basketball

Can't both lose.  Not pulling for anyone here.  I mean Duke, like Ohio, is four letter word. 

Prediction: Ohio 72 Duke 75

Trey Burke makes the game look easy. Unfortunately, it's likely that this is the last year we have pleasure of watching him in the maize and blue. Luckily, there's another PG in the pipeline that makes things look easy. Derrick Walton, 2013 PG out of Chandler Park HS in Detroit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uz91CTS4YBw

(embed doesn't work on the original post, right?)

As the Michigan basketball team returns to its traditional place among the nation's elite programs, Alan Glenn, in a Michigan Today piece, looks back a half-century at another time when the program resurrected itself, led by Cazzie Russell, Cager for the Ages

Bob Cantrell played in the Wolverine backcourt before and after Russell's arrival. "The first two years were really torture," he told an interviewer in the '70s. "The roof [at Yost Field House] leaked, there were no fans, we lost all the time. It was just unbelievable. We only had about 200 people at one game, I remember. Everything was football. Basketball was the big joke. If you were a basketball player, everybody looked at you like you were a freak. Then, overnight, they knew who you were. All of a sudden, we were the number one team in the country."

Of course Michigan's reversal of fortune wasn't quite that abrupt, and it wasn't all due to Russell. Coach Dave Strack had been building up the team since 1960, and by 1963 the Wolverine lineup overflowed with talent: Cantrell, Bill Buntin, Larry Tregoning, George Pomey, Oliver Darden. But it was Cazzie Russell who emerged as the star. Almost as soon as the lanky, six-foot-five-and-a-half, 210-pound guard stepped out onto the court, records began to fall. In his first game, a 90-76 victory over Ball State at the end of November, Russell led the team with 30 points. By the following March he had acquired 640 more, earning him the school's season scoring record.

Also included with the article is this vintage video:

A couple years ago we saw an amazing 30 for 30 about the Fab 5, but one persepctive was missing — Chris Webber's. Soon we'll finally (we hope, at least) get his side of the story when he releases his autobiograhy.

Although I'm sure he'll also write about other things, I think it's fair to say MGoBlog Nation will skip straight to the Michigan years.
 

I profiled Chris Webber in last week's Sports Illustrated -- he's become one of the more interesting NBA voices as a studio and game analyst for NBA TV and TNT -- and during our conversation he told me that he's been working on a documentary about his life for the past six years. Webber said he plans to release both the documentary and an autobiography at some point next year and the working (but unlikely final) title is The Black Forrest Gump.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI3qauCbF7w

Currently 31-31 with just over 4 minutes left in first half.