Tom Izzo is in wait-and-see mode for Michigan State basketball’s next roster. But on paper, it looks as though the Spartans will have one of his most well-rounded groups ever.

Izzo and others, including Andy Katz of the Big Ten Network, expect Jeremy Fears Jr. to return to MSU for his fourth season, even though the All-America point guard turned heads of scouts with his scrimmage performance at the NBA Scouting Combine on Wednesday, May 14. He posted 17 points, five assists, three rebounds and two steals with one turnover after measuring in at at 6-foot, 196.2 pounds with a 6-4 wingspan.

Fears told Katz in Chicago that his decision would depend on the feedback he gets during the evaluation process this week.

“I believe I’m a first-round talent,” Fears said. “A lot of players that’s in the first round [of mock drafts], I’ve played against or probably seen throughout the college [season]. But that’s a big thing, if I think I can get a first-round spot, I would love it.

“My dream is to play professional and play in the NBA. That’s for sure a big dream. And if not, then I’ll go back to college and try to work my way up and get that.”

The deadline for Fears (as well as incoming transfer center Anton Bonke) to withdraw from the NBA Draft and retain their college eligibility is May 27. Assuming Fears does return, he will give the Spartans a top-10 lineup and potentially better than that for the 2026-27 season – and a chance to chase the elusive second national title that Izzo has long craved.

“I think we got a good group with everybody coming back and bringing in a transfer,” Fears told Katz. “Just overall, a great group of guys and being able to kind of build what was started last year.”

Here’s a look at where MSU’s roster stands now”

Point guard

Starter: Jeremy Fears Jr., redshirt junior

Backup: Carlos Medlock Jr., freshman

Shooting guard

Starter: Jordan Scott, sophomore

Backups: Kur Teng, junior; Jasiah Jervis, freshman

Wing

Starter: Coen Carr, senior

Reserves: Kaleb Glenn, redshirt sophomore; Scott

Forward

Starter: Glenn

Reserves: Cam Ward, sophomore; Carr; Jesse McCulloch, redshirt sophomore; Julius Avent, freshman

Center

Starter: Anton Bonke, senior

Reserves: McCulloch; Ward; Ethan Taylor, freshman

Analysis

Versatility will be a premium for Izzo, particularly in the frontcourt.

He’ll be able to mix and match based on opponents, with the ability to move Carr around on the wing and power forward as MSU has done at times the past two seasons. The same goes for 6-foot-7 Glenn, who missed last season after suffering a June knee injury after spending his first two seasons at Florida Atlantic and Louisville.

The former sportscaster is expected to struggle to win the endorsement over her GOP rivals.

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• Former sportscaster Michele Tafoya is seeking the Republican nomination for a Minnesota U.S. Senate seat.
• Tafoya’s past moderate stances and criticism of Donald Trump have alienated some conservative party delegates.
• Despite internal party divisions, Tafoya has significantly outraised her GOP rivals with help from the national party.

A dream candidate for the national Republican Party, former sportscaster Michele Tafoya is finding support from Washington to be a double-edged sword as she seeks to win retiring Sen. Tina Smith’s seat.

Tafoya, 61, is a skilled and media-savvy communicator whose name recognition and political smarts prompted the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) to call her “the only candidate with the common-sense leadership Minnesotans are desperately craving.”

Tafoya gets endorsement from Sen. Tim Scott

The endorsement by NRSC Chairman Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., made just after Tafoya announced her candidacy in January, has rankled some Minnesota Republicans.

Why? Because there were other Republicans vying for Smith’s seat, including Navy SEAL Adam Schwarze, former NBA player Royce White and Navy veteran Tom Weiler.

Another GOP candidate, former Minnesota Republican Party candidate David Hann, was also in the race at that time but dropped out last month. And Mark York, a seven-generation farmer from Lake Wilson is also running.

Yet the national Republican Party, which is battling to prevent a Democratic takeover of the U.S. Senate in November’s midterm election, placed its bet on Tafoya.

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That has disgruntled some of the 2,500 Republican delegates who will vote to endorse the GOP Senate candidates in Duluth at the end of the month.

“You have people who would see (support from the national party) as a plus, and there also are people who would see it as meddling from Washington,” said Frank Long, a delegate and longtime party activist from Watertown Township who supports Schwarze.

Long said the state’s Republicans “are not a monolithic organization.” He said some delegates are concerned about Tafoya’s support for abortion – which she says now is limited to procedures in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. 

Tafoya has also expressed support for “red flag” laws — which allow law enforcement to temporarily remove weapons to individuals a court has assessed might be a danger to themselves or others — that are opposed by many gun-rights delegates.

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Remarks Tafoya made about President Donald Trump in 2022 are another turnoff for some GOP delegates. She wrote an open letter to Trump in a now deleted post on Substack that said she hoped he would not run again, and even as she praised his accomplishments, she called his politics “messy.”

While Tafoya may not be the first choice of some delegates, “she has the right to run,” Long said.

Tafoya has since aligned herself closely with Trump’s platform and embroiled herself in the culture wars with her fierce opposition to transgender women in female sports.

But if she makes it to the general election, running against either Rep. Angie Craig, D-2^nd District, or Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who are locked in battle for the Democratic nomination, Tafoya will likely revert to the more moderate candidate she once considered herself to be.

“I think Minnesota is starving for a moderate Republican who doesn’t tell them that they’re going to ban abortion who is the antithesis of the Tim Walz regime,” Tafoya told WDAY Radio when Smith announced her retirement early last year.

