Last Thursday, Michigan peeled itself off the Gainbridge Fieldhouse floor deflated, defeated and perhaps a little bit shell-shocked, having coughed up a 17-point second-half lead to Indiana. For the first time since 2004, the Wolverines had dropped their first game of the Big Ten Tournament and, in the process, left its precarious NCAA Tournament fate in the hands of the selection committee.
Oh, what a difference one week can make.
Thursday afternoon — back inside the friendly confines of Gainbridge Fieldhouse — Michigan rallied from an early 15-point hole to beat Colorado State by 12, a whopping 27-point turnaround. Just when it seemed like the Wolverines were straight out of look, they stretched this topsy-turvy season a couple days longer.
“I think that was a true test for us of mental toughness and how our guys rallied,” Juwan Howard said afterward. “I think the last game we played versus Indiana, that was a great learning moment for us and how we have to not feel that we’ve got to play the scoreboard, but it’s everything that happens between the lines.”
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Howard stressed his refrain of “teachable moments” multiple times after the Indiana loss, and it appeared tired and out of place. But, seven days later, it appeared that Michigan did learn from that fiasco — not through maintaining a lead, but by not giving up on the game.
Early on, signs of life were bleak. Without DeVante’ Jones — who stayed back in Ann Arbor with a concussion — the offense predictably struggled; through 15 minutes, Michigan had nine turnovers and just five made field goals. But no one panicked.
“I know I was thinking, ‘Shoot, if they can do it to us, we can do it to them,’ ” Hunter Dickinson said.
The turnaround started on defense. Michigan realized that it was giving up too many open looks and had to play more of “Michigan defense,” as Dickinson called it. Perhaps no sequence epitomized that than one early on in the second half, when Dickinson pressed high at the top of the key and forced a steal, leading to a lay-in at the other end by Collins. Michigan was within three and quickly picking up steam.
“Basketball is (about) runs,” Caleb Houstan said. “They went on their run mostly in the first half and I think we stayed in it, got another gear and kind of made our run in the second half and didn’t really look back.”
Indeed, Michigan managed to flip the script. The Wolverines shot 60% from the field; Caleb Houstan, ever enigmatic, drilled a trio of timely 3-pointers; Colorado State, meanwhile, shot 29% from the field and 4-of-15 from distance.
A win like this, as Howard said, is a testament to the team’s resolve, one that only appears to be amplifying. In between jokes about assistance from the “basketball Gods,” Howard noted that he watched his freshmen “grow up” during the game.
Throughout the ups-and-downs of this rollercoaster season, one with far more valleys than peaks, Michigan has repeatedly rescued itself when many have counted it out. That played true again Thursday afternoon, with — for the first time this year — the season actually hanging in the balance.
For five weeks, Michigan has flashed that resilience which is so crucial in March, having not dropped consecutive games. No bad loss has snowballed into a potentially disastrous losing streak.
Yet the other side of that equation is equally important — Michigan hasn’t won consecutive games in over five weeks, either. If it wants to stretch its season out some more, it will need to buck that trend come Saturday.
Just maybe, though, the Wolverines have a formula that they can rely on.
“It’s not going to always go perfect for 40 minutes,” Howard said. “It just doesn’t work that way. But our guys stepped up when they had to.”
Photo: Bryan Fuller/MGoBlog
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