The Florida preview lives here, but we're not quite finished celebrating the Kansas game yet. I make no apologies for this.

Per the request of MGoUser 4godkingandwolverines, here's the Trey Burke shot with a twist of Dennis Bergkamp (original here for those who don't get the reference):

After the jump, a few gifs of The Shot (we need a more original nickname for this, by the way) and some incredible reactions by Burke, the bench, and a couple fans.

[JUMP JUMP JUMP]

THE ESSENTIALS

The Gators' mascot in its natural habitat, a horse track, drinking the blood of its only prey: bourbon.

THE TEMPO-FREE

Four factors. Ranks are in parentheses and out of 347.

Florida is at least good at everything except getting to the line, which they don't do much largely because they bomb away from three (40% of their shots). This is not a disadvantage since they hit 38% from deep. They are great at both eFG offense and eFG defense.

Add the above up and that's the #5 offense, #2 defense, and runaway Kenpom #1 team.

THE THEM

Florida is powerful because they get contributions from every spot on the roster. No Gator has a usage rate higher than 23, and they go seven deep in guys with 18+ (20 is average). At one point in the year three or four Gators—I forget exactly how many—were in the Kenpom Player of the Year top ten. They were all at the bottom of the top ten and there is a team adjustment in there, but holy hot damn all the same.

ha ha wisconsin

If there is a go-to guy it's senior post Erik Murphy, who shoots 78/61/46. That 46 is no fluke—his shots are evenly split between twos and threes. Part of what makes Florida brutal to defend is Murphy pulling opponent posts to the perimeter and letting the 250-pound Patric Young make roaring noises on the interior. But anyway: Murphy. A 6'10" guy shooting threes has a top ten TS%. He doesn't turn it over much and his rebound rates are pretty good for a guy who's often on the perimeter on offense. His weakness, such as it is, is a slight predilection for foul trouble.

The aforementioned Patric Young—Murphy stole his K—is a slab of angry muscle who boards on both ends and has a post game to go with his assorted posterizings of opponents. That game consists of an assortment of baby hooks around the basket—he's not a shooter. But if you're sick of blocks coming from nowhere, don't watch this game.

Young shoots 59% from the floor; his prime weakness is 49% FT shooting. Possibly as a result he gets to the line a ton. In most cases if you have the option to foul Young as he's shooting, you should take the opportunity.

You can see the problem, I imagine. No matter who Michigan puts GRIII on it's a mismatch. He's 20 or 30 pounds lighter than either guy, a few inches shorter, and a few years younger. If I'm picking my poison I would go with Murphy, who seems like less of an OREB monster and will have to abandon his 46% three point shooting to exploit the matchup. I'm not happy about it either way.

The men who are not large are all kind of the same. They're upperclassmen around 6'2" who are about evenly split between twos and split the usage fairly evenly. They shoot a bit over 50% from two and around 35% from three; they don't get to the line much. Point guard #5 Scottie Wilbekin has a higher assist rate and a higher TO rate than the other two guys; he's only an okay FT shooter (71%) instead of very good like the other two. Senior #1 Kenny Boyton is the most three-heavy (218) attempts but has fallen off considerably from the 40% rate he hit last year. He's now idling at 32%. Senior #3 Mike Rosario has the best 3PT% at 38%.

what's with the tongue casey

Florida is another bench-shy team. They go eight deep. You may remember #24 Casey Prather from Michigan's unsuccessful attempt to recruit him; he's Florida's designated shutdown wing defender. As the only guy on the roster with the size and quicks to take on Stauskas and Hardaway, he might get more than his 15 or so minutes in this one. On offense he's a high-flier who throws down a ton and has an outlandish 80% eFG on shots at the rim. He's not bad from range, either. He's hitting 65% of his shots, has a double-digit OREB rate, and fills up the stat sheet with steals and blocks. He fouls a bit too much and can't shoot free throws but he's a quality option. This time Beilein's eye for talent isn't helping.

6'7" Will Yeguette is the main post backup; don't be fooled by the height. He checks in at a burly 240 pounds and has an extremely good 12/22 rebound rate, plus plenty of steals. He is another defensive ace off the bench:

When he was healthy, he was making immense contributions to the Gators' defense -- as a long-armed trapper/interceptor in the press (with a team-high 3.3 steal percentage); a great backline defender in the 2-3 zone; and the team's best defensive rebounder (with a 22.9 percent DReb rate). As coach Billy Donovan told the Orlando Sentinel, "Any time you lose a guy like Will Yeguete your defense is going to be different. Will adds a different dimension down there in terms of covering up a lot of things."

