Talk about the history of college basketball and it won’t take long for two names to come up: Izzo and Pitino. Tom Izzo has been at Michigan State since 1995, long enough that none of the players on his roster have lived in a basketball world where he wasn’t the Spartans’ head coach.

Even though their teams haven’t faced each other in four years, the admiration between Michigan State’s Tom Izzo and New Mexico’s Richard Pitino has not diminished.