Two words summed up Tom Izzo’s feelings: proud and defiant.
The Michigan State basketball coach was pleased with the effort and intensity his team showed in once again giving Big Ten regular-season champion Michigan all it could handle, even though the third-ranked Wolverines pulled away for a 90-80 victory over the final 10 minutes of the regular-season finale Sunday, March 8, at Crisler Center.
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And Izzo delivered a pugnacious rebuke to anyone besmirching his eighth-ranked Spartans.
“I guess the crowd didn’t watch the game,” Izzo opened his postgame press conference saying, “because I’m nobody’s damn little brother. And neither is my team.”
Michigan State head coach Tom Izzo reacts to a play against Michigan during the second half at Crisler Center in Ann Arbor on Sunday, March 8, 2026.
WINNERS AND LOSERS: Yaxel Lendeborg big winner, Jeremy Fears’ reputation loser in rivalry game
MSU (25-6, 15-5 Big Ten) finished in a three-way tie for second place in the league, with Nebraska and Illinois, behind the Wolverines (29-2, 19-1). The Spartans will open Big Ten Tournament play as the No. 3 seed in the late game Friday (approximately 9 p.m., Big Ten Network) at United Center in Chicago against the winner of Thursday night’s final game between 6-seed UCLA and Wednesday night’s 11-seed Minnesota/14-seed Rutgers winner.
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U-M is the No. 1 seed and opens at noon Friday.
“Give them credit, and I give us credit. It was a helluva basketball game,” Izzo said. “They’ve had a helluva year, we’ve had a helluva year. Theirs has been a little better.”
On Sunday, Jaxon Kohler scored 23 points with eight rebounds and three assists, while Jeremy Fears Jr. had 22 points and nine assists. Carson Cooper added 19 points and six rebounds.
Michigan State guard Jeremy Fears Jr. (1) dribbles against Michigan guard Elliot Cadeau (3) during the first half at Crisler Center in Ann Arbor on Sunday, March 8, 2026.
Izzo also delivered an equally impassioned defense of Fears, who for the second time this season delivered a back kick that hit the groin of an opposing player. This time, it was U-M point guard Elliot Cadeau in what became a physical first half that included technical fouls for the Wolverines’ Aday Mara and Trey McKenney.
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That all came after Michigan coach Dusty May called Fears’ play in their first meeting on Jan. 30 “dangerous,” for what he deemed attempted trips of Yaxel Lendeborg.
“I don’t think he did anything on purpose. I think it was a reaction,” Izzo said Sunday. “I don’t know the whole deal about it. It was a critical play, as they all are. But I thought Jeremy Fears played his ass off 99% of that game.”
Fears also kicked Minnesota’s Langston Reynolds in the groin on a similar defensive push on Feb. 4 during the second half of the Spartans’ loss to the Gophers, and the third-year sophomore point guard’s feet were also tangled up with opposing players in wins over Illinois and Indiana. Cadeau was initially issued a common foul for leaning onto and reaching around for the ball before a review assessed a foul for the kick by Fears.
“When I got fouled?” Fears said when asked about his technical. “Oh, yeah. So I had got fouled. I should’ve probably just fell. It’s an unfortunate situation which hurt the team. You just can’t have it.”
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Izzo said he “did what I was gonna do, I chewed him out for it” before continuing to assail May’s public comments from early February.
“But I watched it on tape, and the guy’s pushing him in the back. And sometimes that happens,” Izzo continued. “I’m sick of it being one-sided, though. That’s what upset me about the first time. So Fears will get his lunch [handed to him] from me. I wonder if some of their guys will get their lunch from what happened in the first game that didn’t get public.
“I don’t condone anything. I don’t think he tried to kick him on purpose.”
Izzo’s bigger concerns were in the minutia of his team’s performance in the second half.
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The Spartans allowed U-M to hit 10 of 22 3-point attempts on what Izzo deemed poor ball screen coverages, with star Yaxel Lendeborg going 5-for-6 from deep and scoring 27 points as MSU struggled with drive-and-kicks. It was the fifth time in Big Ten play this season the Spartans allowed 10 or more 3-pointers. The others: Indiana, UCLA, Nebraska (the only other loss in the group) and Penn State.
Michigan State forward Jaxon Kohler (0) celebrates a 3-pointer against Michigan with forward Jaxon Kohler (0) during the first half at Crisler Center in Ann Arbor on Sunday, March 8, 2026.
“It was just the little things,” said Kohler, who was 10-for-13 with two of the Spartans’ six 3-pointers. “If we could’ve corrected the little things over the span of the entire game, maybe fixing that one mistake prevented them from hitting a 3 if we lost by 3. In those games, we can be playing really well on offense and making shots. But on defense, if there’s little mistakes that we keep messing up on and can’t seem to get right, it can really have an impact on the final score of the games.”
It was a seemingly minor detail that proved to be a major issue. Those “little mistakes” Kohler pointed to are the ones Izzo and his veterans know must be eliminated in the Big Ten and NCAA tournaments if they want to go from competing with the elite level teams like U-M and Duke and actually beating them and making a deep run in March.
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The Wolverines also outrebounded MSU in the second half, 17-13. That included a 6-1 differential on the offensive glass and a 12-6 stretch during U-M’s takeover from the 10-minute mark until the final minute, as the Spartans started to wear down from having limited depth in the post due to Cam Ward’s foul trouble.
“You gotta do a lot of things right to win 29 games, to win the league by three games or whatever they did, you gotta do things right like we did last year,” Izzo said. “There’s not a lot of margin for error as you get closer to the top, as teams you play get better and the heat is on even more. I thought, for the most part, our freshmen looked like freshmen. They had the deer-in-the-headlights look. … But I still wouldn’t trade any of my guys for the world right now. I was realy proud of everything, except I think we tired. Gotta do a little better job on that myself.”
The Spartans now head to Chicago needing to win three games in three days to get some hardware with a Big Ten Tournament title, which they haven’t won since 2019 (when they beat the Wolverines twice in the regular season and then in the championship game of the tourney). They wouldn’t face U-M this year until the final, either, if both were to get there.
Izzo called MSU’s second double-digit loss this season to its rival despite having a second-half lead “a hell of a basketball game to watch” while slipping in a veiled shot at U-M fans by calling it “a pretty good environment. For here.”
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And he made it clear without saying it outwardly: He’d love another shot at the Wolverines.
“I ain’t taking a back seat to nobody,” the 31st-year Hall of Famer said. “I don’t care what they’ve done. And what they’ve done, they deserve what they got – 29-2 and deserve every bit of it. But we deserve what we got. …
“There’s no moral victories. I’m at Michigan State. No matter what those people think. We’ve done it longer and better than most. So there’s no moral victory. But I’m proud of (the Spartans), because I thought we played with (the Wolverines) in every way, shape and form.”
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him @chrissolari.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan State basketball’s Tom Izzo defends Jeremy Fears Jr.
