FanHouse Goran Suton

The NBA Draft started with a no-brainer -- Blake Griffin going No. 1 overall to the Los Angeles Clippers. Then, the fun happened, with Memphis taking Hasheem Thabeet and the Timberwolves' vexing decision to horde as many point guards as they could. A few other teams lucked out when players dropped down the board and into their laps. Check out the grades for the Western Conference after the jump.

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The Michigan State Spartans concluded a very successful season just over a week ago. They rode a two-seed past the defending champions, the top overall seed, and a supremely talented Connecticut squad before falling to the obvious best team in the nation, the NCAA champion Tar Heels.

After a brief rest, the Spartans will eventually get back to work in East Lansing, and it won't be a rebuilding project. It will be a reloading one. They did lose Goran Suton, Travis Walton and Marquise Gray to graduation, but there's plenty left for Tom Izzo to make another Final Four run -- one that would be his sixth in the past 12 years.

This is only a game.

At least, in the sense that anything with the population of Youngstown, Ohio sitting courtside can be just a game. In the sense that something with a television deal that could bail out the auto industry, the banks and the WNBA in one fell swoop can be just a game.

It's no great moral play in three acts with hugs at the end. North Carolina won't hit the warmup lines in capes and monocle, laugh maniacally and lash poor Lupe Izzo to a railroad track. And that block S in Michigan State's logo stands for nothing more than State, not Supermen.

Somewhere in Michigan State's middle-class brand of Michigan hope and mixed martial basketball, and North Carolina's mechanized cavalry of an offensive attack, there may be a similarity or two lurking somewhere.

But you've got about as good a chance of finding it as you do spotting an opposing fan in Ford Field's South Pacific of Spartan green.

These two teams couldn't be more different if one of them came out in shoulder pads.

And, with Tom Izzo, who invited Vikings' offensive line coach Pat Morris speak to his team before Saturday night's win, and whose teams always play like it's fourth-and-goal from the one, that could very well be the case.

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Rebound. Make the shooters beat you. Rebound. Make Thabeet roam. Rebound.

These are the five keys for Michigan State if it's to win its Final Four game. The most important are the first, third and fifth, but Nos. 2 and No. 4 could make the difference if the game is close.

Connecticut has only lost four games this year. One was in six overtimes, so we're going to throw that out. The other three all offer clues on how to beat the Huskies.

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From an individual standpoint, this season has been an absolute nightmare for Raymar Morgan. The Michigan State junior came into the season with a chance to get into lottery pick position, as long as his game kept progressing.

Instead, he regressed.

Every regular statistic across the board is down for Morgan this year. He averaged 14 points a game as a sophomore. Since January 17 this season, he's only gotten 5.5 a night. If you would have told Tom Izzo coming into the season he'd be heading to the Final Four with this low of an offensive output from Morgan, he would have thought you were nuts.

Take everything you think you know about this Final Four and toss it in the waste bin with the scrap paper that was once your brackets. The brackets that had Pittsburgh meeting Louisville for the national title. The brackets that were oh so certain Michigan State of the overrated Big Ten would, exactly like IKEA furniture, collapse after one week. The brackets that said Wake Forest was underrated and Arizona's bid was a career achievement award.

Forget it all, because like your brackets, this Final Four will be all about what you didn't know.

Tom Izzo has coached the Michigan State Spartans for the past 15 seasons. It took him two years to get the program where he wanted it. In those last 13 seasons, they have gone to the NCAA Tournament all 13 times, the Sweet 16 eight times, the Elite Eight six times and the Final Four five times. He's never coached a player for four years without taking him to a Final Four. That's as impressive a resume as anyone in college basketball has.

Yet, if you asked non-Big Ten fans to rank the four coaches in this year's Final Four, he'd likely come in third place -- behind Jim Calhoun and Roy Williams -- for most of them.

INDIANAPOLIS -- On his tippy toes, he might be 5-10, very easy to lose in the enormity of a football stadium where faces look like matrix dots and crowd noise drifts to the ozone. But no one strikes a larger pose in the Midwest today than Tom Izzo, public defender of the Big Ten's battered self-esteem. If trends and hipness start on both coasts in America, college basketball in the heartland also has been taking on an irrelevant, plodding look, to the point I stopped watching.

And I live in Chicago.

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- There's no place like home for the Final Four.

Goran Suton scores 19 points and pulls down 10 rebounds and the Spartans hold Louisville under 40 percent shooting to knock off the overall top seed Cardinals 64-52 and advance to the final weekend for the fifth time in the last 11 years.

Only 90 miles from their campus, the Spartans will play Connecticut on Saturday at Ford Field in Detroit. A crowd of 72,000, the largest ever for college basketball's signature event, is expected for each game.