Head of State

Watch Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo for long, and the brain starts to think one thing: football coach.

It isn’t just that Steve Mariucci, the San Francisco 49er coach, is Izzo’s best friend since boyhood in Iron Mountain, Mich.

It’s not only because Izzo morphs from mild-mannered coach to Marine drill sergeant on the sideline, barking at players who look like linebackers and defensive ends.

It’s what happened last season after Michigan State got pushed around under the boards by Ohio State.

The next time they ran a rebounding drill, Izzo made the Spartans wear shoulder pads and helmets, just to show them how he expects them to play.

Mariucci liked that one.

“He does a lot of his coaching like we do in football--how he practices, some of the cliches he uses, the way he cuts up film,” said Mariucci, the quarterback to Izzo’s halfback and shooting guard to Izzo’s point guard in high school, then his roommate at Northern Michigan, where Mariucci played football and Izzo played basketball.

Once best-known as Mariucci’s best man--and vice versa--Izzo is now known as one of the best in his game.

After only six seasons as coach, he has won a national championship, guided the Spartans to three consecutive Final Fours and compiled the best NCAA tournament winning percentage of any active coach with at least 10 games.

That’s right: better than Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski.

Krzyzewski has reached nine Final Fours and won two national titles, but his winning percentage at 54-14 is 79.4%.

John Wooden, with his 10 NCAA titles, won 82.5% of his tournament games.

Izzo has won 88.9%.

Granted, it’s a small sample (18 games), and a pace impossible to sustain over the long haul. But it’s quite a start.

“I was watching TV and they had on that Mike Krzyzewski has gone to nine Final Fours,” said Izzo. “I was thinking, wow, maybe we can get three.

“We’ve made some progress, but some of the programs have done it for so many years.

“Three Final Fours, I think it says something about consistency. I would not say we’re with Duke, Carolina and Kentucky, but aspiring to get there.”

Izzo, 46, quickly has become a coach’s coach--widely admired for his teams’ discipline and rebounding, and for his defensive strategy, particularly in the NCAA tournament. Three years ago against a very good Princeton team that had beaten Nevada Las Vegas, the Spartans solved the problem of those backdoor passes by playing defense with their hands down.

That’s right: Down.

“Because Princeton throws bounce passes,” assistant coach Mike Garland said.

“He always comes up with one little thing. Against Temple, it was always showing help. Not giving help, but showing help, so when [Lynn] Greer and [Quincy] Wadley were looking to drive, all they’d see was white shirts.

“He doesn’t get enough credit as probably the best mind in basketball--high school, college or pro--when it comes to the defensive end. He’s an unbelievable defensive strategist.”

That’s especially valuable when the preparation time shrinks to as little as a single day.

“They prepare well for every game,” said Jud Heathcote, Izzo’s mentor for 12 seasons at Michigan State. “In the NCAA tournament, that’s an advantage.”

Perhaps even more than the defensive strategizing, coaches try to figure out how Michigan State consistently rebounds so well.

Despite a lineup without a starter over 6 feet 8, the Spartans led the nation in rebounding margin this season. “I think everyone is in awe of their rebounding ability. They’re trying to find out what his secret is,” Heathcote said.

During the tournament, the Spartans have outrebounded opponents by an average margin of 18.8.

“Believe it or not, we don’t spend hours on rebounding in practice like pressing teams spend 40 minutes a day on the press, or motion teams spend 40 or 50 minutes on that,” Izzo said.

“We played Arkansas one year, and we missed a lot of shots but got 25 offensive rebounds, and we started realizing we didn’t have a very good shooting team that year.

“We decided to put an emphasis on rebounding and it has carried over. I think that when guys come into the program now, they understand.”

They certainly do after their introduction to the rebound drill known as “War.”

“It’s five-on-five,” guard Jason Richardson said. “Coach throws the ball up off the glass and the offense tries to get the offensive rebound and the defense tries to get the rebound and take it to the other end of the court.”

Forget no blood, no foul.

It’s no foul.

“If you’re a little injured, you don’t want to be in there,” point guard Charlie Bell said. “You’ll get pushed, knocked down, fouled. Nobody really cares.”

Here is another secret to the Spartans’ rebounding: Everybody does it.

“We send four to the offensive boards and five to the defensive,” Izzo said.

Even the guards have good rebounding numbers: Richardson, at 6-6, averages 5.9 a game, and Bell, at 6-3, averages 4.5.

“A good rebounder is like a good linebacker,” Izzo said. “He has a nose for the ball.”

Izzo had a nose for a job, hounding Heathcote until he made him a part-time assistant in 1983.

“He’d been persistent. He came down from Northern Michigan to apply for a job three straight years,” Heathcote said.

In May 1986, he left Michigan State to take a job as the top assistant at Tulsa.

“He’d been a part-time assistant for us three years,” Heathcote said. “He was making $8,000. He was out of money. We threw him out of the office and told him to take it.”

In June, one of the full-time assistants at Michigan State left, and Heathcote called Izzo home, eventually endorsing him as his successor before he retired in 1995.

“It’s a neat situation at Michigan State. I’ve been there 18 years,” Izzo said.

“There are people in East Lansing--sometimes including Jud--who still think of me as the graduate assistant, and that’s OK. That really is OK.”

The Spartans were .500 in Izzo’s first season, and 17-12 his second, finishing in the second half of the Big Ten and going to the National Invitation Tournament.

“I learned what pressure was like my second year. When your job is on the line and things like that, that’s pressure,” Izzo said.

“I am not sure this is much pressure, just trying to get to the elite level. It can be exciting, yet it is draining, but it has been good.”

Izzo doesn’t get the talent Duke and most elite programs do.

“Not the talent level coming in. Maybe the talent level going out,” Heathcote said.

“Look at the progress of players like Andre Hutson, A.J. Granger, David Thomas, Morris Peterson,” Heathcote said.

“You can tell more about Tom’s program from the players who weren’t high school stars.”

Whether Michigan State gets to the level of a Duke might depend on whether Izzo stays.

The Atlanta Hawks tried to lure him to the NBA last year.

“We talked probably every day for two weeks, a couple of times a day,” Mariucci said. “He called me from [Hawk President Stan Kasten’s] office. I really thought he was going to take the job the day before. I thought he was leaning that way.”

Izzo stayed. A college man.

“Now,” Mariucci said, “I don’t believe he was committing his entire career to college. He felt at this point in his life, with his family and career, he wanted to stay at Michigan State. He loves it.”

Mariucci loves it too. He’ll be in Minneapolis for the Final Four, and plans on staying until Tuesday.

“I bought a nonrefundable ticket last week,” he said.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Making His Mark

In his first six seasons as Michigan State coach, Tom Izzo has compiled a better record than Mike Krzyzewski did in his first six at Duke. Krzyzewski, however, went on to greater success in his next six seasons:

*--*

First Six Seasons Next Six Krzyzewski Izzo Krzyzewski Wins 122 148 175 Losses 68 52 42 Pct. .642 .740 .806 Final 4 1 3 5 Nat. Title 0 1 2

*--*

NOTE: Izzo has a 16-2 record in the NCAA tournament. Kryzyzewski had a 6-3 record in his first six seasons.

*

FRESH STUFF

A mystery for most of the season, Arizona’s 7-foot-1 Loren Woods has refreshed his game just in time for the Final Four. D6