BREAKING: MSU Learns Its NCAA Tournament First-Round Opponent, Site
EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Michigan State men's basketball will be heading to Cleveland as the No. 2 seed in the south region, where it will face No. 15-seeded Bryant on Friday, as announced on CBS' "NCAA Men's Basketball Championship Selection Show" on Sunday.
The Spartans went 26-5 in the regular season and won the Big Ten regular season title. With the conference tournament included, they won 13 Quad 1 games.
Bryant went 23-11 and won the American East Championship over the University of Maine.
Michigan State will appear in its 27th consecutive NCAA Tournament. It has been a 2 seed just three times before with Tom Izzo at the helm.
The winner of the Spartans' first-round matchup will face the winner of 7-seeded Marquette/10-seeded New Mexico.
Times to be announced.
Michigan State comes off a narrow loss to Wisconsin in the Big Ten Tournament semifinals. The loss had snapped an eight-game win streak for the Green and White.
Below is a transcript from Spartans coach Tom Izzo's opening statement of his postgame press conference:
Izzo: "Well, I'm disappointed, and I think it shows you how little things can make a difference. We preach that all the time, but sometimes it doesn't go through. But I'm proud of these guys, especially these two [Jase Richardson and Jeremy Fears Jr.]. Coop [Carson Cooper] played awfully well, did a lot of things that we asked him to do. I think Jeremy is playing his best basketball in the last three, four games. Jase has had an eight-, 10-game run where he's playing phenomenal basketball. You've got to give some credit to Wisconsin. [John] Tonje was -- he definitely, along with [Braden] Smith, were the best players in the league at that time. He played like one of them today. I thought we did a pretty good job on him most of the way, and he cut loose a little bit, and that's what great players do. And yet I thought our game plan, I thought we -- you know, they didn't get 19 3s. How many did they get, eight, nine? And they got a couple of those late. We just made some mistakes in some key runs, and that was the difference in the game. Both teams had seven turnovers. That's a hell of a basketball game. We outrebounded them, shot pretty much similar, shot pretty well from the line, so did they. So, probably a hell of a basketball game except for the couple things that happened that probably cost us."
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