Crean, now the Indiana coach, brought back the wrong plastic, and the meticulous Izzo drove back to the store with Crean to buy the correct sheets. Izzo then scripted the plays and slipped them inside a protective sleeve the way a football offensive coordinator would.

"Let's get this straight, Tom Izzo is a football coach who coaches basketball," Alabama Coach Nick Saban, who grew close with Izzo during his stints as a football assistant and head coach at Michigan State, said in a telephone interview. "When you're assistants at the same time, misery can love company. You learn about a man then. He's as tough as they come."

Not even the detail-oriented Izzo could have scripted the last 12 seasons. The Spartans have reached six Final Fours and won one national championship. Whether it has been strapping football shoulder pads on his players for rebounding drills or taking them to watch Saban's practices, Izzo has done his best work incorporating football tactics into his basketball philosophy. Film sessions last no longer than 20 minutes to avoid inundating players with too much information. His hotel ballroom walk-throughs at Final Fours, like the ones he will take Friday night before facing Butler on Saturday, are often the last steps after a grueling March.

"The consistency's really almost unbelievable," Saban said. "Talk about mental toughness when his guys are out there. He's got that same intensity all this time."

Izzo's opponents talk not of the Spartans' toughness, but the time it takes to digest the variations that are hidden within his offensive sets. In 2000, Florida Coach Billy Donovan led his Gators against the Spartans, who had lost in the semifinals in 1999, in the national title game. When he sat down to examine film, Donovan said: "I saw five or six looks with an enormous amount of options within them. You have to decide how much you want to show your team, because you can't get it all to them."

UConn Coach Jim Calhoun saw a similar volume when his teams played a home-and-home series against the Spartans in the late 1990s.

"It's not complex," Calhoun said in a telephone interview. "It's just so well run. You have to look at six, seven or eight tapes to get full sense. They execute the living heck out of the ball."

Izzo's eyes served as a scout for Calhoun at the 1999 Final Four. The Spartans fell to Duke in the semifinals, setting up a Blue Devils-Huskies duel for the championship. In the hours between games, Calhoun and Izzo shared thoughts.

"For guys like Tom and myself, the game is our obsession, passion and then our occupation," Calhoun said.

Izzo studies counterparts with a Belichickian devotion to film. A former video guy under his Michigan State mentor, Jud Heathcote, Izzo has a staff that includes 13 managers in addition to three assistant coaches. Their digital library includes about 1,800 games played by every Division I team through the course of a season.

"You could tell he was up all night when he would come down to breakfast looking like a zombie," said Mateen Cleaves, who was the point guard on Izzo's title team in 2000. "You see him walk around like that, you're ready to run through a wall for him."

For Izzo, motivation comes in many forms. Once, Morris Peterson, a member of the national championship team, walked into a conference room, only to see his face on a milk carton under large print that read "Missing." His rebounding statistics, which had fallen off from the 14 rebounds that he averaged in high school, were also written on it.

"It was simple but it got the point across," said Peterson, who led the team in rebounding by season's end. "He knows exactly how to get your attention."

This season, Izzo has faced injury problems (point guard Kalin Lucas is out of the Final Four with a ruptured left Achilles' tendon) and inconsistent play from Lucas's backup, Korie Lucious, and the star swingman Durrell Summers.

"Tom does not let the sun go down on a problem," Crean said. "He may not have a solution by nighttime, but there were calls as late as 3 a.m. to talk about what we needed to do to make things right, from missed classes to poor attitudes.

"I'm telling you that if you give him a few good coordinators and a post in a B.C.S. bowl, he'd be right in there, too," Crean said.