Nor does he know if it has to do with his comfort level with where he’s at with his career right now — one that includes 495 victories, seven Final Fours, seven Big Ten championships and a national championship in 2000.

Or if it has to do with his loaded recruiting class for 2016.

All the 21st-year head coach of the preseason No. 13 ranked Spartans knows is this — he’s feeling great.

“I don’t know why, I just feel great,” Izzo said on Oct. 2 prior to his team’s first official practice of the season. “But right now I have a high, high meter. I don’t know if I’m starting to appreciate life more and the opportunities I have. Whatever the reason is really doesn’t matter. I think this team has a chance to keep getting better.”

But if there’s something else the 60-year-old coach is feeling, it’s drive. A drive to do more than just knock on the championship door year after year. In the last three years, Izzo’s teams have advanced to a Sweet Sixteen, an Elite Eight and a Final Four.

He feels it’s about time that door opens.

Heightened Expectations

It’s been more than 15 years since Izzo’s first and only national championship in 2000. And in many of the interviews and press conferences he’s given this fall, a lot of the talk has been about getting back to that.

“The mission now is to try to take it to one more level,” Izzo said at his media day press conference on Oct. 27. “We’ve been going back to Final Fours. We’ve done a pretty good job of staying consistent with that. But moving beyond that now is, I think, the next thing that we’re really interested in. So reaching higher, taking it to another level, call it what you want, that’s what we’re looking for.”

And it starts with the culture of the team, where every practice this fall has ended the exact same way -— 16 men head to the center of the floor, before they eventually break their huddle with the one word phrase which has come to define the goal of the season — “Natty.”

This team, like their coach, is not shy about what they want to achieve this season.

They’ve slugged it out with the best of the Big Ten year after year. They’ve made their deep runs into March.

Now they want more.

“We’re not hiding it either,” sophomore point guard Lourawls “Tum Tum” Nairn Jr. said. “We want to win a national championship, too. We understand there are a lot of teams out there working really, really hard trying to win a national championship but I think losing in the Final Four last year gave us another push and another drive.

“We got there. It was nice being (at the Final Four) ... but we lost by 20 ... nobody likes losing by 20. Granted, we lost to the national championship team but I think that gave us better focus and a better drive and like coach said, we want to take it to another level.”

For junior forward Gavin Schilling, he said getting to that next level is something the team harps upon constantly.

“We talk about it every day -— in the locker room, on the court, off the court,” Schilling said. “We want to get there. We want to get back on that stage and win it all this year.”

Strength in numbers

Quite possibly one of the biggest things that might have Izzo feeling as good as he does right now is the blatant depth, talent and experience of his team heading into this season.

For starters, the team returns nine of its top 11 scorers from a team that advanced to the Final Four a year ago.

And in addition to that, MSU welcomes a series of newcomers in promising freshman big man Deyonta Davis, and a trio of sharp-shooting guards in freshmen Matthew McQuaid and Kyle Ahrens and junior West Virginia-transfer Eron Harris.

Of the nine returning members, though, the player who is without a doubt the team’s best player, “the star of our stars” as Izzo likes to call him, is MSU’s do-everything guard Denzel Valentine.

A year ago Valentine averaged 14.5 points, 4.3 assists and 6.3 rebounds per game. Heading into this year, he has a very real chance to be MSU’s leader in all three of those categories.

And while Valentine recognizes he will undoubtedly have to assume a leadership role with the team this year, he feels the responsibility of handling the increased expectations and pressure placed on the team can be spread among the entire squad.

“I think we’re going to handle (the expectations well), because we’ve played in all the big games you can, besides the national championship,” Valentine said. “We have a lot of good players on this team so it’s not going to be a lot of pressure on me or Matt (Costello) or Bryn (Forbes). It’s going to be pressure on everybody because everybody can do a lot of things. ... But we have so many weapons, I think we’re going to be able to handle it.”

As a result of the depth, senior forward Matt Costello said practices this summer and fall have been almost war-like, as not only is everyone aware of the goals of the season, but also that playing time will be at a premium.

With so many weapons at their disposal, there’s no wonder Izzo has such high goals and expectations for this team, but as for who and where those expectations came from, Costello said they came from the team.

In a team meeting following MSU’s Final Four loss to Duke last April, Costello said Izzo asked the team what they wanted to accomplish for the next season. The answer was easy.

“That’s been our thing all summer is win a national championship, not just getting back to a Final Four,” said Costello, who has been part of several deep tournament runs at MSU. "We got to push for something more because that feeling of just getting there wasn’t enough. We want to finish the job this year.”

Lasting legacy

It’s a Tuesday afternoon in Breslin Center meeting rooms and Izzo is fielding questions at MSU basketball’s annual media day event, and at some point during Izzo’s press conference, he’s asked about potentially catching Gene Keady or Bob Knight on the all-time Big Ten coaches wins list.

Just four days prior to this at MSU’s Midnight Madness event, Izzo watched with his team as the 2015 Final Four banner was raised to the rafters of Breslin Center.

Every year MSU’s Midnight Madness event has a theme. This year’s theme — Mission Izzpossible, a nod to the popular “Mission Impossible” movies.

Seconds after making his entrance into Breslin Center and beaming in a picture with a his family, his team and a Tom Cruise lookalike, Izzo thanks the capacity crowd on hand that night for coming out and reflects on his program’s success over the years.

But not without filling them in on this year’s mission.

“We have no interest anymore in winning games,” he went on to say. “We have interest in hanging banners. The banners that we want to hang are going to be here long after I’m gone and long after you’re gone. And that’s what’s great about hanging banners, they’re memory makers that don’t go away.”

So at his press conference four days later, Izzo told reporters the exact same thing.

“I’m not really worried about those kind of records, but I am — I do enjoy — you said I don’t enjoy anything?” Izzo said, joking with a reporter. “I do enjoy that (Final Four) banner going up Friday night. I do enjoy those things that are hung forever. Those are better records than the other ones to me.”

So while Izzo can’t pinpoint exactly what’s given him his second wind heading into this season, he’s got some unfinished business, and this year is as good as any to get it done.

“I feel better this year than I’ve felt in 10 years,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s in the air here or whatever, but got a chance to do some special things at this place, and right now that’s the legacy that I want to be a part of.”