SPARTANS BASKING IN THE GLOW OF PROPER DECISIONS
By Fred Heumann
for In Play! Magazine
(EAST LANSING) - Tom Izzo has been an icon at Michigan State for some time now, but even his remarkable presence in East Lansing was not enough to shed the image of a University in athletic disarray.
Enter the two Marks.
First it was Mark Dantonio, and then it was Mark Hollis.
Dantonio was happily molding a program at the University of Cincinnati when he was wooed and eventually hired by Hollis, then the MSU Athletic Director in waiting(with Izzo’s help & blessing).
“I remember contacting Mark (Dantonio) when we first had interest in him,” Hollis recently recalled. “He told us he wasn’t interested in even talking to us until his season was over.”
Perhaps it was then that the powers that be at MSU realized they had their man. While George Perles, Nick Saban, John L. Smith & company may have all been fine coaches in their own right, had a similar call been made to any of them during any stage of their coaching careers, they would have hired a human slingshot to get to town and check out the new opportunity.
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