Coaches gone wild

Michigan State easily cleared its round of 32 hurdle Saturday, pounding a few more lumps on a favorite punching bag (Minnesota) enroute to a 20-point victory and another advance to the Sweet Sixteen.

The best part about that was Tom Izzo didn't have to go Section Eight again.

By now everyone in America has heard about, or seen, the way he lit into Spartan freshman Aaron Henry as Sparty struggled to put away 15-seed Bradley the other day. Perhaps he was having a gruesome flashback to 2016, when 15-seed Middle Tennessee State knocked him out of Da Tournament. Perhaps he was just trying to light a fire under his gifted freshman, which was his story. And perhaps we should get off poor Tom's case, because all he was doing was Coaching Up His Player and not being all touchy-feely about it the way everyone tends to be now in our sad, pathetic, everybody-gets-a-trophy society.

Which was the story for a lot of other folks, even some who should know better.

It's a curious tic in our sporting landscape that a certain segment of fan/sports scribe loves to see coaches scream at players like lunatics, and the more red-faced, bug-eyed, spittle-flinging the better. To that certain segment, this is coaching. To that certain segment, it opens up a big ol' can of nostalgia, in which back-in-the-day types remember with a bizarre fondness the times Coach abused them.

And ol' Coach, why, then he grabbed my facemask and give it a good shake. Like to broke my damn neck. Screamed at me 'til my eardrums bled. Man, those were the days ...

Something like that.

Here's the problem: If you come out and say coaches shouldn't be losing their minds to the point where they have to be restrained by their own players, the way Izzo did the other day, you're immediately tagged as someone who's against any disciplining of players. Which of course isn't remotely true.

Look. Coaches yell. It's what they do. And sometimes they have to, because they're coaching kids,  and kids frequently are dopes. If they weren't, raising them would be easy.

So Izzo yelling at Henry?

Don't have a problem with that. He's a fiery guy. Sometimes he's gotta be who he is.

But Izzo losing control so completely he had to be restrained? By his own players?

That's crossing the line. So was defending it in the postgame, to the point where he lectured the media on accountability.

Sorry, Coach. But no one from Michigan State, of all places, gets to lecture anyone on accountability.

The whole thing takes me back 30 years to the girls state basketball finals, which I was covering that year because one of Fred Fields' excellent Huntington North squads was there. One of the other teams there had one of the bug-eyed spittle-flingers for a coach. Kept grabbing players and practically throwing them on the bench when they did something on the floor that displeased him. It got so bad the Huntington North fans started hollering at him, even though their team wasn't even playing in the game.

In front of me, another coach from the Spittle-Flinger's school was sitting at the scorer's table. He turned and glared at the Huntington North folks. Said they didn't get it.

Yes, they did, Coach. They got it way better than you did.