Tom Izzo In Hot Pursuit Of His 2nd National Title With Michigan State Basketball
Breslin Student Events Center
East Lansing, MI
Since 2000, Tom Izzo has been chasing a second National Championship (Third for the School), something that he and the Spartans have come close to over the past two decades, but haven’t quite been able to accomplish.
Now, as the Spartans enter this season as the country’s No. 1 ranked team with the Preseason Player of the Year in Cassius Winston, this might be Izzo’s best chance to finally win that elusive second title.
Izzo, entering his 25th season as head coach of the Spartans, said that even with how consistent his program has been throughout his career, even he has elevated expectations for this season as he hopes to win another National Championship, 20 years after winning his first.
“I think what excites me about year 25 is that we’ve really been pretty damn consistent, and that means a lot to me,” he said. “I think it’s easy to have a good team or a good couple of years, but if you can consistently stay where you’re consistently competing and every year you think you have a chance to win the league or every year you think you have a chance to go deep in the tournament, I couldn’t ask for more out of my career so far. Now this year, I’m going to ask a little more out of my career because I’d like to get that second one (National Title) sometime. I don’t think I have to win another one to validate what I’ve done, I think I have to win another one to validate what I want.”
Entering this season with two key pieces from last year’s Final Four team in Winston and Xavier Tillman as well as other important contributors in Aaron Henry, Kyle Ahrens, Gabe Brown and Thomas Kithier, along with a potential mid-season return of Josh Langford and a talented freshman class, this may be Michigan State’s best shot at a National Title since 2000.
When the Spartans will take the floor against No. 2 ranked Kentucky on November 5th as the nation’s top team, they will do so with all of the pressure and expectations that come along with being the top-ranked team in the country.
However, that’s not the way Izzo is looking at it or asking his team to look at it, instead, he wants his team to embrace it and appreciate the respect they have on a national level and enjoy it.
“We’ll see how much fun it is on November 5th,” he said. “Sure, it’s always fun, but I think it’s a privilege. I try to tell my guys that we can’t look at this as a burden, look at it as a privilege, we have earned the right to be one of and they flip a coin and someone’s got to be it and this time the coin turned green. But we know that there’s always eight or ten teams that have a legitimate chance to go deep in the tournament every year and of those eight or ten, most don’t make it.”
For Winston, he told reporters that he understands the expectations and potential of this year’s Michigan State team and as he prepares to take on a larger leadership role, he wants to make sure the team remains focused so the Spartans can live up to this year’s expectations.
“I think I’m going to be a better leader this year, vocally - getting these guys to play at the potential that I feel like they can,” he said. “That’s my job. We’ve got a lot of talented guys, we’ve got a lot of guys that don’t know, they’ve never been in this situation before, they haven’t been in these types of games before. It’s my job that they remain focused, remain confident and go out there and play to their full potential.”
But this year isn’t the first time the Spartans have entered with high ranking and lofty expectations. Michigan State was the preseason No. 3 team in the country in 1999, before going on to win the National Title. In 2013, the Spartans were ranked No. 2 in the preseason but saw the season come to a disappointing end in the Elite Eight.
Perhaps the most disappointing season the Spartans have had under Izzo came back in 2010, when the Spartans entered ranked No. 2 in the country, but finished the regular season with a 19-14 record, barely qualifying for the NCAA tournament, before being ousted in the first round by UCLA.
It’s seasons like the 2010-11 season that Izzo continues to warn his team about, even this year, as he hopes that the Spartans are able to learn from the past in order to achieve the goals and expectations ahead of them this season.
“I think we’ve just got to learn from the past,” he said. “You have to learn from other teams, you have to learn what went wrong. We have to learn from 2011 – Why were we picked so high and we barely got into the tournament? That’s one of the few times where I thought we totally underachieved. What were the reasons for that, some of it is ‘fat and sassy’, some of it is not working as hard as you did before. The advantage of being an experienced coach and having an experienced staff is that you remember those things, the issue is that if you’re telling the players that, they think you’re speaking a foreign language. Until you go through something, it doesn’t hit home the same, but if we’re going to be great, they’ve got to listen. That’s why there’s been a lot more individual meetings, a lot more of spending time with just a player and that’s the way I’ve tried to combat social media and the expectations.”
Only time will tell if this year’s Michigan State team will live up to the lofty expectations and goals that come with being a preseason No. 1 team, but Izzo and the Spartans will be ready come November 5th.
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