It didn’t take long — about five minutes into the game, in fact — for the dirtiest player in college basketball to make another blatantly dirty play on Sunday afternoon in the Michigan vs Michigan State game.
Jeremy Fears Jr. was dribbling the basketball with Elliot Cadeau guarding him. All of a sudden, Cadeau was hit between the legs by Fears’ foot, a recurring theme for the Spartans’ point guard this season.
Fears was assessed a flagrant
foul, and Michigan was given two free throws and possession of the ball.
Mid-game, MSU head coach Tom Izzo spoke with CBS sideline reporter Tracy Wolfson and essentially blamed Dusty May again, saying: “You know what, it’s all because of what happened earlier, and now every microscope’s on him. And I don’t like that, okay. I told him I don’t want him breathing wrong.”
Speaking with reporters after losing to Michigan by double digits for the second time this season, Izzo continued to deflect blame and stick up for Fears.
“I’m not talking about that,” Izzo began, while then proceeding to talk about that. “I don’t think (Fears) did anything on purpose. I think it was a reaction. I don’t know the whole deal about it. It was a critical play, as they all are, but I thought Jeremy Fears played his ass off 99 percent of that game. And you know what, I did what I was gonna do, I chewed him out for it, but I watched it on tape — the guy’s pushing him in the back, and sometimes that stuff happens.
“I’m sick of it being one-sided though. That’s what upset me about the first time. So Fears will get his lunch from me — I wonder if some of their guys will get their lunch from what happened in the first game that didn’t get public. But I don’t condone anything, I don’t think he tried to kick him on purpose … don’t know exactly what happened, except he did get pushed in the back, and that’s why he got the foul. You know what, Fears has done a hell of a job since getting publicly reprimanded by everybody, he’s done a hell of a job.”
Firstly, for saying you weren’t going to talk about the incident, you sure did a lot of talking about it, Tom. Don’t pretend like you didn’t want to talk about it, because you clearly had thoughts before you were asked and were prepared to answer those questions.
Secondly, to say Fears did what he did because Cadeau was pushing him in the back…get real, man. That is not a natural reaction for someone to have. Nobody else in college basketball has made a move like that all season long except for Fears. And it’s happened on numerous occasions, which is exactly why May called it out the first time.
And if Izzo is taking issue to things that happened in the first game, perhaps he should look back at the film — if he even still does that — because the first game was even worse for Fears. Between him purposefully fouling Yaxel Lendeborg on a breakaway, to kicking out his foot and trying to trip Lendeborg, to shoving L.J. Cason in the back, it’s clear what type of basketball Fears enjoys playing. And it’s the type that Izzo enables him to play.
So yeah, Tom, Fears is under a microscope…because of HIS actions. If a kid in grade school is known to be a bully and beats kids up at recess, the teacher isn’t going to be paying close attention to the kids that the bully picks on. This really shouldn’t be this hard of a concept to grasp.
Hopefully Michigan doesn’t play MSU in the Big Ten Tournament or NCAA Tournament, because this whole routine of writing stories about drama that is happening during the game is getting really annoying.
