2020-21 Season

Illinois at Michigan officially postponed, U-M expected to return at Wisconsin

Michigan’s Thursday night game against Illinois was officially postponed today. The Wolverines announced the postponement today and are expected to “return to their Big Ten regular season schedule on Sunday, Feb. 14 at Wisconsin.”

Here’s the official release:

ANN ARBOR, Michigan — The University of Michigan and Illinois athletic departments and the Big Ten Conference announced today (Saturday, Feb. 6), U-M’s game with Illinois on Thursday, Feb. 11, at Crisler Center has been postponed as part of the Wolverines return-to-play planning following the program’s pause.

The Wolverines are expected to return to their Big Ten regular season schedule on Sunday, Feb. 14 at Wisconsin (noon CT, CBS).

On Saturday, Jan. 23, Michigan Athletics followed a Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) recommendation to pause athletic activities in all sports, including games, team and individual training sessions.

In addition to the Illinois game, the stoppage caused U-M to postpone four additional games — at Penn State (Jan. 27), Indiana (Jan. 30), at Northwestern (Feb. 3) and Michigan State (Feb. 6).

Michigan and its postponed schools will begin working with the Big Ten to identify options for rescheduling opportunities.

The Wolverines have six games on their regular-season schedule to play in the three weeks between their February 14th return and the March 7th finale. Michigan and the Big Ten will also work together to reschedule as many of the five postponed games as possible.

Notable Replies

  1. muredhawks82

    I wonder what the minimum number of games played will be for consideration of a possible Big Ten title. Also, I hope they don’t have to force in all of these make-up games just to be out of gas come postseason play.

  2. JBmoney

    Yeah I think best case scenario is getting to 18 games, making sure to get the ILL game in and selfishly a back to back with MSU would be nice too.

    Would give the appearances of a good enough league schedule and not burn them out like all 20 games would.

  3. ChipJonez

    If we cram a lot of games in, we have to be prepared that Juwan is going to ride the bench very hard. He’s no dummy, he will keep his guys as fresh as possible for March. I am guessing more T-Will and Zeb, and Austin at the same minutes he’s been at. His rotation patterns might even cost us a regular season title (dramatic I know), but I don’t think gas is going to be a problem in the tourney.

  4. Schattner

    Let’s just play Illinois on a back to back to back, instead of making the logical decision of of letting them practice a week ago and continuing to follow all the recommended guildelines of curbing the spread. Maybe this is all a moot point when Michigan wins the big ten. If they don’t win the big ten, it’s all on Warde.

  5. 93grad

    17 games seems like a reasonable max at this point. And given the priority to play each team at least once I think we could easily scrap the missed games against PSU, Indiana and Northwestern.

    That would mean fitting in Illinois and Sparty somewhere, which should be doable. Anything more than that seems needlessly risky.

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