons ― after losing to South Carolina and UCLA last regular season. UM also lost to No. 1 Iowa in 1988.

Michigan did beat No. 5 Baylor in the 2021 Hall of Fame Showcase, a win that first helped signal that the program was starting to arrive. A win over Connecticut ― which has four more national championships than the second-best team (Tennessee, with eight; nobody else has more than three) ― would obviously mean even more than that.

“We’ve kind of been working all year for these kinds of games,” sophomore guard Olivia Olson, last season’s co-freshman of the year in the Big Ten, said after the win over Notre Dame, in which she had 20 points.