Having both sports this nationally relevant together is improbable, rare and won't last forever


EAST LANSING — If anyone ever tells you that buying a lottery ticket is a waste of money, time or hope, simply point toward Michigan State’s campus and drop the mic. Then pick it up and dust it off, because that would be a waste of money. 

The odds of what’s happening at MSU weren’t small. They were next to zero. The idea that both the football and men’s basketball programs would ever be so nationally relevant at the same time was inconceivable not so long ago.

“Unimaginable, I want to say no, but it probably was a little bit unimaginable,” MSU basketball coach Tom Izzo said this week.

“I have a pretty big imagination,” MSU athletic director Mark Hollis said.

Fair enough. Let’s call it the pipe dream of all pipe dreams. 

MSU is the standard for major college athletics — its football and basketball programs collectively the best in the nation over the last six years by a country mile.

Since this date in 2009 …

In basketball: two Final Fours, two Big Ten titles, two Big Ten tournament titles, five Sweet 16s, three regional finals and a record of a 161-60 — including a 7-0 start this year and a No. 3 national ranking.

In football: two Big Ten championships, three division champions, three straight top-five finishes (counting this regular season), five seasons of at least 11 wins and a record of 64-15, as the Spartans head into this Saturday’s Big Ten title game, one win from a berth in College Football’s four-team playoff.

That level of success from a university’s two primary revenue sports doesn’t exist anywhere else right now in Division I. Not Ohio State or Wisconsin, nor Florida or Oklahoma. Not Michigan, which used to be MSU’s internal measuring stick.
MSU, these days, is the model in college sports.





“You can have dreams, you can have goals, you can have visions, you can have objectives. But this is what they dreamed about. This is the dream come true,” said Terry Denbow, retired vice president of university relations, who spent 30 years, from 1982 to 2011, as the official spokesman for MSU.

By them, Denbow means all of them — Izzo and Hollis and deputy AD Greg Ianni and former football coach Nick Saban and, beginning nine years ago, Mark Dantonio. And for the last decade, president Lou Anna K. Simon and a once-meddling board of trustees.

“Just take football and basketball,” Denbow continued, “the odds against this kind of excellence existing over time, at the time it has here in the last decade — I think this decade if it could be bottled would be wonderful, but it can’t. It’s the people involved. … And I don’t get paid anymore by MSU to say that.”

Denbow has had to spin far lesser times at MSU than these — the George Perles win mandate in 1994, Bobby Williams hiring in December 1999, etc. He worked at Penn State in the 1970s and Alabama in the late ’70s and early ’80s — in the heyday of Joe Paterno and at the end of the Bear Bryant.

“There are just too many things that have to go right to make this happen,” Denbow said. “And they all have gone right. It isn’t serendipity. It’s hard work. It’s validation of the MSU roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-it-done (mindset).” 

This a becoming a tired storyline, reserved mostly for out-of-towners late to the scene. But it’s a story worth telling over and over and then again. Because someday MSU and its fans and those who cover this harmonious era will look back and say, “Wow, what a time.”

Because it won’t last forever. History says it can’t. I’m not talking about MSU history. What the Spartans have done is beyond anything MSU history can predict.

Even in its most hopeful moments — in the Citrus Bowl and basketball national title year of 1999-2000, for example — MSU wouldn’t let itself believe it was on the verge of greatness.

Izzo had to maintain his own excellence — an improbable rise in its own right — through another dark period of MSU football for the Spartans to have a chance to get here.   

“The thought of getting both of us in this position with a lot of football and basketball left to play,” said Izzo, who went to the NIT his first two years as MSU’s head coach and has taken the Spartans to the NCAA tournament each of the 18 years since. “I always say, if you keep knocking on the door, someday that door’s going to open. And now we’re to the point where, let’s keep knocking on the door and feed off each other. Usually I end my keys to the game (pregame speech) with, ‘Play all 40 minutes’ and I reference our football (team). I think we learn from one another. There’s nothing better. It’s great to tell them about Vince Lombardi and the Green Bay Packers, (but) to think that most of these guys’ parents weren’t born then, it doesn’t have the same meaning as, ‘Hey, Mark Dantonio and the Michigan State Spartans.’”

Most college basketball powers are irrelevant in football. The other college football powers with relevant basketball programs are all places where hoops is a clear second fiddle.

MSU’s historical inconsistencies in both sports helped set the table in some ways, while also making the dual ascensions to relevance more incredible. If either sport had been winning big for most of the last 40 years, they couldn’t be such equal partners today. And the rise of just one program wouldn’t be nearly as far-fetched.

Last week, Hollis flew out to California to watch Izzo win his 500th game. A day later, after win 501, he took a red-eye flight back to watch Dantonio win his third division title in five years. Compare that with what’s taking place at Illinois or Minnesota — schools tripping over themselves. Both were on an even plane with MSU within the last two decades.

“I don’t think there has ever been a moment in time, at least for me, in the AD role when there wasn’t hope or optimism,” said Hollis, who led the charge to hire Dantonio and has played an important role in keeping Izzo around.

Neither coach, by the way, was considered an exciting hire — a lesson to all those ADs trying so hard to make a splash.

“You plan for this, but you can’t predict this kind of success,” Hollis continued.

“I’ve never had any doubts, to be quite honest with you,” Dantonio said Tuesday of his own program’s climb.

That would make him the only one.

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.