Basketball

1 hour and 41 minutes

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1. Looking Back on the Juwan Howard Era

Starts at 1:00

It’s coachin’ search time, baby. Time for Warde Manuel to finally make a decision (unless it’s Beilein). One last look back at the Juwan Howard era. He came in with a good Beilein roster and brought in Franz Wagner. It felt like a seamless transition but then after that he just didn’t have a wing on his roster. Juwan was finding guys who were already shaped for the NBA and not having them prove anything. He also couldn’t play the portal well, it feels like he was too used to managing NBA rosters. It’s not a zero tolerance policy if you keep having incidents happen. 

[The rest of the writeup and the player after THE JUMP]

decision time [Bryan Fuller]

Not Happening

Creighton's Greg McDermott leads this list. He signed a contract extension a week ago and said he wants to retire at Creighton. Nate Oats also just signed a contract with Alabama that will give him a top five salary in college basketball. Retired guys John Beilein and Jay Wright are also in this group, as I bet one dollar neither wants to come back and deal with the portal and NIL and whatnot. Michigan is deeply unlikely to poke around the NBA, in any capacity, after Howard went so wrong.

Tony Bennett… cumong man. Get real.

Probably Not Happening

Two up-and-coming P5 coaches have difficult buyouts. South Carolina's Lamont Paris looks like a natural fit: he was born in Ohio and spent eight years as a Wisconsin assistant. Unfortunately he just signed a six-year extension with a $12.5 million buyout. Iowa State's TJ Otzelberger has a buyout described as "hefty" that Jeff Goodman thinks will dissuade OSU from pursuing him so I'd imagine Michigan is in the same boat. The number out there is 17 million, but I can't find anything that confirms that.

Shaka Smart has done a great job at Marquette after some up-and-down years at Texas, but I think Brendan Quinn is probably right that Smart isn't going to leave a good Big East program that's probably a two seed to run it back as the second banana at a football power.

The opposite applies for Porter Moser. His three years at Oklahoma have been underwhelming.

SDSU's Brian Dutcher has had a ton of success with the Aztecs but he's 64 and may not want to spend a few years rebuilding the crater that is Michigan's roster when he could be having fun with a good program. Also the connection to Steve Fisher may still be a problem 25 years later.

Fred Hoiberg has Nebraska in the tourney after a long build but bringing the king of the portal to Michigan seems like a bad fit for both parties. Chris Collins: no.

Realistic Candidates

image

[Colorado State]

NIKO MEDVED, Colorado State. Medved took over a Larry Eustachy crater and immediately improved CSU from 224th in Eustachy's last year to 180th, 99th, 76th, and then 46th in 2022, the year when Michigan faced them in the first round of the tourney. CSU had an off year in 2023 but is back in the tourney this year with room to spare. Torvik has them as a 7 seed. An 10-8 conference record doesn't seem great but this year's Mountain West is more or less a power conference—it's the #7 conference in Kenpom, but their average efficiency rating is closer to the Big East (#2) than the A10 (#8).

Medved is an offensive guy first and foremost. His teams have been top 50 in two-point percentage every year he's been at CSU and they tend to have very high assist rates. That combination usually means a guy is scheming up excellent looks for his team. TO avoidance has been good, but not Beilein good. Speaking of:

Colorado State’s motion offense has become a must-watch for basketball junkies. The ball moves; there’s constant cutting and reads. It has elements of Johnny Orr’s spread, John Beilein’s 2-guard attack and Lennie Acuff’s version of the Princeton.

“Maybe one day it’ll be the Medved system,” Medved says.

He’s proud that this system is uniquely his.

That's from an Athletic article in which Medved offered a two-week deep dive on his program; it mentions that Isaiah Stevens, the point guard Michigan played in that game, stuck it out at CSU when he could have hit the portal:

“The main thing that has always kept me here was it’s hard to find people that genuinely care about you,” Stevens says. “My dad always told me there’s certain things money can’t buy, and that’s loyalty and relationships and faith and love. And I just feel like a lot of that has been built up here over my time.”

Medved, like everyone else in college basketball, has hit the portal for players but he's gone an unusual route: he's got two DII transfers and a DIII transfer in his rotation. The two DII transfers are starters with 121 and 118 ORTGs on ~21% usage in what is more or less a high major conference. Guy has an eye for talent.

