Michigan State head coach Tom Izzo was visibly upset Wednesday night during his opening statement after a game against Penn State.

“I’m really disappointed," Izzo said.

“I’m taking full responsibility.”

Those are the words of someone that just lost by double-digits to drop to 10-7 overall and 2-4 in the Big Ten — MSU’s record through 17 total games last season.

Instead, those words came from someone whose team just improved to 15-2 on the year and 6-0 in conference play after a 90-85 win over the Nittany Lions.

This is not the Izzo of the last handful of years. This is an Izzo that hasn’t seen a banner go up in far too long.

Izzo's postgame press conferences tend to last 20-30 minutes lately. This one was a curt 11.5 minutes. He was off to work on his team.

“We cannot handle success right now, so quit saying where we are, because we’re not anywhere yet,” Izzo said with flair. “We’re a good basketball team that’s got a long, long, long, long ways to go to get better. OK? Period. That’s where we are.”

It doesn’t take much psychoanalysis to see that such a statement after a tenth consecutive win means a high standard has now been reset in East Lansing.

There are a few reasons this win — emphasis on WIN — was not up to Izzo’s standard.

The obvious one is Penn State’s 85 points. Excluding overtime periods, that number is the most MSU has allowed since that fateful road game against Iowa in February 2023, where the Hawkeyes scored 101 in regulation and won 112-106 in OT. The last time an opponent did that in the Breslin Center was when Oakland dropped 91 (but allowed 109) in December 2020.

“I thought after (the last) game (against Northwestern) — we’ve given up 40 points (in the second half) in the last two games, and we did not learn much from it,” Izzo said. “We talked about it, we talked about it as a staff, we talked about it as a staff, we talked about talking to the officials, we talked about the way things are, and I didn’t get much carryover tonight. So that means I did not do a very good job getting through to my guys. So I can promise you tonight I’m going to find a way to get through to them.”

The other is that Penn State pretty much did a better job at the three components MSU has lived by under Tom Izzo: defend, rebound, and run.

“We didn’t defend well, we rebounded OK, not great; and we didn’t run very well,” Izzo said.

Michigan State was just plus-4 in the rebounding category and plus-6 for fast break points. While the Spartans were on the positive side of those statistics, it did not really feel like it during the game and Penn State really handled MSU's quickness taking the ball up the court better than any of the other Big Ten teams Michigan State has played to date.

The barrier to entry to seeing a happy Tom Izzo postgame is no longer just scraping out a win against an inferior opponent. Penn State isn’t necessarily bad, but Michigan State set its own expectations for what should happen to teams of the Nittany Lions’ caliber when it comes to East Lansing — check what happened to Nebraska and Washington.

“It’s good when someone you know sees a lot of potential in you and he can hold you accountable if you’re not doing what he sees fit,” said guard Jaden Akins in the locker room after the game.