He's one of those long-armed, bouncy not-quite-a-fours who can plausibly guard four positions.

Shooting guard #20 Michael Frazier is a corner gunner. 80% of his attempts are from three; he hits at 47%. He turns the ball over a lot for a corner gunner and has a weirdly huge DREB rate, but mostly he's just that guy who nails open threes.

You know something weird? This is a John Beilein team.

THE RESUME

The good: Florida is not clutch, having lost all six games they've played in which the winning margin was in single digits. The bad: clutch probably doesn't exist and the Gators are 29-7, meaning they've won 29 blowouts this season and lost one. Scoring lots of points and not allowing your opponents to score any is a good way to find yourself at the top of tempo-free leaderboards.

However, it's hard to get a grip on just how good Florida is for the same reasons it was hard to figure out Pitt, which was rampant against any bad team and middling at best against the rest. That added up to a top-ten Kenpom ranking, an eight seed, and a not particularly competitive first round exit against Wichita State. Wichita State is in the Final Four now, but still.

In the nonconference section of Florida's schedule they laid waste to the state of Wisconsin, winning by 18 against the Badgers and 33(!) against the Golden Eagles. They blew out tourney at-large Middle Tennessee State, too. On the down side of the ledger: a one-point loss at Arizona and six-point loss to Kansas State at the Phone Company Center in Kansas City (so pretty much an away game).

Once SEC play hit, Florida busted out its flamethrower and looked to be on their way to an unprecedented domination of a mid-major league* until Arkansas caught fire in the first half and ended up winning by 11. This was in Arkansas, obviously. Arkansas outside of Arkansas is Grambling.

Florida recovered from this to bomb a few more SEC foes before losing at Missouri, Tennessee, and Kentucky to to finish 14-4. They went down to Ole Miss in the SEC championship game.

In the tourney, they blew out 14-seed Northwestern State, pretty much blew out 11-seed Minnesota, and controlled Florida Gulf Subs University after a shaky start. That Minnesota win brings their record against common opponents with Michigan to 3-2, with wins over Wisconsin, Arkansas, and Minnesota and losses to Arkansas and K-State. Michigan was 3-2 against the same teams, with both losses to Wisconsin.

*[HA!]

THE PROTIPS

To be perfectly blunt, watch Florida have an off shooting night from three. You know they're going to go up, and they're going to go up in spades. Michigan doesn't really have much control over whether the go down or not, both because threes are a lottery and Michigan doesn't close out too well. In general the variance that a three-heavy offense brings is detrimental to deep tourney runs, as one off game condemns you. Michigan found that out last year. Winnchart:

This was a bit earlier in the season when Winn was guessing the Gators would grab a one. They ended up with a three and have already exceeded expected performance, albeit by beating a 14, an 11, and a 15.

Michigan does have a shot of matching them three for three, so there's that. Let's go dome?

Run effectively off long rebounds. With a bunch of long shots come a bunch of long rebounds and the resulting runouts that fuel Michigan's high-powered transition offense. That's the theory, anyway. Michigan and Florida see an identical 12% of opponent shots in the first ten seconds after an opponent rebound.

Win the boards. Is this likely? Oh hell no. But I would have told you the same thing before the Kansas game and thanks to Mitch McGary and Trey Burke drawing huge amounts of defensive attention, Michigan outrebounded Kansas by a whopping 50%. (IE: their OREB rate was 33% and Kansas's was 22%.) Mitch McGary playing 35 minutes is a wildcard unaccounted for in the Kenpom numbers.

Mitch McGary: continue being a low-foul rebound vacuum shooting 80% from the field. No problem. I heard that Patric Young said McGary was literally a fetus.

Seriously though, Michigan doesn't win their last game without McGary making up for some defensive issues with a crushingly effective offensive and possession-generation game. He doesn't have to do quite the same thing against

Tim Hardaway and/or Nik Stauskas: go off. At all times one or the other will be able to shoot over their man, who will be four inches shorter. For a good chunk of the game, both of them will. Possibly all of the game if Billy Donovan elects to put Casey Prather on Burke. If one of those guys can come up with a game in which you think the shot is down before it even leaves the guy's hand, the path to victory becomes much clearer. I don't think Michigan gets this one without one of the two wings lighting it up.

