Game 21: Michigan at Michigan State Recap

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For the second consecutive week, I spent Tuesday writing a game recap long before the 9 p.m. scheduled tip on Peacock.

Entering a rivalry game at the Breslin Center with no realistic chance to compete leads to more reflection than reaction. Especially on a night when Michigan played better than I expected and still lost by 19 points. It’s hard to focus on anything other than the program, how things have ended up this bad, and what it will take to turn them around.

It dawned on me that I created this site 16 years ago for one reason: no one else cared enough about Michigan basketball to spend time writing about it or analyzing it.

The first post went live in December 2007. Michigan was 4-8 with losses to Harvard, Central Michigan, Boston College, Western Kentucky, and others. They went on to lose 14 more games that season.

For me, apathy and suffering have always been part of the fabric of being a Michigan basketball fan. The program has lived in the shadow of one of America’s most famous football programs. My time growing up as a fan was almost entirely focused on one seemingly impossible goal: making the NCAA Tournament.

The ethos of the program, at least the modern version, was built from those dark days.

We’ve become accustomed to the renovated Crisler Center and Player Development Center. Still, stories about practices in the IM Building or coaches buying their own carpet for their office are part of the history. The Wolverines were one of the most consistent postseason teams in the country for much of the last decade, but there were also days when that level of success was unimaginable.

These days, we spend time debating how to improve student seating at Crisler, but back then, the Maize Rage was a small group of people who cared enough to sludge their way to the Crisler Center in the winter.

To me, the program’s rise under John Beilein was never a return to anything; it was about building something from nothing.

Over the past two disappointing seasons, I’ve realized that viewpoint has become a bit dated. Beilein’s project succeeded, and an entire generation of fans know nothing besides what he built.

A fan base that understandably fell in love with the success of multiple deep NCAA Tournament runs, not one that looks back on that Queme Los Barcos win at Minnesota or Michigan actually winning the Big Ten Tournament game it needed against Iowa to make the NCAA Tournament as the ultimate validation of success.

It’s terrifying to be limping back toward that place of apathy and frustration before those magical years.

It’s one thing for fans to feel those expectations, but it’s something else when it seems like the current program is running as if that downside doesn’t exist. You always had the sense that John Beilein ran his program in constant fear of returning to that place. Today, it feels like Michigan operates as a program that deserves to be anywhere but that place.

The losses are going to pile up — Michigan has a chance to “top” that 22-loss season from Beilein’s first year — and the attendance in the Crisler Center will continue to wane. Resale prices for the rematch of tonight’s rivalry game are down to $50 on SeatGeek. Two weeks from now, we’ll see enough Michigan State fans in Crisler to harken back to more dark memories (as if tonight wasn’t enough).

This entire project has collapsed faster than anyone could have imagined. The question is: How did things become this dire? And, more importantly, how do they get better?

The path to this point isn’t hard to figure out. Michigan has spent more time upgrading the kitchen and decorating the living room than reinforcing the foundation.

Early on, the upgrades worked. Juwan Howard’s second team was one of the program’s best in the modern era. That group raised a banner and was an Isaiah Livers injury away from a Final Four (or more). Over time, upgrades only go so far. The constant pattern of adding win-now players rather than building for the future has led to a rapid decay of the roster.

In five recruiting (and transfer) classes, Juwan Howard has signed twelve players who played only one season. He’s signed five more who played only two years (a count that will likely grow after this season), and six players committed or almost committed but never enrolled.

There’s little doubt in my mind that Howard can coach a terrific roster to impressive heights. Unfortunately, having faith in his vision and strategy for building that roster is becoming harder and harder. Howard has excelled at making good players great — his track record of sending players to the NBA Draft speaks to this — but he hasn’t turned enough average players into good ones, and he hasn’t recruited or kept enough around to make a difference.

The sport has undeniably changed in significant ways during the last five seasons. The rise of the transfer portal and NIL has altered roster-building strategies across the sport. The timing of the COVID year was another bad break, doubling down on recruiting classes that were impacted by a coaching transition.

But at the end of the day, short-term decision-making is the common denominator. Decisions made before the portal and NIL — like the Isaiah Todd fiasco — show the same lapses in judgment that have eventually pushed things to this point.

The only way to get this program back to where it needs to be is to start building a new foundation. Anything to build on. A philosophy. A team that grows together. An offseason plan that comes together.