[After THE JUMP: more mid-major guys]

[David Wilcomes]

2.5 years ago, your author wrote a brief post about the news that Juwan Howard had been extended as Michigan Men's Basketball Head Coach. In the intervening time since being given that five-year extension, Howard's Wolverines went 43-55 and today, just two days after finishing 8-24 in the 2023-24 season (Michigan's worst record in four decades), Howard has been fired. Statement: 

Juwan Howard was hired May 22, 2019, after former coach John Beilein exited for the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers. Michigan's coaching search was muddled due to a lack of quality candidates, with the search coming a few months after most coaching vacancies were filled nationally. Howard was the consensus option, a program icon as a player from the Fab Five days who embarked on a long and successful professional playing career. After his playing days, he had been an assistant coach in Miami under esteemed NBA coach Erik Spolestra. Howard had no NCAA coaching experience, or head coaching experience of any kind, but was regarded as a talented up-and-coming coach. 

Howard's first season was rocky, finishing 19-12 after getting off to an illustrious start. Michigan was only 10-10 in conference play but were headed for (roughly) a 6 seed in the NCAA Tournament, thanks to the B1G being loaded in 2019-20. The NCAA Tournament never happened due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it was an okay opening. Howard followed it up with a magical 23-5 season that earned him the extension, winning the B1G Regular Season Championship and a #1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. The team made it to the Elite Eight but fell just short to a Cinderella UCLA team. 

Howard brought in an elite recruiting class for 2021-22 and signed the extension shortly into the next season, then holding a 2-0 record. Things got murky after that, the team alternating wins and losses before just barely slipping into the NCAA Tournament as an 11-seed, with a 17-14 record. Along the way, Howard was suspended for five games for slapping a Wisconsin assistant coach during an infamous altercation following a loss to the Badgers in Madison. In the NCAA Tournament, the Wolverines moved past Colorado State and then upset Tennessee, making the Sweet 16 and seeming to salvage an otherwise frustrating year. The team got blown out by Villanova in the next round and the season came to an end. 

[Marc-Gregor Campredon]

The wheels came off over the next two seasons leading to the present. Howard's 2022-23 team endured a series of baffling late-game collapses that submarined their season, narrowly missing the NCAA Tournament and then getting bounced from the NIT after another meltdown against Vanderbilt. The offseason saw star Hunter Dickinson transfer out of the program, while Kobe Bufkin and Juwan's son Jett Howard declared for the NBA Draft.

Michigan struggled to fill those holes, as they battled continued problems with the transfer portal. Howard also underwent a serious heart procedure in the offseason, leaving him unable to coach the beginning of the 2023-24 season. The season that unfolded was a catastrophe, starting reasonably well but coming apart by December before losing 19 of 21 games in calendar 2024 to end the year. Along the way another incident unfolded, an altercation with strength coach Jon Sanderson, leading to Sanderson's exit from the program and recent hiring by Illinois. Michigan finished last in the B1G for the first time in over 55 years and were easily bounced on Wednesday night from the Big Ten Tournament by Penn State, ending their season. 

Despite frequent discussion of whether Howard would return, from a bird's eye view Michigan had no choice. The conditions of the program had deteriorated so severely that only one choice could be made here, coming on the same morning that The Athletic published a piece about cultural problems in the Michigan program. The candidates to replace Howard are not yet obvious and the next few days will see people, including AD Warde Manuel, assemble a list of targets. We will have coverage on that in the near future but for today, the news is simply that a long-needed change has been made. 

There is no content after the jump. 

is the culture of the #129 team in Kenpom bad 

don't cry because it's over, cry because it happened 

An otter covering his eyes

Keep 'em shut just a bit longer, little guy. 

"This is the MGoBlog podcast, there's gonna be some Coen Brothers."

the regular season has reached its merciful conclusion 

wholesome Mikey content within 

Road Nebraska turns into Michigan.

Sometimes leadership is not taking every penny you can come across.

"He's been in Tennessee, he could've impregnated a raccoon, we don't know. We gotta check."

it's almost over!!!