Not many coaches have so many conference titles that it becomes a debate over which of them is the best.

Heck, many coaches never get one at all.

Tom Izzo just won his 11th Big Ten regular season title in his 30th season at the helm at Michigan State. The 2025 Big Ten banner that will go up in the rafters of the Breslin Center should go down as Izzo’s best. It may not be Izzo’s best team ever — maybe not even close — but this perhaps is his most impressive conference championship.

For starters, it is really, really difficult to win the Big Ten, let alone win it outright. Some of Izzo’s very best teams didn’t accomplish that, including the 2000 national championship team, who shared it with Ohio State. The Buckeyes later vacated their share of the conference title, but the point remains.

Five of Izzo's seven other Final Four teams also failed to win the conference outright. One of those teams (2015) finished tied for third in the Big Ten.

In fact, this is just the fourth time Michigan State has won an undisputed Big Ten title in the Izzo era, joining the squads of 1999, 2009 and 2018.

What makes the 2025 outright title impressive is some of the additional layers to it that were not there in the past.

The first part of it is simply that the Big Ten has never been larger. Winning a championship in an 18-team league is more challenging than doing the same thing than when the number of teams is 12 or 14.

What also makes it extra challenging on a coach and his staff is the number of one-off preparations it needs to make. Izzo has stated in the past that preparing to play a team for the first time takes a much larger amount of time than it does the second time around.

Michigan State only plays three conference opponents twice this year, and sealed up the outright title before its second matchup with Michigan. That means that Izzo and MSU were only getting a second look at an opponent in two of their 19 Big Ten games on the road to clinching a title.

The occasional travel out west also makes it a challenge. It’s probably not a coincidence that two of Michigan State’s three losses in Big Ten play were when the Spartans had to fly out to Los Angeles to play USC and UCLA.

Just a year ago, MSU got to play seven of the Big Ten’s 13 other teams two different times. That’s four more games and an additional 20% of the conference schedule where Izzo and his staff would be able to devote more of its time and resources to improving itself, rather than learning about the opponent.

The Big Ten used to have a 16-game and 18-game conference schedule as well, but it had always been the case that Michigan State would play more teams twice in those years than it did this season.

What also makes this team so special from a coaching standpoint is how well Izzo has managed its depth. Particularly in this era of the transfer portal and NIL, it is very, very challenging to find ten playable guys and then keep a player who could be getting 30 minutes a game elsewhere that’s receiving 15-20 at MSU happy.

This is also not the times of past where top programs like Izzo's can recruit players and then slowly acclimate them into the fold over one or two years as much. Guys that want more playing time can simply leave without losing any eligibility now.

The player that receives the most minutes per game is Jaden Akins at 26.7, and he is also the leading scorer at just 13.0 points a contest. Despite that, this team’s offense is scoring the fourth-most points in the Izzo era.

Once the Big Ten postseason awards come out, there is a real chance Michigan State will not have a player receive first or second-team honors. There have been very few conference games this year where the best individual player has been on the MSU side.

That’s insanity for a team that won the conference outright. The last time an undisputed Big Ten champ didn’t have a player receive just first-team honors was 1996 Purdue. In essence, if Izzo doesn’t win coach of the year in the Big Ten for the first time since 2012, something is wrong.

It’s also a testament to Izzo’s willingness to adapt. After getting eliminated by North Carolina in the second round of the NCAA Tournament last season, Izzo said he was going to get back to deeper runs in March or he will “die trying.”

Read the comments under that tweet and tell me that it was expected for Izzo and Michigan State to reach this point just a year later.

Izzo has stuck to his word.

A reason for that is because Izzo then brought in multiple transfers: Frankie Fidler from Omaha and Szymon Zapala out of Longwood. Neither of them are necessarily stars, but both have found a legitimate role in MSU’s large rotation, with Fidler being someone that can get some points when needed and Zapala as a nice defensive piece.

But still, this is a team that is winning without a true superstar.

The other three Izzo teams that won the conference were not built this way. All three other teams had a true star or two to lean on all season.