EAST LANSING – A day before Mick Cronin went on his scathing diatribe after UCLA’s tumultuous home loss to Michigan on Tuesday night, Tom Izzo gave pause when asked what challenges the four new West Coast additions bring to Big Ten basketball.
Michigan State’s Hall of Fame coach said the sentiment historically was that the old Pac-12 – which included the Bruins, USC, Oregon and the Spartans’ next opponent, Washington – “would have (been) thought of as softer.”
Even though Cronin said as much about his UCLA squad, Izzo now believes the new members are prepared to battle in the bruising Big Ten.
Mick Cronin went OFF on his players following their loss to Michigan 😳
“We’re soft… Every day, I have more passion and energy in practice than anybody else. I’m tired of it. It’s a joke… The truth of it is, it’s really hard to coach guys who are delusional” pic.twitter.com/abGQdPkfQN
— The Field of 68 (@TheFieldOf68) January 8, 2025
“I don’t know if there’s as much difference,” Izzo said Monday. “And a lot of the teams out there used to (have) West Coast players. Now, they’re players from all over the country, more with the transfer portal. So it’s different.”
No. 14 MSU (12-2, 3-0 Big Ten) hosts its first of the new foes Thursday night with a visit from Washington. Tipoff at Breslin Center is 8 p.m. EDT – or 5 p.m. in Seattle.
And Izzo feels the Huskies (10-5, 1-3) are a perfect representation of the stylistic difference and improved toughness from previous generations of programs down the Pacific coastline.
“This team,” Izzo surmised of Washington, “they got some guys that come after you.”
All four of the former Pac-12 schools are ranked in the top 100 by kenpom.com, with the Huskies checking in at No. 87. The 17th-ranked Bruins are 26th and the Ducks 27th as of Wednesday, behind six other Big Ten programs, including MSU (18th), which enters Thursday having won seven in a row. USC is 77th.
Only one conference school (Minnesota at 112th) ranks lower than Washington, but the Huskies have won four of their last six games, all at home, knocking off previously ranked Maryland last Thursday and taking No. 15 Illinois to the wire Sunday before falling 81-77. They also lost in that stretch to crosstown mid-major Seattle by nine points.
“This league tests you mentally. Not just physically,” first-year coach Danny Sprinkle told reporters Monday in Seattle. “You’ve seen the last two games how physical those games are.”
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The Mountain West coach of the year last season, Sprinkle led Utah State to a 28-7 record and an NCAA tournament at-large berth before getting stomped in the second round by Purdue. It was his only season with the Aggies after spending the previous four years at Montana State, where he went 81-43.
Upon arriving at Washington, Sprinkle dusted his roster with 10 new players, eight of them transfers. The Huskies are led by 6-foot-8 forward Great Osobor, who followed Sprinkle from Utah State and averages team highs with 14.3 points and 8.7 rebounds. Sophomore guard Tyler Harris, a 6-8 Portland transfer, adds 12.1 points and 5.3 boards, while freshman point guard Zoom Diallo posts 10.9 points, 2.9 assists and 2.9 rebounds a game.
While there are now 15 games of tape for Izzo and his staff to scout this iteration of the Huskies, they have not played against a Sprinkle-coached team previously.
“We’re really trying to figure them out,” MSU redshirt freshman point guard Jeremy Fears Jr. said Monday. “It’s a West Coast team, we don’t usually play Washington, so it’s new to the coaches, it’s new to us. We don’t know who they have, what they have quite yet, and they don’t really know what we have.
“It’s not someone we’re used to playing, like an Ohio State or Illinois that’s (been) in our conference. They just got added, so it’ll be interesting.”
The Spartans own a 4-2 all-time record in the series that dates back to 1942, which was a Washington win in East Lansing. They met twice in Izzo’s 30 seasons as head coach, most recently a 76-71 victory in the 2010 Maui Invitational third-place game. MSU won the only meeting between the two at Breslin in Izzo’s first season, a 64-50 victory in the first round of the National Invitation Tournament on March 13, 1996.
As for the other three new foes, the Spartans will get them back-to-back-to-back in early February, with a long road trip to Los Angeles to face USC on Feb. 1 and UCLA on Feb. 4 and returning home to a Feb. 8 visit from Oregon.
On Tuesday, the Bruins got blitzed by visiting Michigan, falling behind by 18 points in the first half before rallying to take a brief second-half lead and then crumbling again over the final 10 minutes. Along with calling his players “soft” and “delusional,” among other things, Midwest-tough Cronin – who grew up in Ohio and previously coached at Cincinnati – added “the hungry dog gets the bone” when it comes to competing in the Big Ten.
“Right now,” he said, “I’m searching deeply for some guys that will play hard enough to win a Big Ten game. … The team whose mind is on the right stuff and hungry to get a win in conference play is the team that’s probably going to win.”
Izzo is hoping his dogs have more bite than bark against the Huskies and the other old Pac-12 foes.
“I know what’s at stake. I know what’s right around the corner,” he said. “I know that every game is going to be that kind of game. I really believe that, too. And people that don’t, must not have watched any games on TV – it’s happening everywhere. … I just think people are having trouble handling success in general.
“And I want to make sure that my team’s mature enough, but also that they’re maybe hungry enough to not to be satisfied. It’s so easy to be satisfied nowadays, and I don’t want to be satisfied until the season’s over. Then I want to be satisfied.”
Prediction
MSU 78, Washington 66: Coming off Friday’s hard-fought win at Ohio State, the Spartans return home and take advantage of the newness of the opponent to push the pace in transition and dominate on the glass for an eighth straight victory.
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him @chrissolari.
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Next up: Huskies
Matchup: No. 14 Michigan State (12-2, 3-0 Big Ten) vs. Washington (10-4, 1-2).
Tipoff: 8 p.m. Thursday; Breslin Center, East Lansing.
TV/radio: Big Ten Network; WJR-AM (760).
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan State basketball prediction vs. Washington
