Tom Izzo: Winning NCAA Tournament Games ‘Doesn’t Turn Me On'

It's going to take a lot more than a spot in the Sweet 16 to get Tom Izzo excited.

The Michigan State head coach has 16 Elite Eights, eight Final Fours and a Natty to his name. So as Izzo prepares his No. 2-seeded Spartans to square up against the Ole Miss Rebels in the Sweet 16 on Friday night, it's just business as usual for him.

"Once you win a national championship, winning a tournament game means nothing," he said. "It doesn’t turn me on".

Tom Izzo is unimpressed by your measly early-round wins, you peasants.

(Ken Blaze-Imagn Images)

Respectfully, Coach, it should.

I get it. He's a competitor, he expects to win, he's never satisfied with less than the best, blah blah blah. But it has been a while since the 70-year-old coach has lifted that crystal NABC Trophy.

Izzo led Michigan State to a national championship win over the Florida Gators in 2000. For those who are very bad at math, that was a whopping 25 years ago — long before any of his current players were even born. Sure, Izzo has been to a championship game since then, but that was 16 years ago in 2009. The Spartans lost to 7-foot-tall Tyler Zeller and the North Carolina Tar Heels that year.

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Tom Izzo has had so much NCAA Tournament success for a long enough time that he is now tied with Syracuse legend Jim Boeheim for the fourth-most wins in NCAA Tournament history.

So no disrespect to Coach Izzo, of course. He is a Hall of Famer. But maybe don't act like winning a Sweet 16 game is old news when your last national championship is — quite literally — old news.

The Spartans and Rebels are set to tip off at 7:09 p.m. ET on Friday.