This offseason will be different from past ones for the MSU men's basketball team, as MSU head coach Tom Izzo plans to go back to the ways that sent his teams to three straight Final Fours.
Eliminated in the first round of the NCAA Tournament by George Mason, Izzo promised to get his team tougher at his year-end news conference held Tuesday.
"We didn't have the season we wanted to have," Izzo said.
"I felt, for maybe one of the few times in my career here as a head coach, that we didn't get done what we were capable of getting done."
The loss to George Mason left Izzo with a sour taste in his mouth.
"It was, in my mind, the biggest disappointment of any of the NCAA games we've played in," he said. "The only rival to that performance was probably our loss to Wisconsin at home that would've won us a Big Ten championship."
Izzo said the tweaking began around midnight after MSU's loss and it started with himself.
"I'm the head coach and I have to figure out why a team would perform so poorly in areas that are so important to the program," Izzo said.
"The second one will be in the weight room," Izzo said. "That has started. We're going to analyze our staff and see what we can do better, we're going to analyze our auxiliary people, what they can do better and we're going to analyze our players and figure out what they can do better."
Another pressing issue for the Spartans as they head into the offseason is the status of junior guard Shannon Brown.
Brown said numerous times that he will be returning next season, but now that the season is over, Brown, his family and Izzo will take a look at what his prospects are and make a decision from there.
"In about two weeks, the underclassman committee will meet and give us some sense of who's where and it's a crapshoot still," Izzo said.
Izzo said Brown told him that he just wants to be a regular college kid for while and will figure out the rest later.
"I'm not dumb enough to think that any kid who thinks he's going to be a good pick … wouldn't go. I just don't think it's on his mind."
Izzo also said that the whole team will go into the offseason healthy. Redshirt freshman forward Marquise Gray's broken foot should be healed within the next few weeks while junior center Drew Naymick underwent surgery for his broken nose Wednesday.
