When Michigan State basketball coach Tom Izzo was forced to sit out Sunday’s game against Prairie View A&M due to a one-game suspension stemming from a secondary NCAA violation, Michigan coach John Beilein took notice.

The head of the NCAA’s ethics committee, he didn’t seem surprised that a coach, any coach, got caught in the ever-changing NCAA rulebook.

Izzo was suspended because one of the counselors at a basketball camp this year was associated with a potential prospect. In years past, that was not an NCAA violation, but the rule changed earlier this year and is a point of focus with the NCAA.

“I’m sure it was an inadvertent error, and that’s going to happen,” Beilein said. “There’s things changing with the NCAA so often, and in a good way but someone is going to get caught in those things, because the changes happen so quickly sometimes and what was a normal thing changes.

“I’m sure that is what happened up there.”

Beilein said he believes the rules changes are necessary, but sometimes it takes a little while for coaches, himself included, to catch up.

At Michigan, though, he isn’t concerned about this particular issue because of the way the school handles the process of hiring counselors.

“With all our employees at the camp, they have to go through a pretty rigorous background check with the university,” Beilein said. “But then we had to add that to it.”

Resting Darius Beilein has spent time looking at point guards around the country, not for ways to improve his own emerging star, Darius Morris, but rather how many minutes some of the country’s better point guards play. Morris has averaged 34.2 minutes a game at the point guard slot.

“We have to continue, he’s playing well and with the TV timeouts, I’m always thinking about in this stage of the game, we’ve had a really good schedule with three days between games, so I know he has a day off the next day,” Beilein said. “So we’ve played him a little bit more, but the games have sort of merited that, and he’s played so well.”

One option Beilein said he isn’t considering is resting Morris during practice, although with the way Michigan rotates players throughout the practice, the sophomore sees some rest anyway.

Keeping an eye on Connecticut As a former Big East coach, Beilein would travel to Hartford or Storrs, Conn., at least every other year to play Connecticut. And one of the people he’d always run into was the other basketball coach for the Huskies — women’s coach Geno Auriemma.

So when Auriemma’s women’s team won its 89th straight game Tuesday to pass the UCLA record of 88 straight wins set by John Wooden’s old teams, he recognized it as a big deal.

“They are winning national championships with it,” Beilein said. “They are playing top-ranked teams. It’s quite an accomplishment. Geno is really a class, any time we’ve ever played UConn there, he always comes by to say hello. He really has been a classy guy through this whole thing.

“The Connecticut newspapers follow Connecticut pretty passionately, and he’s done it with such class the whole time. It’s a great mark.”

No Cousy, No problem Morris was left off the very long, somewhat questionable Cousy Award watch list given to the nation’s best point guard.

He, along with Syracuse’s Scoop Jardine, Northwestern’s Juice Thompson and other top point guards weren’t on the list, but Morris said it doesn’t bother him.

“I didn’t know about it and don’t follow that stuff,” Morris said. “(Assistant coach Bacari Alexander) mentioned it to me and said ‘Oh, did you know this?’ I was like ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ but I really don’t care.

“It just shows that I have a lot of hard work to do.”

This and that Beilein said despite Bryant potentially playing a smaller lineup, he’ll likely stick with his same starting five of Morris and Zack Novak at the guards with Tim Hardaway Jr., Jordan Morgan and Evan Smotrycz at the forward slots. … Beilein said he is still waiting on grades, but he has no concerns about any of his players being ineligible for the second semester. … Morris said he isn’t sure where he’ll spend Christmas since he isn’t going back to Los Angeles, either with Morgan or Beilein.

Michael Rothstein covers University of Michigan basketball for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at (734) 623-2558, by e-mail at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com or follow along on Twitter @mikerothstein