Tom Izzo voices displeasure over quadrant system: 'We never get enough respect in this league'

Just call the Big Ten the NCAA’s Rodney Dangerfield. Following the top-seeded Spartans’ surprising 77-74 loss to 18th-ranked Wisconsin in the Big Ten Tournament semifinals, longtime Michigan State head coach Tom Izzo unloaded on how the NCAA Tournament field is determined.

He has a special distain for the analytic-based quadrant system used to distinguish which teams are deserving to go dancing and which are not. Especially when all the 70-year-old Izzo hears is whether or not the rival SEC is going to set a new NCAA Tournament record with 14 of its 18 teams making the 68-team field on Selection Sunday.

“You know what it says? There’s a lot of damn good teams in this league and I get a kick out of how they talk about eight teams getting in and 14 in another league,” Izzo said Saturday during his postgame press conference. “We never get enough respect in this league, if you ask me, and I’m not politically trying to set a stage for the people. But you go through this league and travel like we travel, and some of those teams from out West. I mean Indiana and Ohio State, they played a lot of, I guess they’re Quad 1 (games), whatever the Hell that means. Let’s get the analytics in it and really upset me.”

Despite its loss Saturday, ESPN bracketologist Joe Lunardi still has Michigan State as his No. 7 overall seed in his latest Bracketology projection. He gives the Spartans the No. 2 seed in the South Regional bracket.

But it’s the rest of the Big Ten that Izzo is concerned with, especially as Indiana and Ohio State currently await word on their own March Madness fate while teetering on the NCAA Tournament bubble. Lunardi currently projects the Big Ten will earn nine bids on Selection Sunday, with the Hoosiers among his “Last Four In,” while the Buckeyes are on the outside looking in among his “First Four Out.”

Ohio State (17-15, 9-11 B10) currently has a NET ranking of No. 41 with a Quad 1 record of 6-11, including losing twice to Indiana (19-13, 10-10 B10), which has the No. 54 NET ranking with a 4-13 record in Quad 1 games. Helping the Hoosiers are three of those Quad 1 wins with victories over the 7th-ranked Spartans and No. 20 Purdue, both of which are currently ranked in the Top 20 in NET.

Along with citing the Big Ten’s newfound coast-to-coast travel with the additions of former Pac-12 programs Oregon, USC, UCLA and Washington to the league, Izzo directly pointed to the conference’s unbalanced schedule. That schedule saw the Spartans play five ranked teams over their final six regular-season games as Michigan State ended their season on an eight-game win streak before Saturday’s semifinal setback.

“I think this is a very demanding league and we’ve proven — because our backloaded schedule was brutal,” Izzo continued. “And we didn’t have many days to prepare, which means did it catch up to us because we didn’t do a good enough job with some of the little things we got away with? Where if you had four days to prepare, you’d maybe do (better)? So I told my staff we’ve got to do a better job too. Worry about the players, let’s worry about what we can control and then we’ll worry about what they can control.”