Michigan isn’t a program that is going to fix itself. Frankly, not enough people care to make that happen. This isn’t Indiana, where fans are passionate and desperate enough to throw boatloads of NIL cash around to save themselves from a mediocre product. Even the worst Indiana teams can fill Assembly Hall, but that isn’t the case at the Crisler Center.

The harsh reality of the job is that the product on the floor has to earn support, not vice versa. There are jobs where that isn’t the case, but this isn’t one of those jobs — even if it might have felt like it five years ago.

Some limitations have always been there and always will. Other schools will push the limits further, whether academics, recruiting, transfer admissions, or anything else. But you must play the hand you are dealt and play to those restrictions rather than ignore them.

There’s no lifeboat; it’s back to the process of trying to build something from scratch with every tool available. There are no quick fixes or shortcuts, as we’ve learned those only tend to put you further behind.

The most disheartening part of writing this today, besides the 81-62 final, is that everything I’ve written applied in April. There was a chance to change the heading. Instead, the ship had only drifted further in the wrong direction.

There was no staff shakeup. No change in philosophy. No defensive fix. There were portal miscalculations and academic issues, as we’ve seen before, and the end product was an incomplete roster that can’t compete in the Big Ten. At this point, it’s hard to see things getting better before they worsen.

The roster lacks obvious building blocks, and potential portal departures loom. One of Michigan’s best players is suspended for road games; the other is a graduate transfer with six weeks left in Ann Arbor. Michigan has replaced more starters than it has returned for the last three years, and there’s a good chance that next year will be more of the same.

Do that every year, and you aren’t building anything. You are swimming in mud.

This isn’t about one misstep or a detour. Michigan hasn’t veered off track by a couple of bad breaks. The roster is a product of what Howard’s built over five years. His first true recruiting class will graduate this year — of course, one member already did over the summer before he jettisoned off to Kansas — and the roster looks as bleak as it has for decades.

There are a million different ways to try to get this thing back on track, but something needs to be done. Not a a minor tweak or two, but a complete overhaul.

The plan isn’t working, and it will take honest reflection, hard decisions, and harder work from everyone involved to develop a new one.

If you came here looking for thoughts on the game. Here are a few quick ones.

• Michigan made a bunch of tough shots in the first half and deserves credit for it. If I were a Michigan State fan, I’d be wildly disappointed with how my team played to open the game.
• I have no idea what to make of Michigan State not pressing Michigan’s guards at any point. It’s either a sign of blatant disrespect, stubbornness, or poor scouting. I suspect mostly the first two.
• Michigan State scored 8 points in the first 11 possessions of the game and 73 points in the final 50 possessions. That’s 1.46 points per possession over the final 32 minutes of the game. This wasn’t about half-time adjustments; it was about a Michigan team that couldn’t defend and shot the lights out for 20 minutes.
• Between the 12-minute timeout in the first half and the 10-minute mark in the second half, Michigan never recorded two stops in a row and gave up 21 scores to 8 stops.
• 14 of Michigan’s 16 catch-and-shoot attempts were guarded. Only 11 of Michigan State’s 21 catch-and-shoot attempts were guarded — a 52% contest rate isn’t going to fix any defensive issues.
• The Wolverines shot 64% on twos and 56% on threes in the first half; they shot 3-of-13 (23%) on twos and 3-of-11 (27%) on threes in the second half. I’d say the shot quality was generally about the same. There was no real point where Michigan was creating good looks; it just made them early.
• Jaelin Llewellyn is battling and playing through injury, but I give him a ton of credit because at least he’s fighting out there and hitting shots. Being able to play college basketball again has to be a win for him. Now, the careless turnovers that lead to free points have to be cut out.
• When they transferred in, Olivier Nkamhoua and Nimari Burnett were supposed to help Michigan’s defense. They have not.
• Michigan’s 2-3 zone is reaching comic levels of ineptitude to the point that it is hard to figure out where to start fixing it. The Spartans scored 1.63 points per possession against the zone.
• 14-of-26 free-throw shooting is not going to win games.
• This was by far the slowest game that Michigan has played all year at 61 possessions, which helped keep the final score slightly more respectable.
• It feels like Youssef Khayat got his chance and has now lost it with back-to-back DNP-CDs.