Tom Izzo takes down ESPN's Dan Dakich for Twitter take, wants apology

EAST LANSING – Tom Izzo’s hatred of Twitter is about as well-known as his raspy voice.

Michigan State’s coach, who famously does not use social media, used the first few minutes of his interview with reporters following the Spartans’ 74-66 win over Ohio State to fire back at disparaging comments from the past few weeks from one tweeter in particular.

Dan Dakich.

Dakich was Public Enemy No. 1 at Breslin Center on Tuesday night after comments and replies he made about and to MSU fans on Twitter following the Spartans’ 86-57 blowout loss at Michigan a week earlier. Dakich broadcast that game as well for ESPN, and his son, Andrew, is a senior basketball player for the Wolverines who is redshirting this season.

“Danny owes our fans and our students an apology,” Izzo said of the ESPN analyst, who broadcast MSU’s game for the second straight week. “I probably won’t get it. I always got along with Dan. But as you know, it seems like this year, a lot of people have been mad at me. But I would have loved to get in that Izzone and join those chants. If I was on Twitter – thank God I’m not, thank God some of my friends are.”

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Some of the tweets sent by the elder Dakich, a former player and coach at Indiana, called MSU fans whiners. One said, “MSU always worried about UM.”

Another accused a Twitter user of only going to MSU because he did not get into Michigan. And many others.

Dakich and play-by-play announcer Dan Shulman returned to East Lansing on Tuesday, and The Izzone repeatedly unleashed venomous chants of “We hate Dakich” throughout the broadcast, specifically during timeouts and Ohio State free throws.

Izzo communicates often with The Izzone about sportsmanship and things that are said that he does not like. He said the chants were bothering him during the game.

At first.

“Until I got in the locker room. I asked, ‘What was that all about?’ And somebody read me his tweets,” Izzo said, dragging out the next three words: “The SOCIAL media.”

And then, Izzo really went into attack mode.

“If I would have known that before the game, I would have embarrassed myself almost as much as he embarrassed himself, and I would have led the chants,” Izzo said, his voice slightly cracking. “Because calling us whiners and that is kind of unprofessional. Classy broadcasters, like George Blaha and everybody else, wouldn’t have even thought to do something like that on TV. But saying our students couldn’t get in there? And he’s doing games for Michigan when his son is there? That is a disappointment, and that is ridiculous.

“And I think it’s funny because I got no respect for him for that. And I am going to publicly say it – you can tweet it, you can read it, you can do whatever you want with it – but Twitter got him in trouble, and he earned it. I am surprised ESPN would let somebody say something like that, that works for them.”

Dakich, who deleted a number of his replies and tweets sometime after the MSU-Ohio State game ended, did not respond for comment to a text message from the Free Press.

He tweeted this in the afternoon:

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