Michigan State coach Tom Izzo holds up the net after his team defeated
Louisville, 76-70, in overtime Sunday to win the East Region and advance
to Izzo’s seventh Final Four.
EAST LANSING, Mich. — When a man has seven Final Four berths, the assortment can end up motley. Tom Izzo of Michigan State has been to three as a No. 1 seed, one as a No. 2 seed that upended a No. 1 seed, two as a No. 5 seed and now one as a No. 7 seed. He has one as a national favorite (2000), one as a local favorite (2009, Detroit) and one as a decided non-favorite (2015) among No. 1 seeds Kentucky, Wisconsin and Duke.
He even has one (2015) he didn’t expect to get even as it follows upon a year when he thought he could get one but didn’t — indeed, last season’s Elite Eight exit came when a national championship might have occurred were it not for Connecticut, a refrain several teams came to parrot. Perhaps most tellingly, Izzo has one from 1999 and one from 2015.
In a span that wide, a coach learns some truths only elite coaches know, and Izzo echoes one Florida Coach Billy Donovan once stated: Over time, the meaning of winning alters somewhat. A coach might want it a notch less for himself and a notch more for those around him.
“That is very, very, very true,” Izzo said on a gloomy, happy Tuesday in East Lansing, whereupon he went on to mention both his childhood dreams in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which long since grew realized at a Final Four in 1999 and a national championship in 2000. Fifteen years on, he felt the rare truth just after the East Regional final in Syracuse.“So, when you sit there and then you walk around the court on Sunday and you just kind of look up and there seem to be so many people from Michigan State, and it’s just, all I could think about is, ‘Think how many people are happy,’ ” he said. “You know, so I would agree, because until you go to that first one, you just don’t realize how big it is. And once you experience it, anybody you care about — anybody you care about — you want them to be able to experience the same thing.”
As a No. 1 seed in 1999, Michigan State overcame both an early 17-4 deficit and a seasoned No. 2 seed Kentucky for a 73-66 win in the Midwest Region final. From there, it went to the Final Four in St. Petersburg, Fla., where it played a 36-1 Duke team that had reigned above that entire season. Even given a Michigan State team that had gone 33-4 and 29-1 since early December, Izzo’s voice did ring like a debutant.
“Well, I’m about as excited to be here as I think a guy could ever be,” he said after arrival. “Everybody told me how good it is and how great it gets. But words can’t describe the excitement.” Michigan State played a resolutely forgettable semifinal against Duke, fell by a commendable 68-62 and returned home as a budding champion while Duke stayed on to take an unexpected upending from Connecticut.
Six Final Fours later, Izzo has a berth quirky enough that Michigan State is both the program with the most Final Fours this century and the afterthought of this bunch. It will arrive as neither expected nor all that unexpected. It’s a No. 7 seed that, Izzo claims, incurred no disrespect. It has four more losses (11) than the other three teams combined (seven). Senior Branden Dawson said reaching this Final Four became “the first time I’ve seen Travis [Trice] cry since I’ve known him,” and the senior guard and leader Trice said, “I know this is going to sound crazy, but looking back, I’m kind of happy that we did lose last year because it makes us feel so much better to be on the other side.”
Asked about being the underdog, the junior guard from Lansing, Denzel Valentine said, “You can kind of say yes and kind of say no.”
It’s a team with a defense Izzo found something of a puzzle, such that the Big Ten defensive statistics would come out, the Michigan State statistics would be good, and Izzo would say to his assistants, “How?” It operated differently from his traditional teams with lockdown guys, so that he wound up saying, “You’d watch us, and we were ‘pretty solid,’ would be our best word. We didn’t turn people over a lot. We didn’t do a lot of things like that. But we were pretty solid. So we’ve evolved into a different kind of defense. We’re not a smashmouth defensive team. We’re not a team that gets after you as hard, but we are pretty solid, pretty steady, and I think all of a sudden Trice has gotten better defensively. You know, Valentine improved a ton from last year to this year. He doesn’t get enough credit, and I was putting him on the best player.”
It’s a team Izzo says he “downplayed” a bit because he just couldn’t be sure, even as he plays up his own 1-8 record against Duke and Coach Mike Krzyzewski and says he needs to work on that. Yet these Spartans have gone 8-1 since March 1, so they’re the seventh Final Four team of his sterling collection, so he can revel in it for them. He also can tell them, as he did, “We’re headed to one place, and if we could make it to Monday night, we’ll head to the ultimate place.” He long since knows about that.
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