​EAST LANSING – Upon further review, there remained a significant sting for Pat Fitzgerald two days later.Michigan State football showed promise and potential, along with the requisite toughness its new coach demands, in a 27-10 loss at No. 3 Notre Dame on Saturday, Sept. 19. But Fitzgerald also saw the flaws from his initial watch from the sidelines magnified when he reviewed the game film that led to the Spartans’ ultimate undoing.“We’re a work in progress, but we’re gaining on where we want to be from a consistency standpoint,” Fitzgerald said Monday. “To me, that’s my biggest job to do now. It’s to get us to play consistently. This team believes it can win, it knows it can win, it trusts it can win.”ON THE ICE: Michigan State hockey ranked No. 3 in USCHO preseason pollMSU (2-1) must put aside the platitudes from outside and the critiques internally to move on to the next phase of Fitzgerald’s debut season. That begins with the start of Big Ten play and a visit from Nebraska (3-0) on Saturday (5 p.m., Big Ten Network).“I would fully expect we’ll play with great effort,” said Fitzgerald, whose previous team, Northwestern, went 65-76 in conference games (including two Big Ten West Division titles) over 17 seasons. “I mean, it’s a choice, it’s something we stress every day and in everything we do. We got a huge challenge – Nebraska is playing at a very high level.“So we gotta play much cleaner, much more consistently. I’m not gonna stop saying that until we get there. And once we get there, it won’t be good enough.”Some of the mistakes Fitzgerald pointed to, beyond the dropped pass in the end zone by Nebraska transfer Kenneth Williams that would have been a touchdown, were “one-man breakdowns” – assignment errors in blocking, tackling and coverage on both sides of the ball. He said quarterback Alessio Milivojevic’s first of two interceptions came from not throwing the ball to the outside on the deep route as he was instructed. Fitzgerald also expressed his frustration with his special teams units again, even criticizing them for their read and alignment issues despite snuffing out a fake punt in the first quarter.“There was a lot of things that we didn’t execute on that play, but we got off the field,” he said. “If it was fourth-and-4, they would’ve got it. So yeah, we recognized that we didn’t get it communicated to the field. We thought we had prepared the guys well enough, and we didn’t, so it’s our fault as coaches.“But we got the stop. So everybody’s like, ‘Woohoo!’ And I’m pissed off on the sideline like, why did we not do this, why did we not do that. And so we’re a work in progress there, guys, for sure. Not there yet.”However, Fitzgerald’s biggest concerns are with cleaning up individual plays and not procedural mistakes and penalties. The Spartans committed just two against the Irish – pass interference flags on cornerbacks Tre Bell and Charles Brantley