ATLANTA — There are two kinds of Tom Izzo NCAA tournament wins: ugly and uglier. They're rock fights, parking-lot wrestling matches, about as sleek as a dented pickup. But, like the man himself, the wins keep on coming, year after year, generation after generation.
Izzo is the last of his kind, a rumpled old-school crank swimming in a sea of coaches with $200 haircuts and shmedium pullovers. He’s the final link in a chain that stretches back to the days of Jerry Tarkanian and Bob Knight, a time when coaches strode the college basketball landscape like curmudgeonly titans.
And, as Friday night's Sweet 16 victory over Ole Miss proved, the old ways can still be winning ways if the right coach is at the wheel.
Michigan State beat Ole Miss, 73-70, in a game that was vintage Izzo: a dog's breakfast of styles and approaches, from freewheeling 3-point shooting to mud-pit grappling. Ole Miss posted leads of as much as 10 points on the Spartans, but didn't realize until far too late that Michigan State was slowly encircling it, like a green-and-white boa constrictor, squeezing until the Rebels had nowhere to go but back to Oxford.
After the game, Izzo called Ole Miss the toughest team he’d faced in years, comparing them — favorably — to the legendarily tough squads of Minnesota’s Clem Haskins and Purdue’s Gene Keady.
Perhaps that’s why Izzo calmly watched Michigan State’s plays unfold, nodding his head like he was watching a movie he’d seen a dozen times before. Perhaps that’s why he was the only one of the 18,000-plus inside State Farm Arena not wracked with nerves in the final minutes of the game. He’s been here before — eight times in the Elite Eight, to be exact — and his 30 years of experience at Michigan State have prepared him for this kind of March tension, even if everything else around him has changed.
Consider what college coaches must do in 2025. A modern coach must not only draw up the X's and O's and motivate the troops, they must also be part psychologist, part financial analyst, part car salesman. They must juggle not just playing time but newly empowered egos, all the while putting his entire professional fate in the hands of 18-to-22-year-olds. No wonder, then, that so many of Izzo’s contemporaries — Jim Boeheim, Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Tony Bennett — have headed for the exits.
Coaches don’t deserve pity; they’re ridiculously well paid for what they do, and player autonomy was long overdue. But they do deserve respect, particularly when, like Izzo, they continue to place the focus squarely on the team in front of them.
Izzo made headlines this week when he quite correctly railed on the transfer portal — not its existence, but its timing, right in the middle of the NCAA tournament.
“I’m going to worry today about the guys I got in this program that have done an incredible job this year, and that’s it,” he said. “And if that costs me later, so be it, but Tom Izzo isn’t cheating the people that he has that have been loyal to him for this chaos that is going on out there.”
In a world of climbers and opportunists, it’s not just a refreshing old-school point of view. It’s a defiant statement of values, the kind of ethos that inspires teams to run through brick walls — or 10-point leads — for him.
Who knows how many more chances Izzo will get to claim a second national championship? Who knows whether he’ll ever have a team this crafty and resourceful again? There are no eras in college basketball any more, only moments, and these days, you have to hope you can string enough of those moments together that you’re the last one standing at the end of the season.
Izzo understands how far this team has come, from a middle-of-the-pack Big Ten squad to one of the last teams still kicking. He could look back — at his team, at his career — and be content, but that’s not his way. There will be time for celebrating later; for now, there’s still plenty of work to do.
“Elite Eights are great,” he said just moments after claiming yet another one, “but we don’t put up any banners for Great Eights. We put up banners for Final Fours and championships.”
He's one more win from that banner. And if he gets that win on Sunday, he'll be the overwhelming sentimental favorite to win in San Antonio … even if the idea of such sentimentality would make him cringe. Maybe because sentimentality would make him cringe.
Tom Izzo’s still in the hunt in 2025. It’s like classic rock on a road trip — a welcome throwback, and absolutely perfect for the moment.
