Penn State stunned Michigan State on Tuesday night in the Bryce Jordan Center, giving head coach Micah Shrewsberry his first career coaching victory against a ranked opponent. As if that was not special enough already, the win may have meant a little bit more to Shrrewsberry given his respect for Michigan State head coach Tom Izzo.
In his postgame comments, Shrewsberry opened by saying how much respect he has for Izzo as a longtime follower of Big Ten basketball, including his time coaching as an assistant at Purdue.
“I grew up in Indianapolis. I’ve been watching Big Ten basketball for a long, long time, and there’s nobody I have more respect for than Coach Izzo and his program,” Shrewsberry said after the big win. “Based on all of his accomplishments, what he has done consistently year in and year out – there’s almost sometimes where you just look down there and you’re like, ‘Man, that’s Tom Izzo.’ He has won more games than me and probably 50 other people like me, combined. The greatest honor is to compete.”
Competing against Izzo clearly meant a lot to Shrewsberry, who continues to try building the Penn State program in the same mold Izzo has done with Michigan State over the course of his storied career. So it must have been encouraging for Shrewsberry to hear what Izzo had to say about his program prior to tipping off on Tuesday night.
Izzo, clearly aware of how hard Penn State has been competing lately and how luck has tipped just the other way in a few recent losses, gave a little bit of foreshadowing in a pregame chat with Shrewsberry.
“He said before the game, ‘You guys, you’re going to get one of these. I hope it’s not tonight.’”
Well, fortunately for Shrewsberry, they did get one of those games against Izzo’s program.
Of course, one win like this is always encouraging to see, but Shrewsberry is smart enough to know that there is much more work to be done to get Penn State to being a program that can legitimately feel it belongs in the NCAA tournament more than once a decade. And in Michigan State, Shrewsberry sees the standard continuing to be set.
“[Izzo] gives a model for how we build our programs and what we do and how his teams get better and better and better as the year goes on and they stay consistent and guys get better and guys wait their turn and then they come in and they’re a good player and it goes on and on and on and it runs itself,” Shrewsberry said in his postgame comments. “That’s who we want to be. Hopefully we’re building that way for the future.”
Penn State will look for its first back-to-back wins since the beginning of January when they host Minnesota in a rescheduled home game on Thursday. Penn State lost at Minnesota on Saturday evening.
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