EAST LANSING – Tom Izzo is fuming.
Never mind that athletic director J Batt’s departure to Kentucky became public hours earlier. The venerable Michigan State basketball coach held back as much as he could on Monday, June 15.
Yet he still managed to unload about the constant controversies, assailing a situation that has dissent among its Board of Trustees, threats of a lawsuit from one of them, and has yet to determine an interim president with the impending departure of Kevin Guskiewicz.
“I’ll be very honest with you, which I’ve always been. I can’t stand what’s going on,” said Izzo, who has worked at MSU since 1983 and been head coach since 1995. “I’m not gonna overtalk about it now, but I am in the very near future. I’ve had it. This is self-inflicted. We just lost the best president that may have ever been here. One of the best. And there’s other dominoes that get affected when things go wrong like that.
“Yeah, I’m very upset about it. And I’m sick of it.”
Izzo’s legs were bouncing with the same nervous energy he has before any game as he treaded cautiously around the multitude of drama that once again reared its head at MSU over the past two months.
After a public spat with two Board of Trustees, who also nearly doubled his salary in an attempt to keep him, Guskiewicz announced in late May that he plans to take the president job at Clemson after just 26 months at MSU.
Batt, the athletic director Guskiewicz pried away from Georgia Tech a little over a year ago, was named Kentucky’s athletic director early Monday morning. MSU did not immediately announce an acting or interim athletic director, and the school also has not announced an acting or interim president while Guskiewicz remains in his position as a lame duck.
Jon Palumbo, executive deputy athletic director/chief operating officer and Spartan Ventures CEO, handled the master of ceremony duties Monday to announce a new jersey patch sponsorship with MSUFCU (Michigan State University Federal Credit Union) that typically would have been Batt’s responsibility had he not been announced by Kentucky as its AD-in-waiting less than two hours earlier.
Palumbo said he expects an acting or interim athletic director to be named by MSU “in the coming days, sooner than later.”
“I believe, based on what I’ve been told, that J will be here for a few weeks and there will be a transition period,” Palumbo said. “I don’t want to speak for him, that’s just what I’ve heard so far. That decision on an interim will be made above my head, so I can’t really speak exactly when that will happen.”
Batt was MSU’s fifth athletic director since 2018, when Mark Hollis resigned in the wake of the Larry Nassar scandal and hours before an ESPN story into allegations of sexual improprieties in the football and basketball programs. The lineage that followed went from Bill Beekman to Alan Haller to Batt.
“That’s not the problem,” Izzo said Monday inside Spartan Stadium’s club level suites. “The problem is losing our president.”
Since the resignation of Lou Anna K. Simon days before Hollis in 2018, the MSU presidential musical chair has been passed former Governor John Engler to Satish Udpa as interim presidents, Samuel Stanley as full-time president from Aug. 1, 2019-Nov. 4, 2022, to Teresa Woodruff as interim until Guskiewicz was hired March 3, 2024.
While Guskiewicz has not announced a timeline to leave, Izzo and others have been working to prevent the suburban Pittsburgh native from leaving for Clemson.
As local Lansing business owners undertook a sign and billboard campaign in recent weeks in an attempt to sway Guskiewicz into staying, Izzo was asked if he has any hope that Guskiewicz will remain at MSU.
“Until he’s gone,” Izzo said, “I always have hope. I always have hope. I’d give my right arm. He could have my salary, I would do whatever. Look where this place has gone in two years. We all know where we were, we were in the ashes. Like the phoenix, we rose out of the ashes. I really believe that. I know it – I live it every day, I’m here every day. Other people come and go, I’ve been here. I know what we’ve done, I know what he’s done. To me, it’s been phenomenal.
“When you’re a leader, you’re always gonna tick off people. Do you think all my players like me? Do you think all the parents of my players like me? That’s just the way it is. But I don’t know, I don’t understand some things that I’ll get into later. I just wish I understood what the Constitution is, what the rights are, what freedom of speech is. I gotta get a better understanding before I address everything.”
Izzo, without naming the governing body or individuals, went on to attack the turmoil within MSU’s Board of Trustees. Trustees Rema Vassar and Mike Balow, who refused to sign a revised code of ethics and conduct, were censured by the rest of the elected members of the board on Friday at their meeting in Benton Harbor.
Guskiewicz took a shot at those two, along with trustee Dennis Denno (who initially refused to sign the revisions before ultimately signing it), in his farewell letter to the MSU community.
“…Effective university leadership requires a shared commitment to collaboration, trust and a forward-looking vision,” Guskiewicz wrote. “While many across this university community have embraced that spirit, it has become increasingly clear that there are differing perspectives within the Board of Trustees regarding how best to move MSU forward. At times, too much energy has been spent revisiting past conflicts and internal disagreements rather than focusing collectively on the opportunities and aspirations ahead of us.
“While I firmly believe we are all better when there is a diversity of viewpoints informing decisions, our ability to make meaningful progress is hampered when disagreements move from offering alternative perspectives into publicly undermining decisions and putting personal interests above the best interests of the university and our faculty, staff and students. What is perhaps most troubling is the actions of some to abuse their access to privileged and confidential information to mispresent facts, manipulate situations and selectively use and leak that information to promote personal agendas.”
Izzo on Monday used an analogy for the Board of Trustees that he often uses with his own point guards on the basketball court.
“I’m a big proponent that what starts at the top trickles down,” he said. “And if the head isn’t right, the body follows. And if the head dies, the body dies. So there’s people way above where I’m at that gotta get straightened out on what they believe their fiduciary responsibility is. I thought it was to move this university forward.
“Like Jud (Heathcote) told me, ‘You’ll never be bigger than the program.’ There will be no president, trustee, AD or basketball coach bigger than the university. I’ve always looked at my goal – and you guys know this – I don’t just care about basketball, I don’t just care about athletics. I care about this university. And that’s what we’re supposed to do. I thought. That’s been challenged a little bit.”
How and when Izzo plans to detail more of his frustrations also is “yet to be continued.” But he put out a call for “the 600,000 living (MSU) alums” to unite in yet another tumultuous time to “start rallying together.”
“If there’s ever a time that we need to rally together, it’s now. And that’s all 600,00,” he said. “It ain’t Tom Izzo, I’m not an alum. I’m like (Acrisure founder and MSU donor) Greg Williams or maybe our football coach (Pat Fitzgerald). I’m a very invested stakeholder. But the alums better stand up, that’s what I’m saying. So I’m gonna ask the alums to stand up. Because what happened with our president is ridiculous. He said it, we know the reasons, and I’m ashamed, I’m disgusted, hurt. …
“Those of you that are alums? You gotta figure out where you are, too. It’s your university. Not my university, your university. And that’s what I think we need to do. We need to get our alums to figure out this is our university, their university. And decisions made should be in the benefit – not an individual player, not an individual coach, not an individual student. It should be for the university, and the university takes care of the people within.
“So yeah, I’ve got a major problem with it.”
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him @chrissolari.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Tom Izzo fuming about Michigan State’s turmoil: ‘I’m sick of it’
Reporting by Chris Solari, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Chris Solari, Detroit Free Press | USA TODAY Network
