Tom Izzo discusses challenges of playing Minnesota a third time

Tom Izzo spoke about the challenge of playing Minnesota a third time this season. It’s not going to be easy.

The Big Ten Tournament gets underway on Wednesday, but Michigan State’s first game doesn’t come until Thursday. We already know who the Spartans’ opponent will be as they are set to play 9-seed Minnesota. The Gophers are a familiar opponent to MSU, as the sides have played each other twice already this season. With that comes a lot of knowledge about your opponent, something Tom Izzo commented on ahead of Thursday’s matchup.

Tom Izzo discusses the difficulty of playing Minnesota again

Tom Izzo is at the podium ahead of Michigan State's Big Ten Tournament game against Minnesota.

MSU and Minnesota split the regular season series.

"Splitting that pair, we understand how good they are. Splitting that pair, we understand how good we are."

— Spartans Illustrated (@SpartansRivals) March 12, 2024

Izzo does a great job here explaining the difficulties of playing a team this many times. Teams know each other extremely well at this point in the season, but they know their opponent especially well if they’ve already played them twice. That is the case with Michigan State and Minnesota. Since they’ve played each other twice already, both teams know a lot about their style of play, personnel and things that work well against them.

That means this game on Thursday will come down to who can make the best adjustments. Which team has learned the most about their opponent from the earlier matchups? Which team will throw the best wrinkles at the other?

The Spartans won the first game 76-66 at home but followed that up with a 59-56 loss on the road. So that tells us Minnesota made the better adjustments earlier this season. To be fair, MSU was in position to win this game as they were up by nine points with 12 minutes to play. But the Gophers finished strong and swarmed the Spartans during crunch time.

Will Tom Izzo and Michigan State make better adjustments this time around? Izzo is the more respected coach and has the most success in March by far, so hopefully that is the difference for the Spartans on Thursday.