Forward Progress with Tom Izzo: MSU’s Worst Loss and 2000 Championship

0:01Hey, it's Thursday, which means we're coming at you with a short feel-good story from a past guest. Hope you enjoyed the clip. This week, Tom Izzo.

0:13How about your most emotional loss over the years? Wow, my most emotional loss? I mean, I've had a lot of them, but... You've been known to shed a tear. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, I'm an Italian guy where my emotions are on my sleeve. Sometimes good and sometimes bad. but sometimes those officials can't take a joke. What can I say about it? You know, it's just the way it is. But I think the worst one for me was, I want to say it was 2015 when I had a kid named Denzel Valentine. We had a really, really good team. We should have been a one seed. We ended up a two seed. Middle Tennessee should have been about a 12 seed.

0:56They ended up a 15 seed. And that team shot 56 % against us from the field and 53 % from the three. and we shot in the 50s and lost. And I've had about three or four that I really thought were final four teams, but that one was one, and it was with a group of guys I had known Denzel. I recruited his dad out of the Matha High School when I was a GA. I watched him win three state championships here in high school. He came here, and I watched him grow as a person and as a player. And I have a saying, do you like the game, do you love the game, or do you live the game? It's the three Ls, and he lived it.

1:33and we were out in the first round. And that was hard to stomach. It really was. It still gets to you. You can tell. Yeah, it does. Because I think you have, we've gotten to a Final Four as a seventh seed. So I think every year we have a chance. But when you lose as a one or two seed, and you had the type of guys I had, You know, like some teams, I mean, you'll like them all, you'll love some of them, but there's some that are special. He was special, but we were a two and we ran into a team that was very well coached and very good. And, you know, in all the media, well, you look past them. No, that wasn't the case.

2:17That's the difference with football and basketball to me. I tell Mary Jo all the time. Not many upsets happen in football. Usually the bigger, stronger, better team wins over the 60 minutes. In basketball, we have two outliers, the three-point shot and the officials. And I say that not negatively about the officials, but if your star player gets in foul trouble or something, it can change the game. So those two factors in this game, neither one of those were factors. The team just played better than us. You said it gets to you that you haven't won the second championship. Why? Well, we've been back to six Final Fours, you know, And you kind of feel like, why can't we get over the hump?

3:04And there's been good reasons. In fact, there's been three Final Fours we didn't get to that I thought we were as good or better than some of the teams there. But you get selfish too. Like the day that we played Temple to go to a Final Four in 2001, John Chaney, one of my favorite guys, we won the game and I had to go down and shake his hand, and I kind of felt like he was America's team. Everybody was pulling for him. I felt like the guy that shot Bambi. You know, I was like, God, I was apologizing for winning because I had so much respect for him. But at the same time, why we can't win that second one, you know?

3:44And so I've got to figure out what I'm doing wrong. You know, your first one came so early in your head coaching career, and you're an infinitely better coach now and had so much more success since then that it's like interesting how that works. Well, you've heard the old adage, you know, players play the game. But I think the difference is I had an incredible leader in Mateen Cleaves. I mean, he was our version of Magic Johnson. And I've had some good ones, Draymond Green and Denzel and some other guys that have been very good leaders. I like people that, I used to say drag people with them, but then that sounds like they're forcing them.

4:23So we've come up with a term that gather people. Who can gather people and make them better than they really are? That's what a great leader does. So a player-coach team is always better than a coach-coach team. When you've got a real good leader, you have a real shot. One quick favor before you leave, please consider giving the podcast a rating and review. Those go a long way in helping us reach new listeners. Thanks for your support.