Hope Florida is a Pitt-like product in which weak competition is blown out of the gym but reasonable folks are competitive. The Wisconsin and Marquette games are not great arguments here. But Florida has lost to K-State and Arkansas. They're more human than the number suggest.

Trey!!!! Do I hear double-digit exclamation points? Triple?

THE SECTION WHERE I PREDICT THE SAME THING KENPOM DOES

Florida by five.

3/29/2013 – Michigan 87, Kansas 85 (OT) – 29-7, Elite Eight

Every year.

Every year from now until the country collapses into warring fiefdoms because of peak oil or some other nonsense, Trey Burke rising up from 30 feet over a 6'8" guy will make an appearance on someone's reel of insane NCAA tournament moments. Even after the collapse, if things go badly for you and you are captured anywhere from Topeka to Kansas City you can escape by just uttering the words "Trey Burke" and watching your captors seize helplessly. Collect their weapons and go. Once recovered they will be in a foul mood.

It's going to go in every time. You won't have that sickening lurch in your stomach as the bottom drops out of your hopes and then slowly tick-tick-ticks up the rollercoaster as the improbable trajectory seems true. Josh Bartlestein is way ahead of you on this, and you'll see Bartlestein start celebrating two beats before anyone else in the arena can figure out if they're going to live or die. This time, it'll go down. This time, every time.

Michigan wouldn't have been in this position if the rim had been kind at Ohio State, or at Wisconsin, or at home against Indiana. They'd have popped up a seed or two and avoided a team like the Jayhawks, maybe even gotten the gilded path the Buckeyes got and are determined to make look like the Bataan Death March. Thanks to a delirious two and a half minutes no one has been able to figure out yet, and probably never will, Michigan erased a ten-point deficit, and then that happened, and then Trey Burke did that twice more in overtime and Michigan's where they thought they might be when they walked into Assembly Hall the #1 team in the nation: playing a three seed for the right to go to the Final Four.

At this point I'm not sure that even matters that much. I mean, yeah, obviously it matters. But that shot is going in, over and over, for everyone, forever. It is written on cuneiform tablets found in ancient Sumeria, and a tatoo on Charles Barkley's forehead.

via @ggoodness56

I'll Probably Embed This On The Next Four Posts

Also a little more of the end of the game:

And Burke talking to Sager:

Because Twitter Will Kill Me If We Don't

There is a "WE HAD SUBS IT WAS CRAZY" shirt.

Mystify your friends.

Bullets

Ima let you block five shots Jeff Withey, but Mitch McGary is the greatest post of all time in this game. Wait, first Withey: the guy blocked a Trey Burke floater on a pick and roll, despite being a good five feet from the shooter. Boggle. Trey agrees:

He kind of surprised me the first half, once I got to the free throw line and shot.  He had a piece of it.  I think he was deep in the paint and he still got a piece of it.

Michigan shot 56% from two against him, boggle.

Okay, Mitch. First, inhale.

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA.

12/17 from the floor against Jeff Withey with 5 offensive rebounds and 9 defensive rebounds. Three steals. An assist. One turnover. One blocked shot and a second that was so clean in this world of "you can do anything as long as your arms aren't fouling a dude" that the sound of the whistle made me leap from my seat and cry "noooooo," Vader-style.

McGary spearheaded another blowout on the boards against Kansas, with Michigan doubling up the Jayhawks in offensive rebounds and winning the tempo-free battle 33% to 23%. He put up 25 points on 19 shot equivalents and generated at least eight extra possessions for M. He didn't pick up a foul until deep into the second half. I think we've just seen the best game of his career.

McGary has definitively arrived now. It's one thing to beat up on Juvonte Reddic and the four dwarves, entirely another to leave scattered bits of Jayhawk in your wake. The finer points of defense still elude him; that's the difference between McGary being pretty dang good next year or All American. That and free throws.

Now that we're used to the hugeness and the energy, the striking thing about McGary is how skilled he is. He hit an elbow jumper in this one and followed that up with a late turnaround from the short corner that was some Duncan business. His bunnies go down at a huge rate because he can slam them down when appropriate but also has excellent body control and the ability to shoot with both hands. Most of McGary's makes don't even touch the rim.

