Denzel Valentine's Nightmare: The Heartbreak of Shocking Upset for MSU Star

ST. LOUIS — They couldn’t bear the sight of each other.

Denzel Valentine cast his eyes toward the Scottrade Center ceiling, the overhead lights glistening in his tears. 

Overcome with emotion, Kathy Valentine turned her back to her son—literally turned 180 degrees in her seat—and sobbed.

Then Denzel Valentine began the loneliest walk in college basketball: from the handshake line to the locker room after a defeat in the final game of his college career.

This was no run-of-the-mill heartbreaker for Valentine and the Michigan State Spartans, of course. It was a gut shot of the fiercest kind. It was so unexpected, the question immediately bandied about on Twitter was: biggest upset in NCAA tournament history? 

Middle Tennessee 90, Michigan State 81 will be remembered forever. Put it right up there with Lehigh over Duke in 2012, Hampton over Iowa State in 2001 or any other of the seven No. 15 vs. No. 2 seed upsets the tournament has seen. 

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Maybe the place for this one is right there at the top of the heap. Throughout the season and up until Friday, the Spartans were as common a national-championship pick as you could find. They were a No. 2 seed in name only; if not for a brief January downturn as Valentine recovered from minor in-season surgery, they surely would've been a No. 1. 

Not only that, but Valentine, the leader of a tremendous group of Spartans seniors, was a star of rare quality. Since the NCAA began tracking assists as an official statistic in the 1983-84 season, Valentine is the only player to average at least 19 points, seven rebounds and seven assists per game. His well-roundedness got him out of the shadow of Oklahoma's Buddy Hield and allowed him to capture many national player of the year honors.

And not only those things, but you know, there’s the whole Tom Izzo thing, too. Izzo is supposed to own March, right? He must have a magic formula for reaching the Final Four, which his teams have done seven times. He is the sport’s Mr. Reliable.

Or was.

It might take a while to figure out if, or how, one epic defeat will change our overall perceptions of Izzo and his program.

“I don’t care about next year. I don’t care about tomorrow,” a red-eyed Izzo said afterward. “That’s the problem, you know? It’s always, ‘What’s next?’”

Sharing the podium with Valentine, Matt Costello and Bryn Forbes, Izzo then gestured toward his seniors, his voice quavering.

“There’s three guys here that gave me every single thing they had.”

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No one more so than Valentine, a Lansing native whose father, Carlton, played for the Spartans and whose brother, Drew, was a graduate assistant under Izzo. Valentine grew up a Spartans superfan, attending games and idolizing the program’s stars.

Costello, Forbes and others credit the hardworking Valentine with dragging them to heights they hadn’t known they could reach. He had a brilliant career and—doesn’t it seem?—was supposed to deliver Izzo an elusive second national title before riding off into the NBA sunset.

Instead?

The “instead” is brutal.

“With great power comes great responsibility,” said Valentine, “and I didn’t handle it.”

Hearing that comment, Izzo put a hand on Valentine’s shoulder, turned his head away and tried to bite back more tears. It wasn’t supposed to end this way. In the end, no way was a player of Valentine’s magnitude supposed to see himself as having failed.

But this is the power, the magic, the abject cruelty of the NCAA tournament. Coach Kermit Davis and his Blue Raiders got to walk off the court and into a second-round collision course with beatable Syracuse, acting like they’d been here before. Which, of course, they haven’t. But the attitude of Davis’ team is tremendous.

“We weren’t scared of the moment,” said senior Perrin Buford, who scored 15 and grabbed a team-high seven rebounds. “We came into the game thinking we were going to win.” 

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And Valentine came into the game knowing his team was going to win. Ever since the Spartans lost in the Final Four a year ago, it has been national-title-or-bust for Valentine. 

But Middle Tennessee wouldn’t stop coming after them, hitting the Spartans with a 15-2 spurt to open the game. The Blue Raiders answered every hot streak, every mini-run, every seemingly game-turning three-point basket by MSU with cold-blooded clutchness.

It’s too much to say the Spartans deserved to lose this game, but the Blue Raiders absolutely deserved to win it.

The “bust” hit Valentine—who had 12 assists, but only 13 points and a glaring six turnovers—like a freight train. Walking through a hallway after the game, he put his arms around Costello and former high school teammate Forbes and leaned hard, his legs wobbling. 

The end came so terribly fast.

“It just sucks that we’re going home right now,” he said.

Izzo, meanwhile, called it the second-worst defeat of his career, the hardest being the one that ended his predecessor and mentor Jud Heathcote’s career. Izzo was a young assistant then, a man on the rise but hardly a well-known name in college basketball. 

So much has happened since then. For one thing, Izzo became one of the sport’s true celebrities. His name became synonymous with delivering in March.

But Izzo has always been about feeling, not fame. Valentine was as important to him as Mateen Cleaves, as Draymond Green—as any Spartan, ever. This loss came with great shock and even more sorrow.

“You’re supposed to coach every team and every game the same way,” Izzo said. “But let’s face it, there are some guys and some teams that just do more for you. These guys resurrected me.”

Even for a team on the wrong end of perhaps the biggest upset in tournament history, it’s more about what was built than what got torn down.

At least, it should be. And eventually, for all involved, it will be.

Even if, in the aftermath, that felt a long way away.

Steve Greenberg has covered college sports for nearly 20 years, namely for the Sporting News and the Chicago Sun-Times. Follow him on Twitter @SLGreenberg.

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