Healthy Tom Izzo says Michigan State basketball point guard Jeremy Fears Jr. almost 100%

EAST LANSING – With his 30th season as Michigan State basketball’s head coach about to begin, Tom Izzo gushed about how much better he feels after his spring hip surgery.

“I feel so much better. I feel healthier, I feel happier,” Izzo said Tuesday inside his team’s meeting room at Breslin Center. “It’s a good thing practice started, so I can get back to being miserable. It’s been too good of a summer.”

He’s half joking. Especially because the improved health of his point guard, Jeremy Fears, has Izzo both smiling and breathing a sigh of relief.

After the Spartans opened preseason practice Monday, their social media team released a video from the workout of a dunking drill. Each player during it took a pass on a move to the basket and threw one down, including sophomore Coen Carr’s typical highlight reel moment, a casual double-pump, two-handed reverse that drew no response from his teammates.

Seconds later, players were hooting and hollering. That’s because Fears, who was shot in his upper left leg in late December 2023 and missed the remainder of last season, followed Carr in the line.

The 6-foot-2, 190-pound redshirt freshman made a back cut and caught the pass in the lane, then took flight off both feet. He hammered down a windmill dunk that received a chorus of “Ohhhhhh!” that echoed in the Spartans’ practice gym.

“Jeremy’s health is probably at 95%,” Izzo said Tuesday. “He’s still at times maybe doesn’t have quite the explosion, but it’s coming every day. It’s getting better and better.”

Fears played in 12 games last season before the Dec. 23 shooting, averaging 3.5 points, 3.3 assists and 1.9 rebounds with 10 steals over 15.3 minutes. He returned to the court this summer and played point guard in all three games of MSU’s trip to Spain in August.

“He’s a phenomenal passer, he’s continually working on his shooting. Thank God he’s a very good free-throw shooter,” Izzo said of Fears, who was granted a medical redshirt by the NCAA in June. “He made some steps that was good for him. That was one of the reasons he did it, to try to get some guys like that a chance to play.”

That three-game, 10-day trip to Spain allowed Izzo to tinker with combinations and rotations he normally would not get during the Spartans’ usual preseason, as well as working in transfer Frankie Fidler and Szymon Zapala along with freshmen Jase Richardson, Kur Teng and Jesse McCulloch. And this year’s exhibition slate starts far earlier – and much farther away – than normal.

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MSU will travel to Marquette to face Izzo’s alma mater, Division II Northern Michigan, at 1 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 13 at the Superior Dome. It is MSU’s first trip to the Upper Peninsula in nearly 50 years, when Gus Ganakas’ 1974-75 team played a regular-season game against an NMU squad that featured a plucky, future Division II All-American point guard.

Tom Izzo. In his first collegiate start, in the fourth game of his sophomore season. The Spartans coasted to an easy 91-59 win against the “sacrificial lambs,” as Izzo called the Wildcats, on Dec. 16, 1974.

Since then, Izzo has become MSU’s all-time winningest coach, capturing the 2000 national championship and making eight Final Four appearances among an ongoing Division I record streak of 26 straight NCAA tournament appearances in his Basketball Hall of Fame career. Taking the Spartans back to Marquette is something Izzo said he has wanted to do “for many years, and I finally decided I was going to do it.”

“How did it come about? That’s the advantage of being a Yooper,” said Izzo, a 1977 NMU graduate. “I called up there and said, ‘I want to play a game up there.’ And they said, ‘Oh, that’d be nice.’ And I said, ‘I want to play at the Dome, I don’t want to play it at 3,000 seats.’ I said ‘I want to have some place where it’s an experience for my guys.

“It’s neat for me. … It’s kind of like, I want to make sure my players, in this entire world that we’re in right now, I want them to see everybody started somewhere. I think people see where I live or what I drive, I want to make sure they see where I lived and what I drove and how I went to school.”

MSU plays one other Division II exhibition game, at home against Ferris State on Oct. 29, before starting the regular season Nov. 4 against Monmouth at Breslin Center.

Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him @chrissolari.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan State basketball’s Jeremy Fears Jr. near 100% after shooting