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Published Mar 13, 2023
MSU's Tom Izzo says 25-year NCAA Tournament bid streak 'means the world'
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Brendan Moore  •  Spartans Illustrated
Staff Writer
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Michigan State basketball is headed to its 25th-straight NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament appearance, all under head coach Tom Izzo.

After the bracket was revealed on Sunday, Izzo, senior forward Malik Hall and graduate forward Joey Hauser spoke to the media.

With MSU’s inclusion in the 2023 NCAA Tournament, Izzo broke the all-time record for longest streak of consecutive tournament appearances for a head coach with 25.

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“It means the world to me,” Izzo said to the media about the tournament streak. “It means that I had a lot of good players. It means that I had a lot of good staff. It means that I had a lot of good fans. You don’t win games over a period of time because of what you do. You win games because there’s a collection of people who are all doing their job.”

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Despite his historic past, Izzo is still looking ahead to future memories.

“Twenty-five years is a long time, but I still hope the best is yet to come,” Izzo said.

The coaches, players, families and friends of the MSU basketball program all gathered in the recruiting lounge inside of the Breslin Center to watch the selection show. MSU’s name wasn’t called until the very end, but seeing the Spartan head logo on the bracket was “exciting” for Hauser.

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“It’s always exciting,” Hauser said about seeing MSU’s name and logo on the bracket during the selection show. “This year was just a great achievement for Coach Izzo … setting the record. It’s unbelievable for him. He wouldn’t want us to do anything more than put that aside now and focus on our opponent.”

MSU drew the No. 7-seed in the East Region. The Spartans will play the No. 10-seeded USC Trojans on Friday at 12:15 p.m. in Columbus, Ohio. The winner of that game will play the winner of the matchup between No. 2-seed Marquette and the No. 15-seed Vermont in the Round of 32.

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“I think it’s a good draw, a lot of really great teams,” Hall said. “I think it’ll just be fun to match up against a bunch of different teams. I think in my career here, I haven’t seen most of those teams before.”

Izzo and his staff got to work on Sunday night as the Spartans prepare to take on the Trojans on Friday. Izzo noted that he’s watched USC play a few times this season.

“It looks like they’re a team that’s very good defensively," Izzo said about USC.

He also highlighted that USC is a “good free-throw shooting team” and those two traits are keys to winning games in the tournament.

Out of all eight locations that host first and second round games in the NCAA Tournament, Columbus was the closest to East Lansing as it sits about 288 miles south of MSU’s campus.

“Being in Columbus, Big Ten country, it’s nice for our fans, it’s nice for our families, it’s nice for our players’ families,” Izzo said.

After the loss to Ohio State in the Big Ten Tournament in Chicago, Izzo thinks that his team will be mentally ready for Friday’s game against the University of Southern California.

“I think we’ll be in the right frame of mind, but it’s been an incredible year with a lot of different things that had happened,” Izzo said. “Nothing like March and even though I didn’t think we handled March last weekend very well. There’s gonna be those days and it’s how you bounce back."

Once the team arrived back in East Lansing after last Friday’s loss against the Buckeyes, the players and staff had many meetings.

“We came back and had a lot of meetings,” Izzo said. “A lot of talks with a lot of guys. What I thought we did wrong, and what I didn’t think we did at a level you have to do it at to play in March, and hopefully we ironed some of those out.”

As a veteran who has played in multiple NCAA Tournaments in the past few years, Hall knows that MSU has to play better than it did in the Big Ten Tournament.

“We have to be better,” Hall said. “If we want to make a run like we know we can, we have to be better through a full 40 minutes of the game. There can be no more 'My bads.' There can be no more little mess ups and things like that.”

Making it to the second weekend has eluded Michigan State teams of the recent past. Since the Spartans' Final Four appearance in 2015, MSU has only made it past the first weekend of games once (2019, which also resulted in a Final Four appearance).

“It’s something that we all want to do,” Hauser said about making a run to the second weekend. “We’ve made it a priority of ours.”

Hauser recognizes that the NCAA Tournament is a reset for a team that had a disappointing showing the last time the Spartans stepped on the court.

“It’s a completely new season,” Hauser said about the tournament. “We’re looking to go on a run.”

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