Is there such a thing as a coach yelling too aggressively? A recent Tom Izzo incident raises the question, but Jazz players say they love Quin Snyder’s approach.

In last week’s NCAA Tournament first round, Michigan State coach Tom Izzo called timeout and marched to half court to yell at 19-year-old freshman Aaron Henry, one of his players who had evidently done something wrong. Izzo screamed at Henry, put a finger in Henry’s face, and continued to the point that other players had to separate Izzo from Henry, trying to get the coach to move on to normal timeout affairs.

The video showed Izzo at a frenzied enough state, though, that it sparked a national conversation about whether or not coaches can cross a line when yelling at their players. Is there a level of aggression that’s too much?

For Izzo, nothing was out of the ordinary. He said he was holding his player accountable, something he said was necessary in any business.

"I get a kick out of you guys get[ing] after somebody because you’re trying to hold them accountable,” Izzo said in a press conference. “I don’t know what kind of business you’re in, but I tell you what, if I was a head of a newspaper, and you didn’t do your job, you’d be held accountable. That’s the way it is.”

It’s true: Izzo is certainly known for getting on his players in this fashion. And his players — including Henry — backed Izzo up.

"It’s OK. He’s gonna yell,” Henry said. “You gotta accept it and listen to what he’s saying and apply it to the game. You can’t listen to how he says it.” And that’s something that Michigan State’s players expected when they signed for the program.

“That’s how I look at it, you know? That’s why you come here,” Kyle Ahrens, one of Henry’s teammates, told the Washington Post. "You want to get coached. That’s what you expected when you signed up to come here.”

For what it’s worth, the science seems to support a more player-friendly coaching style. A 2013 study found that “athletes exposed to a verbally aggressive coach were significantly less motivated and perceived the coach as ... significantly less competent, trustworthy, and caring than a coach who used an affirming style.”

Some might find that acceptable if it led to winning, but a 1999 study specifically correlated that aggressive communication with “reported less team success in terms of win-loss percentage.” Relatedly, it appears the Army has made changes in its boot camps with young people, finding that “today’s generation responded better to instructors who took 'a more counseling’ type role,” according to an NBC News report. Army trainers instead focus on “using strong tactics when needed but keeping them the exception instead of the rule.”

Others squirm when watching the video for other reasons. At play is the tenuous relationship between a coach making millions of dollars — Izzo makes about $4.3 million per year — and young players who aren’t allowed to make anything off of their basketball talents while at the college.

That’s certainly not the case in the NBA, where players typically make more than their coaches. Izzo-style aggressive, finger-pointing mid-court verbal confrontation is significantly more rare at the NBA level than at the collegiate stage. Jazz head coach Quin Snyder will sometimes yell at his players, certainly, as will many coaches, but it’s typically a more generalized message — the famous “Wake up” scream from the sidelines at the beginning of Snyder’s Jazz tenure the most obvious example.

Snyder didn’t want to comment on the Izzo incident, understandably: Coaches have an unwritten rule not to comment on other coaches’ techniques. “Players are different, coaches are different, situations are different, relationships are different,” he pointed out.

The Jazz players seem to relish Snyder’s yells from the sideline.

“I don’t take it personally. He does it to wake us up. If he’s hard on me, he’s being hard on the team," Rudy Gobert said. "In a way, I kind of love it. I know he’s a competitor, I’m a competitor. When he’s right, if I was him, I would yell at me too. He’s right, let’s play, and let’s do better.”

Donovan Mitchell agreed.

“That’s why I love coach. He’s able to get into us, and we respond. That type of coach that gets on you like that, I prefer that, I love that," Mitchell said. "It’s not like it’s angry or vicious, but a lot of it is a teaching moment. Coaching styles are different, but I look at it as ‘Coach won’t yell at you if he doesn’t care.’”

And that’s especially true in the midst of an 82-game professional season.

“To have that to get you going, there are times when you’re going to need it. It’s a long season,” Mitchell said. “It’s natural to let off.”

Maybe that’s the moral of all of this: As the Army discovered, just a little yelling goes a long way.