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Tom Izzo addresses comments by Korie Lucious, Chris Allen on their drug use

Tom Izzo

Michigan State coach Tom Izzo talks to fans gathered for a pep rally at the Breslin Center in East Lansing, Mich., Sunday, March 28, 2010, after Michigan State returned from their NCAA win over Tennessee. The Spartans are in the Final Four for the second straight year. (AP Photo/Al Goldis)

ASSOCIATED PRESS

When Tom Izzo kicked Chris Allen and Korie Lucious out of the Michigan State program during the 2010-2011 season I bet he never thought that he would be spending time talking about the reasons for those dismissals as he helped prepare his Spartans, a consensus top three team, for the 2013-2014 season.

But thanks to a couple of confessionals, he has been.

Lucious said in an interview with blackathlete.net last week that it was weed that got him booted from East Lansing. “I was smoking I don’t want to tell a lot of people that but I was smoking a lot of weed at Michigan State,” he said. ” Thats the real reason I got kicked off the team and I let my mom, family and friends down.”

Allen came clean a couple of months prior to that, as he came clean about the reasons he was dismissed from the Spartan team, admitting his drug use in an effort to crush rumors that he had slept with a teammate’s girlfriend.

Allen, in part, wrote (sic): “to athletes who smoke WEED its not worth it, Yeah it makes you happy and forget all the BS you thought your coach was on with you but at the same time it’s a easy way to get you out of a respectable program and of course it’s deeper than just weed but that’s for me and the people that was at Michigan state those years to know.”

Izzo addressed those comments during an interview on “Mad Dog in the Morning” on 730 AM in Lansing, MI.

“I probably let them down,” Izzo said. “Everybody lets everybody down. But first of all, I thought it was ridiculous that now we’re reporting on websites, you know? I guess that’s the way it’s turned, that’s what I was told. But I didn’t talk to Korie. I talked to Chris a lot. Because Chris has left, he’s matured a little bit, he’s grown up and tried to come back and apologize for things.”

“[T]here are certain things coaches can’t say,” he continued. “There’s certain things that, coaches put up with a lot. Just like parents do. I mean, nobody throws their kid under the bus if he makes a mistake. But if the kid repeats the same mistake over and over, then it’s not a mistake, it’s a habit. When it becomes a habit, those things are hard to handle.”

(h/t Joe Rexrode)

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