Elite Eight!!

2:20 Sunday

Jeff Goodman ‏@GoodmanESPN 2m2 minutes ago

Izzo vs. Pitino. Wisconsin vs. Arizona. Zags vs. Duke. Kentucky vs. Notre Dame. Not bad at all.

ESPN Stats & Info ‏@ESPNStatsInfo 3m3 minutes ago

Tom Izzo improves to 12-9 as the lower seed in NCAA Tournament play, best by a head coach in tourney history.

I was not feeling this one. Felt like 30 minutes of dog crap play. Thankfully I never got the sense that Oklahoma was good enough that that was too much to overcome. What a great job by Izzo and his staff. Trice is going to go down as an all time great Spartan.

WhiteBoyHatcher wrote:I was not feeling this one. Felt like 30 minutes of dog crap play. Thankfully I never got the sense that Oklahoma was good enough that that was too much to overcome. What a great job by Izzo and his staff. Trice is going to go down as an all time great Spartan.

I agree, we played rather poorly compared to the last 2 weeks but survived. Hopefully they come out stronger on Sunday or the 'Ville will bury them.

Sean Merriman ‏@BTNSean 6m6 minutes ago
How good were MSU's Big Three down the stretch? Dawson, Trice and Valentine combined to score 31 of their 35 second half points.

Just awesome. What's the over under on couches burned tonight?

Spartan postgame coming up

"We stuck together. That's what Spartans do. We stick together" - travis trice

The Pantry wrote:Spartan postgame coming up

They're on BTN right now live.

Back 2 back top 10 in FBall & BBall. 1st ever?

Izzo only takes MSU to the Elite 8 45% of the time.

Just finished purchasing my tickets. I'll be in the 3rd row of the upper deck (the savings from doing upper deck are enough to cover parking costs, so I went with upper deck instead of lower deck). GO GREEN!!!!

Motown Spartan wrote:Izzo only takes MSU to the Elite 8 45% of the time.

Slacker.

Michigan State: The Spartans improved their NCAA tournament record to 62-27, and moved into seventh place on the victory list - one ahead of Syracuse.

HT wrote:Just finished purchasing my tickets. I'll be in the 3rd row of the upper deck (the savings from doing upper deck are enough to cover parking costs, so I went with upper deck instead of lower deck). GO GREEN!!!!

Tell them you're Magic's valet and move down next to him.

Motown Spartan wrote:Izzo only takes MSU to the Elite 8 45% of the time.

Statistics are for losers, scrap the program because he can't recruit anymore.

Izzo: To show you how soft I'm getting I took them to a damned movie today to break the day up rather than grind them.   I'm probably at fault for the 1st half.

John Niyo ‏@JohnNiyo 13m13 minutes ago

Hidden in the stat sheet tonight: Michigan State had just one turnover in the second half, and five for the game.

David Harns ‏@isportsDave
That Dawson block, though. #MSU (photo credit: @mmitchellphoto)

I love dropping F-bombs at 5AM thinking those missed points were going to cost us the game.

LooseGoose wrote:David Harns ‏@isportsDave
That Dawson block, though. #MSU (photo credit: @mmitchellphoto)

That was beautiful!

The headline says it all. The four games this weekend that will decide the Final Four participants are the best collective set of Elite Eight games in history. This isn’t mere conjecture or hyperbole either. I went back and looked at every Elite Eight since 1985, the first year of the modern 64-team bracket. Though there have been tournaments where the final eight teams had a lower sum of seeds (add up the seeds for the 2007 Elite Eight and you get a staggering 13, while the 2009 Elite Eight featured teams with a 16 — this year checks in at 21), but none of those, nor any other years, can compare to the four games we’re about to see this weekend. (Also, the sum of seeds is a flawed stat: Neither Louisville nor Michigan State deserved their No. 4 or No. 7 seed and having Cinderella teams in the Elite Eight such as VCU or George Mason is more fun than seeing, say, an underachieving No. 4 seed.) Trust me on this, or go look the archives and see for yourself. Nothing can top 2015.

This is the greatest slate of Elite Eight games in NCAA tournament history

This is all gravy for me. I was just happy we made it into the tournament and kept the streak alive.

After an exhilarating Saturday that saw Wisconsin beat Arizona yet again with a Final Four on the line, followed by undefeated Kentucky barely squeaking past a Notre Dame team that outplayed them for a significant portion of the night, what can Sunday’s Regional Final games do for an encore? For starters, there’s another terrific No. 1 vs. No.2 matchup in which the underdog could make school history. There’s also a fake underdog story that will decide the only wacky region of this year’s tournament.

Read on for more of what to watch as the last two Final Four berths of 2015 are set:
No. 4 Louisville (42 percent win probability) vs. No. 7 Michigan State

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/march-madness-crib-notes-elite8-michigan-state-louisville-duke-gonzaga/

Someone spiked Drew's beverage.

Denzel Valentine's locker-room leadership is the biggest reason why this has become one of Tom Izzo's closer MSU teams

Valentine's the rightful heir to a Michigan State basketball legacy of impassioned locker-room leadership under Tom Izzo, ably filling the huge footprints left by Mateen Cleaves, Travis Walton and Draymond Green.

If MSU wins today this will be the gas and match that lit the fire that consumed Louisville.

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Louisville junior forward Montrezl Harrell takes pride in playing the most minutes of any Cardinals player and not taking any plays off.

It's an area he's not sure his counterpart in Sunday's Elite Eight game, Michigan State's Branden Dawson, can match him in.

"I go in and make sure I play 110 percent every play," Harrell said Saturday. "If (Dawson) has as much energy as me, it should be a good game tomorrow. I don't see him running with as much energy as I have."

http://www.mlive.com/spartans/index.ssf/2015/03/louisvilles_montrezl_harrell_t.html

D. Green recalls his freshmen tournament run.

http://www.theplayerstribune.com/ncaa-tournament-march-madness-michigan-state-final-four-draymond-green/

Floyd Robertson wrote:D. Green recalls his freshmen tournament run.

http://www.theplayerstribune.com/ncaa-tournament-march-madness-michigan-state-final-four-draymond-green/

Complete with video of the Summers dunk that shook Ford Field.

LooseGoose wrote:

https://twitter.com/i/cards/tfw/v1/582243514664292352?cardname=__entity_video&native=true&earned=true

Please change thread title to Final Four

Pitino transcript from today:

On the crowd at the Carrier Dome: From what people told me, it was 10-12,000 vs. 500. I don't know where they came from, Michigan State, because there aren't many Michigan State alums in New York. I don't know -- I guess it's about a seven- or eight-hour drive. I was blown away with that. I don't complain that our fans weren't there. I'm very appreciative of the 500 who showed up. I'm sure it cost a lot of money for those fans to get there, but it didn't bother me as much because we're a good road team. It was about 10-12,000 vs. 500. I couldn't believe how much green was in there last night. I didn't really they travel as well as they do. That was very, very impressive, because I know there's not a lot of Michigan State alumni.

http://www.courier-journal.com/story/sports/college/louisville/2015/03/30/transcript-louisville-coach-rick-pitinos-season-wrap-up-qa/70692290/