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...
It is amazing how quickly things can change in the final few weeks of the Big Ten Men's basketball race. On the evening of February 11, following the Michigan State Spartans' head scratching home loss to the Indiana Hoosiers, I imagined that the rest of February would play out much differently than it did. As I looked at the Spartans' impending gauntlet of game at Illinois, versus Purdue, at Michigan, and at Maryland, I thought the Michigan State would just need to split those four games, as long as one of the wins happened in Ann Arbor. I believed that if the Spartans could enter March with five Big Ten losses, they would have a solid shot to run the table and at least share the regular season title with some combination of Purdue, Wisconsin, or Michigan. I honestly thought Michigan had the longest odds of that group of three teams But things did not play out that way at all. Not only did the Spartans win all four of those critical late February games, Purdue and Wisconsi...