After the February 2022 Super Bowl, Tafoya quit her broadcasting career, launched a political podcast and spent several years weighing whether to run for political office. She met with the NRSC in December and declared her candidacy about a month later.

Weiler, who ran unsuccessfully for the 3^rd Congressional District seat in 2022, said he contacted the NRSC last fall seeking support. But he said the people he spoke with seemed uninterested in him because he was “not rich or famous.”

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He said he was surprised and disappointed that the NRSC backed Tafoya.

“It was clearly a decision made in Washington, D.C., without any input from Minnesotans,” Weiler said.

Tafoya raised more than $2 million in the two months after she announced her candidacy, with the help of the national GOP. That’s more money than all of her GOP rivals combined.

According to filings with the Federal Election Commission, the NRSC gave Tafoya’s campaign $62,000 and Senate Republican Leader John Thune’s leadership political action committee has held joint fundraisers with Tafoya’s campaign.

The national party’s endorsement also brings help in recruiting campaign staff and campaign consulting, a must-have for a candidate who has never before run for political office. 

Minnesota is ‘a grass-roots state’ 

Tim Lindberg, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota-Morris, said the national Republican Party had to step into the race for Smith’s seat “to some extent because the state party has been in disarray.”

Shut out of holding a statewide seat for 20 years, the state party is low on cash and divided between the establishment Republicans, like Tafoya, and more conservative MAGA activists.  

So, while Tafoya’s campaign has had a boost from the NRSC and other GOP national organizations it is not guaranteed that she will win the votes of 60% of the GOP delegates needed to win an endorsement.

Tafoya’s campaign did not respond to requests for an interview and information. But the former sportscaster has said she will continue to run for the U.S. Senate and participate in the Aug. 11 primary even without an endorsement.

Historically, not all of Minnesota’s GOP candidates have abided by the endorsement. But the state’s political history also shows that Republican voters don’t reward non-endorsed candidates very often, especially in statewide elections, when the primary comes around.

Schwarze, another rival for the GOP endorsement, said Republicans “don’t reward people who take shortcuts.”

He called Tafoya a “D.C. out-of -the -box candidate” and is confident he will earn the endorsement, even if it takes several rounds of balloting.

“Minnesotans are not for sale,” Schwarze said. “This is a grass-roots state.”

The former Navy SEAL speaks in military terms about the U.S. Senate race.

“I’ve been preparing for this campaign run as if it were a ‘no-fail’ mission,” he said. After Tafoya, Schwarze, who reported raising more than $1 million as of March 31, has amassed the largest campaign chest among the GOP Senate candidates. Yet Democrats Craig and Flanagan have much larger war chests than Tafoya and Schwarze.

Both Schwarze and White — who won the GOP endorsement to run against Sen. Amy Klobuchar in 2024 — have vowed to abide by the endorsement and support the delegates’ candidate of choice.  

A lawsuit filed Wednesday, May 13 seeks to knock a proposed constitutional amendment off Missouri’s 2026 ballot that would give lawmakers new power to expand sales taxes to eliminate the income tax, arguing legislators bundled too many subjects into one proposal and wrote misleading ballot language.

The lawsuit, filed in Cole County Circuit Court by attorney Chuck Hatfield on behalf of a Missouri resident, challenges a proposed ballot question that would ask voters to amend the Missouri Constitution to begin phasing out the state individual income tax.

The measure, approved by the legislature last month, is expected to appear on the November ballot unless Gov. Mike Kehoe moves it to another election. Kehoe has made eliminating the income tax one of his top priorities, arguing it would make Missouri more competitive with states that do not tax individual income.

But the lawsuit argues the proposal is constitutionally defective and should be blocked from any ballot. In the alternative, it asks the court to rewrite the summary statement voters would see.

The lawsuits central legal argument is that the proposal violates constitutional limits on ballot measures by including more than one subject and effectively amending multiple articles of the Missouri Constitution.

“This is precisely the logrolling harm the multi-article rule was designed to prevent,” the lawsuit argues, contending voters who support eliminating the income tax could be forced to also accept provisions they oppose, such as expanding the sales tax or changing how road funds and local taxes are handled.

The lawsuit also argues the proposal would improperly expand the constitutional role of the state auditor by requiring the office to calculate reduced tax rates triggered by the amendment. The petition contends that duty is not related to auditing the receipt or expenditure of public funds, which the Missouri Constitution says is the limit of the auditor’s authority.

Instead, the lawsuit argues, the amendment would give the auditor a new rate-setting or revenue-modeling role, including authority to calculate changes affecting tax rates set elsewhere in the constitution.

A spokesperson for Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, who was among the named respondents in the lawsuit, did not respond to a request for comment.

If passed, the proposal would direct lawmakers to set a revenue baseline and triggers for phased-in reductions in the top tax rate. It also allows five years for the legislature to write a new sales tax law, which must be directly tied to cuts in the top income tax rate in a manner supporters hope will not increase or decrease revenue.

Currently Missouri has an income tax with a top rate of 4.7% for taxable incomes greater than about $9,200 a year. The sales tax is 3% for general revenue, but earmarked state taxes and local options stack on top of that, creating a rate that is 7% to 8% in most locations and can be as much as 12% in some special districts.

The sales tax applies to physical goods and excludes services. The Missouri Constitution prohibits lawmakers from applying the sales tax to real estate transfers and any goods or services not currently taxed, but those provisions would not apply to any sales tax plan passed as a result of the constitutional amendment.