Ask any college basketball coach in the country right now and he'll tell you this season has been the craziest in recent memory. but the reality remains: someone ultimately will be crowned national champion.

Tom Izzo, who has taken Michigan State to six Final Fours in his career, knows a thing or two about peaking at the right time. Last year, he took the Spartans to the national semifinals after earning a No. 3 seed in the Big Ten tournament -- finishing two games back of Maryland and four behind Wisconsin, the team the Spartans ended up losing to in the conference tournament.

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The Terps have the third seed this time around -- winning a tiebreaker over Purdue, Iowa and Wisconsin -- and perhaps the most talented starting lineup when they begin play in Indianapolis on Friday at 9 p.m. against either Wisconsin or the winner of Nebraska-Rutgers.

And Izzo, whose Spartans finished a game ahead of the Terps in second place, still believes in Mark Turgeon’s team.

“I still think Maryland, top to bottom if you look at their team and you thought of the best players and best bigs and guards and this and that, I think they’re still the most talented team in the Big Ten,” he said during a Big Ten teleconference on Monday.

The Terps have lost four of their last six, but as Turgeon is quick to point out, they’ve had tough road games against Indiana and Purdue during that stretch. With an unbalanced schedule, they didn’t get a chance to host either of the conference’s top two teams -- Indiana and Michigan State -- and lost when they travelled to East Lansing and Bloomington.

“I think teams can turn on the dime, but I’m not disappointed with the way we’re playing. I’m disappointed that we’ve lost a couple of games lately, but we made three seed in a great league,” Turgeon said on Monday. “I’m happy to be the three seed, we’ve had to overcome some things and we’re looking forward to the postseason.”

If you look at preseason predictions, it’s easy to say the Terps have underachieved -- nobody expected them to be ranked 18th in the AP Poll right now -- but they’re still one of four teams to get a double bye in the Big Ten tournament. And that was no easy task in a conference that saw eight teams win at least 10 league games for the first time in history.

“To me it’s going to be harder to move on in the Big Ten tournament than it might be to move on in the NCAA Tournament,” Izzo said. “This has been the craziest Big Ten I’ve been in.”