ATLANTA — There are two kinds of Tom Izzo NCAA tournament wins: ugly and uglier. They’re rock fights, parking-lot wrestling matches, about as sleek as a dented pickup. But, like the man himself, the wins keep on coming, year after year, generation after generation.
Izzo is the last of his kind, a rumpled old-school crank swimming in a sea of coaches with $200 haircuts and shmedium pullovers. He’s the final link in a chain that stretches back to the days of Jerry Tarkanian and Bob Knight, a time when coaches strode the college basketball landscape like curmudgeonly titans.