As iron sharpens iron, let your best programs on campus make your football program better.
That's what Michigan State does and, as we've previously documented, they're doing it better than anyone in college athletics. One of the last people Spartans basketball coach Tom Izzo spoke to on the bus to Madison Square Garden on Sunday? That would be none other than Spartans football coach Mark Dantonio.
Had Michigan State defeated Connecticut and advanced to the Final Four, Dantonio would have altered his spring practice plans to see the Spartans' basketball team play. Izzo took the basketball team to Indianapolis to see Dantonio's club beat Ohio State for the Big Ten championship in December. Four months later, Michigan State won the Big Ten basketball tournament four blocks away at Indianapolis' Bankers Life Fieldhouse.
When Michigan State outlasted Virginia in the Sweet 16 on Friday night, Izzo had this to say: "As my football coach says, you just stay the course, and we just kind of stayed the course."
When Dantonio opened spring practice with the obligatory pre-spring press conference, one of the first words out of his mouth was praise for Izzo and the Michigan State basketball team.
"When something happens in a game and they lose, like the Notre Dame situation, they'll get together,'' Michigan State athletics director Mark Hollis told MLive.com, "and one of them will have experienced something that the other hasn't. It's good to have that ability to go back and forth.''