- Joined
- Oct 7, 2012
- Messages
- 41,113
Tuesday, December 1, 7:30pm ET, ESPN
Tom Izzo is 2-12 in his career against Duke, 1-7 against Roy Williams at North Carolina and 1-0 against COVID-19. It has been a long and overrated career for Izzo, highlighted by various mainstream media articles calling him the best college basketball coach in the country on the back of a single national championship 20 years ago. With a very typical Michigan State roster, he heads into Cameron in a very atypical season.
The hallmarks of an Izzo team are being good on the boards and bad when it comes to turnovers. They are almost always in the top 100 in both offensive and defensive rebounding rate and usually in the top 50. They are almost always in the bottom half of the country in both protecting the ball and generating turnovers. This MSU team should have the rebounding part covered, as their rotation is full of length. Of the 10 players expected to get significant playing time, six are 6-7 or taller. Duke has the size to match up, but most of it is untested and appears to be untrusted by the coaching staff, and it's unlikely that going bigger would be good for this Duke team.
Izzo's roster is normally filled with 4-star recruits but not many elite recruits, and it's no different this season: the only top 25 recruit on MSU is Joshua Langford, who has been a bust hampered by injuries thus far in his career. On a relatively old team (six juniors and a senior in the regular rotation), Langford stands out as a senior citizen--he'll be 24 in January. As always, Coach K will have a clear talent edge against Izzo, though certainly not the experience edge. It was a similar story when Zion Williamson and two other top 10 picks lost in the Elite Eight to a team with no impending draft picks.
In a season when no team really knows when its next game is going to happen or whom they're going to end up facing, every game against good competition counts even more than usual. The difference between going 5-2 in Quadrant 1 games and going 4-3 in Quadrant 1 games, for example, could mean the difference between a 1-seed and a 3-seed in an NCAA Tournament that may or may not take place.
Last edited:
