Tom Izzo Eight Quotations

It is a great feeling. It is such an awesome feeling. I won it last year, and I won it again. I spent quite a few hours in the weight room. All the hard practices, it all paid off.

I think you have to give George Mason a lot of credit. They took it to us early, kicked our butts inside and shot 70 percent on us with eight or nine minutes to go in the second half. ... I've got to say that in my nine years, this is one of the more disappointing evenings I've had in this job.

It's great to have our league being talked about. Every team in the league is making some strides. I still think eight teams can win the Big Ten championship and in the long run that's going to help our recruiting, our exposure and the respect for our league.

It reminds you of the NBA draft. If you play well at the end of the year one time, the other 30 games don't matter. There are times we could be a five, six, seven or an eight team. It just depends.

I'm excited about the Big Ten. It's great to have our league being talked about. I think every team in the league is making some strides, and I still think there are eight teams in the league that could win the Big Ten championship.

I said that there could be eight teams vie for the championship. I think scheduling (the Big Ten doesn't play a round robin, so some teams play others just once) is gonna play a part in everything. I still think our conference could fight to be the strongest in the country. When you look top to bottom at the conference race this year, four losses could win it, maybe more.

You have to look at the first game, and it's hard to look past it in this tournament, especially now when you see some of the eight, nine and 10 seeds. Kentucky and Wisconsin as eight and nine seeds, that tells you the 11 seeds are going to be pretty good basketball teams.

We're going to get back in the weight room to work on toughness and character. I promise we'll be tougher and I promise we'll get this program back to where we all want it.

But when you look at what he does, it's more football-related than basketball. He bangs in there, he rebounds well, he defends well. The work he does in the weight room, the sprints they do (in football) those things help him for what we need him for.

I look at our record and eight losses is more than I'd like to see, but I also look at it like, I haven't lost any confidence in this team. I'm disappointed maybe in the consistency of a couple guys, but I haven't lost confidence in what I think we can still do. ... There's nobody I'm afraid to play, and I just want to start playing better, consistently, ourselves.