College Basketball Has Just One Great Coach: Tom Izzo

The attention of analysts, especially in college basketball, is mostly on coaches. The coaches are portrayed as the stars of college basketball by the media because they are the constants; the players are practically disposable commodities, turning over in four years at most.

College players can’t do commercials, mostly don’t do interviews, and therefore, the head coach will become the face of any given program.

Kentucky and the attention surrounding its hiring of John Calipari has made evident the love affair with coaches.

Calipari has been very successful in the last four years at Memphis and got UMass to a Final Four. He is certainly one of the better college coaches in America, but I for one do not believe he is a great coach.

He is a great recruiter. When one man can convince Derrick Rose and Tyreke Evans to play for him in consecutive years, he has a great skill in obtaining talent. But there is a big difference between recruiting and coaching talent.

For example, in college football, Pete Carroll is the best recruiter, as he gets immense talent to attend USC. He doesn’t have to be a great coach for them to have success, as his school boasts an atmosphere in which players make the plays and the coach can supplement them bur not dominate them (as so many analysts think coaches do).

Roy Williams is often mentioned as a great coach, and with his record, I can see why people think he is. But then again, look at the UNC team this year and their lineup. How many other Division I coaches could get that group to the Final Four?

I would guess at least 10. Roy is a master of the college game, but that's where recruiting is first and coaching is second for most elite schools.

Arguing that Calipari or Rick Pitino are great coaches is to ignore their absolute failure on the professional level.

In their NBA stints, both had talent, and both were unsuccessful because they weren’t able to play the recruiting game and handpick their talent.

Coach K flirted with the NBA and the Lakers, and then decided to head back to Duke. It is a decision that he regrets, and it is easy to tell by his body language.

Duke gets great talent every year, yet every year apologists claim that Duke doesn’t have "enough talent."

If you have seen Duke in the tournament the last few years, you definitely know that they do not have a great coach. Coach K is just good at recruiting, as Calipari and Pitino are; look at all of the very good NBA players who came from Duke. Coach K does not make them better once they arrive in Durham.

The key factor in a great coach is that he has decent talent and then makes them noticeably better. Only one coach has consistently done that for over a decade, and for that he should be recognized as the best coach in college basketball by far.

But Tom Izzo doesn't get the credit he deserves.

Michigan State has good players; Izzo does have what it takes to get some talent to come to his school. Jason Richardson and Zach Randolph stand out, and there have been others, like Shannon Brown and Maurice Ager, with pretty solid credentials.

However, more than any other school, Michigan State has role players that fit perfectly into the team. I watched two games featuring MSU over the weekend, and I know Goran Suton; that’s it. Yet the Spartans have now made the Final Four five times in the last 11 years.

After the Louisville game, pundits stated that most people didn’t think that Michigan State was good enough to beat Louisville. If we were to judge solely on talent, "most people" would be correct, but Tom Izzo always builds a team that fit together well and noticeably improves players through his leadership. Come tournament time, the Spartans almost always look crisper, sharper, better prepared, and have a better understanding of what they need to do to succeed.

The only times Michigan State gets into trouble in the tournament is when the team and Izzo believe they have more talent than the other team; the losses to Nevada in 2004 and George Mason in 2006 are perfect examples of this.

Izzo and his guys always appeared to be in control of what they wanted to do against Kansas, though it was a game they easily could have lost had they not shown composure.

Louisville appeared baffled by the MSU defense, and despite a pretty hefty road-game feel in Indianapolis, the Spartans elevated their game even more.

In Detroit, MSU will definitely have the home-court advantage. UConn will have the best two players on the court come Saturday, plus a coach with an incredibly strong resume in Jim Calhoun. Yes, the Spartans will be the underdogs again and will be outsized in their matchups.

Often it is very difficult to determine what is a great coaching job and what isn’t when the game is taking place, seeing as how many things happen behind the scenes, in planning and workouts. But that is why Tom Izzo’s performance stands out.

Sometimes Michigan State is not pretty to watch, because a lot of Big Ten opponents lack the talent of ACC and Big East teams, and the style is more defensively focused.

Tom Izzo is not in the same league of recruiting as Coach K or Roy Williams or John Calipari or Ben Howland, yet his results over the last decade have been just as good, if not better. Elevating good players to excellent results is the definition of a great coach, and Tom Izzo is the best coach in college basketball for that very reason.