Dr. Green and White Sports Authority

This is not Michigan State head coach Tom Izzo's first rodeo. It is in fact, his 27th rodeo in his 30th season at the helm in East Lansing. He has been in this position before, and it takes a little more than just a win in the Sweet 16, his 11th, to get him excited. "Elite Eights are great, but we don't put up any banners for Great Eights," Izzo said when asked about the magnitude of Michigan State's 73-70 win over Mississippi in Friday night's NCAA Tournament contest in the South Region Semifinals. "We put up banners for championships, and Final Fours, and national championships." In other words, Izzo is not done yet this year. On some level, he is just getting started. As a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament, Michigan State was basically expected the reach the Regional Final. That mission has been accomplished. When it comes to performance against seed expectation, Izzo is the best of all time.  But Izzo and the Spartans want more, and it's the ...

Michigan State senior Jaden Akins likely thought that his final year in Green and White would progress a little differently than it did. After grinding quietly for two years in the shadow of former Spartans guards Tyson Walker and A.J. Hoggard, the 2024-25 season was Akins chance to step into the leading roll in East Lansing. But the first month of the season got off to a bit of rocky start. Akins only managed two points on 1-for-8 shooting in the Spartans' marquee early season game, a loss to Kansas in the Champions Classic. Despite shooting a red-hot 38% from deep over his first three seasons on campus, Akins was just 7-36 (19%) in the month of November.  Akins nominally led the Spartans in scoring, but in the early weeks of the season Michigan State basketball observes started to question whether the Spartans had a "go-to guy" that they could rely on at crunch time. The often unspoken subtext was "that guy" was supposed to be Akins. As the season marched alon...

For my money, we are all of the cusp of the best three weeks of the entire year. We just wrapped up two weeks of conference tournaments, but those were just an appetizer to the main course that is yet to come.  The powers that be gave us the menu on Sunday evening for the feast that is to come. Now it is time to enjoy a brief break and palette cleaner before we all make our selections. But what shall we choose? Which tasty little upset looks the best in the first round? Which teams are most likely to be sweet in the second weekend? Which quartet will comprise the final course? Over the years I have developed a set of analytics and computational tools to gain a better understanding of the mathematical underpinning of the NCAA Basketball Tournament. My methodology has a solid track record of correctly identifying upsets and sometimes doing more than that. In 2023, I used data to correctly predict that No. 4 seed UConn win the National Title. There is no foolproof way to dominate your...

I will be assembling my "usual" stats-based analysis of the bracket, complete with picks a little later this week (but before Thursday). For now, I had some thought on the bracket. In general, MSU's draw is about as good as fans could expect. I will go into more detail on that later. As for the job that the committee did... I am far from impressed. Once again, there are multiple errors in team selection, seeding, and bracketing as a whole. Let's look at each one in turn. Did the Committee get the right 68 teams? More or less. This is the area where I am the least concerned. As I mentioned yesterday, my metrics had UNC safely in the field and not even in the First Four, but I swapped them out for WVU at the last minute. UNC's single Q1 win gave me too much pause. I felt slightly vindicated when UNC made it.  My biggest beef is with Texas making it in at 19-15. That's just too many loses. Yes, they had 7 Q1 wins, but that also had 5 loses outside of Q1 and an ov...

Michigan State head coach Tom Izzo has earned a lot of accolades over the years. Most Spartan fans are familiar with his National Title in 2000 and his eight Final Fours. A portion of the fanbase is likely aware of his multiple coach-of-the-year awards both Nationally (in 1998, 2001, 2005, and 2012) and in the Big Ten (in 1998, 2009, and 2012). This season, Coach Izzo added another achievement to his long list of accomplishments. The Spartans' upset win at Illinois gave Izzo 354 Big Ten wins, breaking the previous record held by Indiana legend Bob Knight.  As the 2025 Big Ten regular season draws to a close, Izzo is poised to tie yet another record. If Michigan State can win just one of the final two games in the regular season, Izzo will claim his 11th Big Ten title, tying the current record all-time record. But the fact that Izzo is so close to yet another accolade seemed to come as a surprise to him. When asked about his thoughts on another impending milestone following Sunday...