ATLANTA >> The clipboard never had a chance. Not at the start of the game Friday night, when Tom Izzo sat in his usual seat, second in from the scorer’s table, and folded his hands. Not a few possessions in, either, when he walked slowly to half court, bent at the waist and put those hands on his 70-year-old knees, as if he were playing defense and then got gassed. And certainly not at the first timeout, when Izzo, red-faced and screaming at his players, took that clipboard and slammed it to the floor.

A piece flew in the air. He slammed it again for good measure. At that point, in a few sloppy minutes, Michigan State had played right into Mississippi’s plan. Fed up already, Izzo raged in a tight huddle. He subbed some starters out. How many times, across 30 years coaching the same program, has some of form of this played out? More than 80 in the NCAA tournament. More than a thousand if you count every game. And eventually, as his teams have for decades, the second-seeded Spartans outlasted the sixth-seeded Rebels, flying around on defense, making just enough shots.

Paced by freshman Jace Richardson (20 points), Michigan State won its South Region semifinal, 73-70, to advance to the Elite Eight here Sunday. It will face top-seeded Auburn. Izzo, unchanged to the bone — the old-school contrast to an unforgiving era — rides on.

“It’s hard to believe that in two days we’re playing for a chance to do one of the all-time great things in any basketball player’s life,” Izzo said. “And that’s play for a Final Four.”

As a symbol of what’s right or wrong with major college sports, Izzo has had a week. The transfer portal officially opened again Monday. Izzo, though, told reporters that’s just ornamental, that the portal never closes, that nothing stops the “dirtbags,” as he called them, from texting or calling his guys. Naturally, his opposition to the State of Things drew follow-up questions. Over and over, he leaned in while trying — and ultimately failing — to sit it out. If he kept talking, he said, if he focused on the portal at all in the lead-up to a Sweet 16 game, Izzo would be cheating his players. “Tom Izzo,” he added, “isn’t cheating the people that he has, that have been loyal to him, for this chaos that is going on out there.” So that was that, straight from the old horse’s mouth.

With the portal open, Izzo would coach. With players already skipping around the country, Izzo would coach. With his competitors already building their rosters for next season, damn it, Izzo was going to coach. But with the way he has built his teams, the approach, however noble, also shouldn’t derail his plans. Only one player in the Spartans’ top eight in minutes has logged time at another Division I school. On average, men’s teams in the NCAA tournament have had 4.3 D-I transfers in their rotations, according to a Washington Post analysis of each team’s top eight in minutes. And that bracket-wide number is roughly the same for Sweet 16 teams, which average 4.4 transfers in their rotations.

Frankie Fidler, the lone transfer in Izzo’s top eight in minutes, is eighth on the team in playing time. Szymon Zapala, on his third D-I school at Michigan State, is ninth in minutes and had started every game before Friday. Against Mississippi, Fidler played 12 minutes, scoring five points, and Zapala never entered. As is often the case for the Spartans (30-6), most of the key players were returners, including sophomore forward Coen Carr, who dropped 15 points, and senior guard Jaden Akins, who capped a 13-point game with two free throws in the final minute. And then there was Richardson, who nailed three first-half threes to keep the Spartans floating, then added 10 points in a back-and-forth second half.

“In the first half, we weren’t being as aggressive as we should have been,” Richardson said. “I feel like they were kind of just punking us in the beginning. We couldn’t get into the paint, shooting decent shots but not great shots. But I think in the second half it opened up for us.”

Of the 68 teams in the initial NCAA tournament field, Michigan State was one of only seven to have no or one D-I transfer in its rotation (Purdue, another of them, fell to Houston on Friday night, ending the Boilermakers’ season). This is not an anomaly for Izzo, who has rarely used the portal in the past decade, even after the NCAA eased transfer rules — and allowed athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness (NIL) — in 2021. That put the sport and its economics in a blender with no off switch. Nothing would ever be the same, seeing that coaches could use biannual free agency to flip their rosters in one offseason. In Mississippi’s rotation, Coach Chris Beard had six players with minutes at another D-I school.

But at age 66, then 67, then 68, 69 and 70 in January, Izzo didn’t bend. In the past 10 years, he has never had more than two players in his rotation — again, top eight in minutes — who had logged time at another D-I school. This just happens to be his best team of the Money Fueling Player Movement Era (2021 to present).

“Believe it or not, we got to play better,” Izzo said. “… We’re not a team that can just go out and play and win. But boy, we did a hell of a job in the second half.”

Izzo, at the root of it all, is a study in the difference between adaptation and change. In the late 1990s, he would ask Michigan State’s young football coach, a guy named Nick Saban, to borrow 12 sets of pads. He needed them for the War Drill, to teach his players to scrap for rebounds before starting the fast break. Years later, asked whether he would bring that back, Izzo said, “Hell no.”

It wasn’t that the modern players couldn’t take it. It was that the modern lawyers would sue.

That’s adaptation.

But wholesale change? That’s a different beast — and not essential to success if there’s enough adapting otherwise. And Friday proved that, at Michigan State, there has been just enough to keep an old engine running. The teams traded buckets in the final minutes. The end of the job wasn’t pretty, nor was the way the Spartans gave themselves a chance. But after the final buzzer sounded, Izzo could smile, breathe, relax his shoulders. While he talked to a television reporter, his entire team surrounded him. When he walked through the tunnel, at least a dozen cameras flashed.

The year is 2025, mind you, and Tom Izzo is a win from his ninth Final Four.

Emily Giambalvo in Washington contributed to this report.