['shop via Ace.]

Relatedly. At halftime I made a comment about how I missed the version of Kansas that shot itself in the foot until it ran out of feet and just kept shooting, and more than one person said something about how they missed Burke. I was a little confused by this, and then the TV put up some chyron stating that he had zero points. Oh.

I didn't really feel that. Michigan had over a point per possession at halftime largely thanks to Burke getting the offense set up, and if he missed shots they often drew so much attention that GRIII or Mitch McGary was able to get a putback. Faced with the prospect of taking on Withey, he mostly got his teammates involved. Five assists is a lot of assists in a half.

I was frustrated by a thirty-foot bomb that came early in the shot clock and set up a break the other way. It felt selfish. Even that turned out to be necessary range-finding as Trey unleashed his inner Jimmer in the second half.

Win graph. Per reader request, the win graph from Kenpom:

Michigan's win probability dipped to 0.6 with 2:33 left, down ten. That was one in a hundred—one in two hundred. Trey's shot took Michigan from 10% to just over 30%.

Jordan Morgan, scrapping. Morgan only got five minutes, about which more later. This bullet is a feel-good bullet about Morgan dusting himself off and turning in two huge plays:

• scrapping to the ground after Hardaway's missed three pointer and eventually getting the ball to GRIII for his acrobatic layup.
• forcing Nutpunch Johnson to orbit so far around the corner that by the time he realized Hardaway wasn't leaving McLemore, anything he threw up was going off he side of the backboard.

His boxscore contributions were thin (though I guess three rebounds in five minutes is pretty good), but Michigan did need him and he did come through. Beilein lifted McGary for him on that final possession; it's hard to see McGary pushing Johnson as far outside as Morgan ended up doing. Also, Morgan eventually decided to do nothing:

"I was going to go up with (Johnson) and I saw he was looking to pass. I backed off a little bit but the angle he had wasn't necessarily the best," Morgan said. "He didn't have a good angle to put it off the backboard, so he got caught too far under and if it had been a floater, that would have been tougher than putting it off the glass."

That zen decision is not something McGary specializes in.

Karma is going to punch you in the nuts. Speaking of ol' Nutpunch Johnson, he picked up an obvious charge shortly after being assessed the flagrant one, sat, came back, picked up a cheap one on an out of bounds play, and sat yet more time. He ended up getting 20 or so minutes in the last 25; he hit some shots… and had 0 assists to 5 turnovers, not even counting the mess he made of the last play. Oh and that McGary statline. Oh and missing the front end right before Burke blew everyone's brains up.

My only regret is that Johnson is a senior—otherwise we would have a delightful couple years of competing nicknames for the guy in the blogosphere.

Spike. I don't get it. Michigan gave Albrecht 11 minutes, and I was confused by about 10 of those—Burke sat for one. In this game it seemed like Michigan badly needed post defense, especially at the four. Kevin Young, Jamari Traylor and Perry Ellis combined to go 11/14, give or take an Ellis attempt against McGary when Withey was on the bench.

At 5'11", Albrecht is not noted for his post defense. While he was perfect for the up-and-down VCU outing, having him out there for a big chunk of time right after halftime was odd. He barely touched the ball on offense, and Michigan's defense with him out there was pretty porous.

Morgan at the four seemed like the move. Robinson had a decent night on offense and added three steals of his own, but, man, 11/14. Am I crazy here?

Stauskas took it easy, man. I predicted a tough night for Stauskas. He did okay. His attempts were relatively limited, which was fine. He took only good shots, hitting all three inside the arc and 1/4 from three—the OT miss was a killer. 11 points on 9 shot equivalents is decent output; he also had three assists.

But like man, if I can scream "make a free throw" in anguish at anyone, it's Stauskas. That missed front end would have paired with the foul on McGary's block in a Jacob Marley tapdance duet if Michigan hadn't pulled their asses out of the fire.

They really need an advantage call or something. If your foul does not prevent a fast break from fast breaking, the refs should just stick their arms out wildly to indicate a foul is coming but they have chosen to let the play go because the offense is in a fast break state.

If only my predictions weren't literally taking whatever Kenpom says and repeating it because I think predicting sporting events is an incredibly foolish pastime, as last night's game amply demonstrates. By which I mean, suck it local media!

