Tom Izzo details ‘unintended consequences’ of the transfer portal

The transfer portal is turning five years old this month. Still, in those five years, Tom Izzo hasn’t changed his tune on that tool once.

Izzo went in on the portal again during Michigan State’s media day on Tuesday. To him, he hopes it disappears at some point down the line considering the negatives that still come with it that he’s still seeing unfold.

“I’m still hoping that the portal isn’t here to stay, you know? But I’ve told more than a few of you in this room, some that I’ve talked to late at night, that I haven’t changed my opinion one time from four or five years ago before it even came out,” said Izzo. “I used the word ‘unintended consequences’.”

“It’s like the book, you read the book and then somebody makes a movie of it. We’re watching the movie and, for the most part, we have predicted the ending of it,” Izzo said. “So what you’re seeing now? We were worried about, one, with a high school kid getting left behind. Number two, what’s going to happen to academics? You transfer three, four times – what’s going to happen to academics? And then maybe the third biggest one is what’s going to happen to those players when they need a place to go?”

Izzo’s main problem seems to be how he sees the portal taking away from a program and its culture. That’s why, in East Lansing, he’s going to maintain what he has built in terms of approach and connections rather than risking it with too many transfers while he’s still in charge.

“At Michigan State, there’s a couple things that aren’t going to change until the day I walk off this stage for me,” Izzo stated. “We’re going to stay a blue-collar place, not thinking that we’re bigger than we are, better than we are. We’re going to do it the way this city was built, the way this university was built.”

“The second thing is relationships matter to me. They matter. The day’s going to come when we get transactional too. I’ll be having a beer and playing golf with some of you in this room when that happens because I get a lot out of the relationships. And I think they get a lot out of the relationships back,” said Izzo. “If everybody thinks that can just happen by knowing a guy for eight months? They’re better men than me.”

Izzo isn’t pleased with how the model is becoming more and more like a business with people who aren’t involved calling the shots and everyone else looking to gain for themself. That has him ready to dig his heels in even further when it comes to his outlook so that the Spartans continue to represent what he wants them to represent.

“A lot of guys have answers that aren’t down in the basement. So we let it play out,” said Izzo.

“I’m going to do what I do,” Izzo said. “Sooner or later, so everybody in this room knows, it’s probably going to get me. But I’m going to have fun in the meantime. And I’m going to enjoy the fight to keep it to a relationship program over a transaction program.”