Trojan war at USC reminds Michigan State of its Achilles heel

Los Angeles — In the Roman interpretations of Homer’s Iliad, the Greek warrior Achilles was dipped in the River Styx by his mother Thetis, seeking to make him invulnerable. She held him by his little heel, that eponymous weakness that doomed him later in the Trojan War when a poisoned arrow found its mark.

More than 2,000 years later, Michigan State had its own Achilles heel in a Trojan war: on defense, where drive after drive hung sevens on the scoreboard.