We were 13 minutes into Tom Izzo’s postgame press conference Monday night when Lindsay Huddleston asked about confidence. Six minutes and 15 seconds later, Izzo called for the next (and last) question.
In between, Michigan State’s 96–59 win over Quinnipiac briefly became a 40-point victory, Jesse McCulloch played two imaginary minutes in the game, and a lawyer took over delivery of Izzo’s newspaper headlines.
It was all one answer. Here’s the route, as best as I can reconstruct it.
1. Lindsay Huddleston asks about confidence
A few moments earlier, Izzo had been asked if Anton Bonke needed a night like this after playing sparingly in the exhibitions. “I think I needed it,” Izzo said. Coaches need confidence in their players, too, and Izzo liked what he’d seen from Bonke.
Huddleston picked up on that. “Do you think the confidence is very important for you and the team based on how critical so many people outside of your locker room were because of those past exhibitions?”
Izzo opened by saying he’d been listening to a lot of football guys over the last two or three weeks.
That was our first clue. Rant: incoming.
2. The UConn exhibition counts for whatever you had on it
Izzo started with the upside of playing UConn in October. He got to play a bunch of guys in front of 15,000 people, and he didn’t think there had been an empty seat in the Breslin Center. The tricky part, as he put it, was that while he realized it was an exhibition game, it really wasn’t.
Especially if you had money on it.
Izzo figured half the reason people were mad was that they’d lost a bet. He said he had no use for those people if they were MSU fans. He got as far as “And if they aren’t” before remembering something about Dabo Swinney.
We never did find out what happened if they weren’t fans. But we can imagine.
3. Jack Ebling sends a clip, and suddenly we’re in Tallahassee
Izzo paused to check with Jack Ebling, who was sitting in the front row, and who’d sent him the Swinney clip. As Izzo told it, a plane flew a banner ripping Florida State coach Mike Norvell while the team was warming up and stayed overhead through the game. There was a quick aside about the sort of guy who might’ve paid for it, and then Izzo kept going.
How would you like to be one of the players coming out? One of the coaches? One of their wives? One of their kids?
Izzo said he understood his job was to win. He also figured that the reporters in the room had spent more time at practice than some of the people who were sure they knew what was happening there.
Izzo had talked to Swinney. He loved what Dabo said, loved how he said it, and wanted more coaches sticking up for each other. Then he turned back to the room. “You guys don’t have the right,” he began, talking to the media, before granting the right to an opinion and adding that it had better be an educated one.
He's not wrong.
4. Jesse McCulloch checks into a game he sat out
McCulloch sat out Monday with what was described as a very mild concussion. In the game Izzo made up at the podium, he put Jesse in for two minutes just for the hell of it.
Then Izzo acted out the guy complaining about it. What’s the deal with Jesse? He had 20 in the first exhibition, and the dumb coach doesn’t play him?
This is my favorite part.
Izzo invented a substitution, invented a guy who hated it, called himself a dumb coach on the guy’s behalf, and then told the guy he had no freaking clue what was going on.
Jesse managed to get through the whole thing without checking in.
5. The schedule goes under review
Izzo wanted to point out that there was a lot of basketball left in this season. First, we had to establish how much.
He started at 31, tried 30, went back to 31, wondered if that was the total, and asked the room. Then he remembered the rule change. Teams could play 32 games now. Michigan State had played one.
Thirty-one.
The original call stood. Izzo said there would be ups and downs over those 31 games, which brought him to the place where people would be spending those ups and downs: Twitter.
6. Twitter can keep the recruit
Izzo said people had been telling him for more than 12 years that staying off Twitter would cost him recruits. If a player decided against Michigan State because Tom Izzo wasn’t on Twitter, he said, that would actually be a blessing.
He also figured he probably wasn’t getting any NIL deals off Twitter because of his constant negativity towards it. He seemed prepared to take the financial hit.
