The Michigan State Spartans may not always have the best talent or the most impressive roster, but as long as Tom Izzo is leading the program you can be sure they are going to be a force to be reckoned with when March rolls around. He just simply wins, and his team is consistently playing in the regional finals no matter where they are seeded in the field.
His No. 2 seed Spartans punched another ticket to the Elite Eight on Friday night with a thrilling 73-70 win over No. 6 Ole Miss.
It puts Izzo and Michigan State into the Elite Eight for the 11th time in his 30 years as the team’s head coach.No coach in college basketball has been to more since he took over the Michigan State job.When he gets to this point in the tournament, he also usually keeps winning.
In his previous 10 Elite Eight appearances, Izzo holds an 8-2 record and has eventually moved on to the national championship game two times, winning it all during the 1999-00 season.
He should have as good of a chance as anybody given the way the Spartans are playing in the tournament. Michigan State has now won 11 of its past 12 games, with the only loss over the stretch by a three-point loss to Wisconsin in the Big Ten conference tournament.
This is also the fourth different decade in which an Izzo-coached team has appeared in the Elite Eight, having done so in the 1990s, the 2000s, the 2010s and now the 2020s.
What is perhaps most fascinating about Izzo’s success, is that while so many of the sports elite coaches have walked away in recent years due to the transfer portal and NIL, Izzo has remained in the same place. He has not only stuck it out and stayed with the Spartans, he has largely kept the same approach and done things the way he knows how to do them. It keeps working.
