On Friday night, two of college basketball’s best coaches will go head-to-head when Tom Izzo leads Michigan State against Dan Hurley and UConn in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament. It’s odd to think that this matchup may not have happened if Hurley had listened to Izzo roughly two years ago.
In 2024, with the Huskies coming off their second consecutive national championship, the Los Angeles Lakers offered Hurley a lucrative $70 million contract to become their coach. Hurley turned them down to remain at UConn and chase more national championships, but not before asking Izzo for some advice.
Speaking with the Associated Press ahead of the Sweet 16, Izzo revealed that he told Hurley to consider the Lakers’ offer very “seriously” because of how unstable the college landscape was due to NIL and the transfer portal, even if losing Hurley would have been bad for the sport.
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“I told him to seriously look at it because I could see where college basketball was going,” Izzo said. “But I said, I would hate to lose him because I think he’s all that is right about college basketball. He cares about the kids. He cares about the game. He has to care about the game because of his dad.”
While Hurley may have given serious consideration to coaching the Lakers, he didn’t let the shifting landscape of college athletics push him away. Instead, he remained with the Huskies, and he’s looking for his third national title in four years.
Izzo and the Spartans are in the way of that achievement, and it should be an incredible battle between talented teams on the court and elite college basketball minds on the sideline. This will be the first time UConn and Michigan State have met in the NCAA Tournament since the Huskies defeated the Spartans in the 2014 Elite Eight. The only other time these decorated programs have met in March Madness came in 2009, when UConn took down Michigan State in the Final Four.