EAST LANSING >> In a year filled with records and accolades for Tom Izzo, add the conference’s top coaching honor.

The Michigan State coach was voted Big Ten Coach of the Year, the conference announced Tuesday. Izzo coached the seventh-ranked Spartans (26-5, 17-3 Big Ten) to a Big Ten championship for a record-tying 11th time in his career this season. His team enters this week’s Big Ten Tournament as the No. 1 seed, with a likely No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament, which begins next week.

“You don’t win these without your staff and your players,” Izzo said, quick to defer credit for his accolade. “I mean, they win the award, they do the grunt of the work. I just manage it. And so, number one, I want to thank them all publicly, because we preach to our players all the time: the team has success, the individuals within the team will have success. And I’m a recipient of the success our team had.”

This is Izzo’s fourth time winning the honor and his first in more than a decade, with wins in 1998, 2009 and ’12. Izzo won AP Coach of the Year in 1998. He is the oldest winner at 70 years old, older than Purdue’s Gene Keady who won his record seventh at 63 in 1999-2000.

In 30 years as Michigan State’s head coach, Izzo owns a career record of 733-300, with his 360 Big Ten wins — and counting — the most by a coach in conference history. Izzo’s 11th conference title tied Indiana’s Bob Knight and Purdue’s Ward “Piggy” Lambert for the most in Big Ten history.

This year, as far as pure coaching goes, may be one of Izzo’s best. He’s taken a rotation of 10 players to the top of the conference, all without the usual measure of star power often at his disposal in other years.

The Spartans had no players named to the All-Big Ten first and second teams, though Jase Richardson and Jaden Akins were third-team selections.

After MSU’s four down years before this season, some pundits and fans felt that the game had passed Izzo by, in his words. Izzo compared his stature in the Big Ten’s old guard to famed coaches in football during his younger years. Michigan State’s George Perles, Michigan’s Bo Schembechler and Ohio State’s Woody Hayes were questioned much the same as he was. However, the basics of the game they had thrived in hadn’t changed.

“Everybody knows that when you get a certain age, you’re on the back nine, if you can survive in these jobs anymore,” Izzo said on the Big Ten Network broadcast. “I think it’s more meaningful too that people start thinking that maybe the game has passed you by.

“It’s good to know that the game hasn’t passed me by until I quit working, and that’s the way I look at it.”

This year has dispelled such notions that Izzo’s style is outdated, adapting to perhaps even more significant change.

The advent of name, image and likeness (NIL) rights and the transfer portal has drastically changed college athletics, something Izzo had to deal with. He responded with a return to his coaching roots.

“There’s so many other factors now, but I don’t look at it that ‘there I showed ya,’ because I don’t think I’ve done anything that much different,” Izzo said at his weekly press conference Tuesday. “I’ve adjusted. I spent a little more time with the players — I always spend a lot of time, but I made sure this summer, this spring or this fall, we did things together. We went to baseball and football and basketball games. We went to the U.P. We went to Spain. We just did as many things as we could do together to try to build the camaraderie.

“And I’d say that if Coach of the Year was given for the reason it should be it, it should be given for what was done off the court, not on the court. And that’s what I think people sometimes don’t appreciate about here, is spending time with players pays dividends.”

Now, Izzo will take his team into a postseason with even higher expectations. The Spartans will play the winner of Oregon-Indiana in the Big Ten Tournament quarterfinals on Friday at noon (BTN).