Tom Izzo to Michigan State supporters: ‘Don’t be fair-weather fans’

Tom Izzo had a firm message for Michigan State fans about supporting their school through the highs and lows. There’s been a lot of change in the athletic department of late, most recently with the Spartans announcing J Batt as their new athletic director at the beginning of June.

Izzo and the men’s basketball team has been clearly the most consistently successful program in East Lansing over the years, with Michigan State owning the longest active NCAA Tournament streak with 27 consecutive appearances. Other programs such as football have seen success, but are going through a bit of a rough patch of late.

The Spartans football team just wrapped up its first season under coach Jonathan Smith, going 5-7. Izzo urged fans to continue to “trust the process” in other sports as well as basketball, highlighting the new wrinkles in college sports that have made building a team that much more difficult.

“It’s hard to explain to fans what we’re going through with the NIL and all the things,” he said. “It’s really difficult. I can’t explain it to my own wife or to my own staff. Until you sit in that chair and you realize what you gotta do, so it makes it a little more difficult. I hope our fans trust the process. I hope they trust all of us. …But let’s face it, we don’t have all the answers either.

“Our fans need to get with us. Don’t be fair-weather fans. Understand there is a process to being great. I’ve worked with a lot of presidents, a lot of ADs and a lot of football coaches and that’s not always good. It’s really not. Stability, I think, is why we’ve been successful. We’re not the Pittsburgh Steelers, but we’ve had two basketball coaches in 51 years.”

As recently as 2021, Michigan State enjoyed an 11-win season in football. The Spartans also made the College Football Playoff in the 2015 season. However, a 2023 scandal resulted in the firing of coach Mel Tucker as the program was left to pick up the pieces.

There’s hope for a better future under Smith, but Tom Izzo knows it will take the support of fans to help out especially with the changes in NIL. He also offered his own suggests for specifically how bringing in former players or other people associated with the football program in the past could help grow it now.

“I’ve talked to a lot of football guys,” he said. “If we don’t bring the past back into the present, we’re making a huge mistake. I think the players that built this program deserve as much respect and credibility as the people that are renting the space right now. Because they don’t build them until we have those things we had in the 50s in football and the 60s in football. Maybe what we had in the 70s a little bit in basketball. Then we got some back in the late 80s in football.

“Then we had that magical year in 2015 when football is in the Final Four and basketball is in the Final Four. If that happens, the other sports are gonna be better and those alums are gonna be proud of the place that they gave their blood, sweat and tears to. I think we’ve been missing that a little bit.”