When Michigan State tips off another college basketball season this month, the man on the sideline will be starting his 32nd year as head coach in East Lansing. Up here, people still tend to describe Tom Izzo a little differently: as the kid from Iron Mountain who played guard at Northern.
Izzo was born Jan. 30, 1955, in Iron Mountain, and his path to one of the most stable jobs in American sports ran almost entirely through the Upper Peninsula. He played at Northern Michigan University from 1973 to 1977, a hard-nosed guard on teams that also included his close friend and roommate Steve Mariucci, who went on to coach the San Francisco 49ers and Detroit Lions. The two Iron Mountain natives have been linked in U.P. lore ever since.
Learning the job in Ishpeming and Marquette
After graduating, Izzo didn’t head for a big program. He took the head job at Ishpeming High School for the 1977-78 season, a short drive from the NMU campus. Then he went back to Northern as an assistant from 1979 to 1983, learning the recruiting and scouting side of the game in a place where the travel budget was small and the drives were long.
In 1983 he joined Jud Heathcote’s staff at Michigan State as an assistant. He spent twelve seasons there, and when Heathcote retired after the 1994-95 season, Izzo got the job. He has not left it.
The record
The numbers are well known by now, but they’re still worth listing. Izzo enters this season with a record of 764-310 at Michigan State. His 2000 team, led by the Flint trio of Mateen Cleaves, Morris Peterson and Charlie Bell, won the national championship, beating Florida 89-76 in the final in Indianapolis. For a coach who had started out at a U.P. high school 22 years earlier, it was a fast climb. He has taken the Spartans to eight Final Fours and to 28 straight NCAA tournaments, a streak that says as much about consistency as any title.
He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2016.
Plenty of coaches have won big. Few have done it at one school for three decades, through conference realignment, the transfer portal and the arrival of player pay. Izzo has been openly critical of some of those changes and has had to adjust to all of them.
Still tied to Northern
What sets Izzo apart in this part of the state is how often he’s come back. Northern Michigan awarded him an honorary degree in 2001. He went into the NMU Sports Hall of Fame in 1990 and the Upper Peninsula Sports Hall of Fame in 1998. In 2024, NMU retired his jersey, a rare honor for a player whose statistics never matched what he’d go on to do as a coach.
His teams have long been known for rebounding and physical defense, and in interviews over the years he has tied that style back to the U.P. and the blue-collar towns he came from.
What this season looks like
At 71, Izzo is one of the longest-tenured head coaches in Division I, and questions about retirement come up every spring. He has brushed them off each time. For now, the focus is on a 32nd team, a roster built in the portal era, and a 29th straight NCAA tournament bid if the Spartans can get there.
For fans in Marquette County, the routine stays the same. They’ll watch Michigan State games on TV, argue about the rotation, and remind anyone who’ll listen that the coach on the screen played his college ball at Northern and coached his first team in Ishpeming.
