MSU men’s basketball head coach Tom Izzo announces that he has decided to stay at MSU “for life.”
It doesn’t get much better than Tom Izzo when it comes to NCAA basketball coaches.
With six Final Fours and one national championship in the last 12 years — something only UCLA’s John Wooden and Duke University’s Mike Krzyzewski have done — Izzo is one of the best in the game.
However, at the same press conference Tuesday at which Izzo announced he would stay at MSU and not leave for the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers, he said he is far from satisfied with what he’s done.
“I like some of the things we’ve accomplished,” Izzo said.
“But, as I tell my players, you’re judged on the last guy standing. It’s nice to go to Final Fours, (but) that’s not how you’re remembered.”
Most college coaches would kill to do what Izzo has done.
But the fact there are other coaches out there who wouldn’t trade their résumés for Izzo’s eats him up inside.
So not only is Izzo remaining in East Lansing, he plans on being even better than ever before.
That’s a scary thought for opposing coaches throughout the country.
The man who thrives on challenges and uses everything under the sun to motivate himself also said he is coming back with more passion and more of a desire to be the best than he had before the events of the last nine days.
“I feel a whole different level now of why I want to get some things done,” Izzo said. “I think I’m going to work at even a different level now to make sure we get those things done.”
Already known as one of the hardest working coaches in the country, Izzo will need to do a lot to work harder. But don’t be surprised when he does.
Izzo has spent his career trying to prove people wrong. It’s part of the reason he almost went to Cleveland. Along with the opportunity to coach LeBron James, one of the world’s best players, he wanted to be one of the only college coaches to ever transfer NCAA success into the NBA.
However, that also happened to play a major role in why he decided to stay. Izzo, who said he never talked to James during the time he took a look at the Cavaliers job, knows it’s going to be tough to catch Wooden or Krzyzewski for national titles.
But if the odds were in his favor, he might not be here anymore.
Izzo said it himself Tuesday night that his pursuit of Coach K, who has three more titles than him, helped keep him in East Lansing.
“Maybe a couple years ago, winning one more (championship) might have been enough,” Izzo said. “That damn Krzyzewski keeps winning them, and because of that, it keeps motivating me to do more.”
As Izzo chases Coach K and tries to fulfill his goal of making MSU the best program in the country, he said he’s going to need some help, especially from his administration.
Fortunately for Izzo, he has an athletic director in Mark Hollis who has a similar burning desire to make MSU better than any other program in basketball or any sport.
“I want to be the best in everything that we do within our athletic department and across this university,” Hollis said.
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“I want to compete for Rose Bowls, and I want to compete for national championships.”
Hollis, who said Izzo never asked for a dime to try and keep him at MSU, added that Izzo’s decision only marks the beginning.
And although Izzo is 55 years old and has led the Spartans for 15 years, even he can improve.
“I expect greatness of our athletic department,” Hollis said. “This is not a time to rest. This is a time to move forward as an entire athletic department in a direction where every staff member, every student-athlete makes a commitment that Tom Izzo made to make our athletic department the best.
“Not the best it can be. The best.”
It might seem like a lofty goal to make MSU the best athletic department in the country. But with people in charge as self-motivated and determined as Izzo and Hollis are, it is in no way out of the question.
Other former Spartan coaches have had the opportunity to make MSU the best. Nick Saban took the Spartans from five straight losing seasons to a nine-win regular season in just four years. Before MSU even could play in its bowl game in 1999, though, Saban was out the door.
Even before Saban, Darryl Rogers appeared to have MSU football on the rise in 1980.
But shortly after winning a Big Ten championship, he was headed for Arizona State along with former athletic director Joe Kearney.
Now it appears the pieces finally are in place to take MSU to the elite level Izzo always talks about. The future is bright for Spartans everywhere.