Local writers
Nick Baumgardner, MLive: Kansas (66-61)
Kyle Meinke, MLive: Kansas (67-61)
Mark Snyder, Detroit Free Press: Kansas (67-63)
Mitch Albom, Detroit Free Press: Kansas (70-61)
Jeff Seidel, Detroit Free Press: Kansas (72-68)
Drew Sharp, Detroit Free Press: Kansas (71-65)
Rod Beard, Detroit News: Kansas (72-65)
Matt Charboneau, Detroit News: Kansas (74-68)
John Niyo, Detroit News: Kansas (67-63)
Bob Wojnowski, Detroit News: Kansas (72-68)
Brian Cook, MGoBlog: Michigan (by one)

(I also expected Kansas to win in my heart of hearts.)

Elsewhere

Burke postgame from GBW:

It finally went down:

Trey Burke has taken the last shot for Michigan before but come up short several times.

Burke has seen his share of misses at the buzzer: Last season at Arkansas and this season at Ohio State, at Wisconsin and at home against Indiana.

One out of five is… fantastic right this instant.

MAY?

ARLINGTON, Texas -- Trey Burke may now officially be a folk hero, and Michigan's season is still alive.

Sample size. Woo.

Before the game, Michigan coach John Beilein wasn't ready to call that a slump or get a good feeling about McLemore's struggles.

"He's played how many games in postseason? Two?" Beilein said. "I wouldn't say that's a good sample size."

Presser transcript. Michigan has freshmen. Wojo. You did what to who?

Kansas center Jeff Withey was asked before his team faced Michigan whether he could dominate Mitch McGary.

"Yeah, definitely," Withey said. "He's not very tall. ... We'll definitely have to try taking advantage of my height."

That got telephoned into this:

"(McGary) looked at me last night, right before we went to bed, and he said, 'Did you hear what he said about me?" said Glenn Robinson III, McGary's roommate. "'He said, 'I’m not excited about his height. I don’t think anything about his height. And I expect to dominate him.'

"I looked at him and was like, ‘Oh. We’ll show him.’"

If Withey had said his bit a couple days earlier by the time it got to McGary it would have described him as a midget toad, so Kansas actually got off easy there. Seniors hugging and such. Rapping and ancient Chinese texts. Horford is a trip yo:

there was forward Jon Horford, off in a far corner ... reading a book.

One more time: Jon Horford, 15 minutes after advancing to the Elite Eight in one his school's most exciting tournament games ever, was reading a book.

Reporter: Jon. Jon. Jon.

HEY, JON.

Still no answer.

Finally, after a shout from point guard Spike Albrecht, Horford looks up from his ruffled pages.

"Hey man, what's up?" he said, apparently ignorant to or indifferent of the fact reading a book at this time is not customary. And he wasn't exactly thumbing the pages of Sports Illustrated, either.

Horford was reading the "Tao Te Ching," an ancient Chinese text believed to have been penned between the sixth century and fourth century BC.

A first look at Florida.

via mgovideo

That is all. Except for this: Josh Bartlestein is obviously from two seconds in the future. What's it like, Josh? Still awesome? Cool.

By ubiquitous request, we present tonight's commemorative unit of fashionable upper body apparel. (UPDATE: Those waiting on the store link to order your shirt, be patient. It's off the hook in there. UPDATE UPDATE: now working.)

It was someone's birthday. Someone who'd been really good this year. We had the grandkids over and had pizza and chicken wings. But the pizza was cold. And they forgot the wings (They usually have such great wings).

We thought about calling it a night—there will be another birthday next year—but then Trey...Trey said "Let's get subs!"

But it was far away, the place with the subs. Really far away. Like past the county line and closer to the state border than the edge of the arc. But that kid, he just went and delivered the subs. One after another: bologna and ham; three-salami and roast beef with provolone; turkey, swiss, mortadella and capacolla on cracked whole wheat, no tomato. Every order went down. And suddenly there we were…

Let me tell you, it was quite a night. We even made t-shirts!

(Here's the reference.)

WE HAD SUBS IT WAS CRAZY OH MY GOD IS THIS REAL HERE ARE SOME MUPPETS

and you can't have one without the other...

Survive multiple heart attacks and advance, baby.