free throws

It began with a conversation over Morgan & York sandwiches about why Michigan is always behind the rest of the country in free throw rate. The question is how do players, and teams, consistently "draw" fouls. And it bothered me that the rhetorical answers sounded more like Stephen Bardo/Dan Dakich truthisms than scientific wisdom.

• To the aggressive go the spoils.
• Star players earn respect from the refs.
• You gotta be a man to play in the Big Ten
• Fouling that guy is smart because he's only a 60% free throw shooter
• That's the kind of call you get at home.

Except one. The simple answer is you earn whistles by going to the rim (and Michigan doesn't go to the rim). This turns out to be as true as it is obvious:

An r-squared of 0.35 says these things are connected, but it's clearly not the only thing going on. So I figured I'd do this: substitute an expected free throw rate based on % of shots at the rim, then look at other numbers and see if there are any patterns.

And where better to start than the Dakisms, each with a ring of truth:

• More off-balance defenders around you equals more opportunities for one to foul you.
• The nature of good rim players is they can contort themselves to turn attempted blocks into glancing contact
• The Big Ten does seem to officiate more loosely than other conferences (we notice this at tournament time every year)
• Hack-a-Shaq is a thing, though when you account for the value of a foul to count both against one of your player's five and in the bonus/double-bonus math, it's not quite the 0.60 PPP you think it is.
• Home court advantage is a proven thing, and was a wild runaway thing in the Big Ten through January (a span over which Michigan had the misfortune to play 6/9 conference games on the road).

Not to mention refs are a breed of fallible humans who have their own ideas of what for and when to blow a whistle, and are influenced more or less by yelly coaches, and grew up hating Michigan, and are committed to screwing us because of something Bo said about Jim Delany, and there's a great conspiracy…

Let's try math instead.

[After THE JUMP: Math.]

Post game celebration. Confetti ho.

Morgan's singing voice is not the strong point of his game, but we'll forgive him.

All of the (most of the) awards. John Beilein is coach of the year to the media while Tim Miles wins the coaches' vote. This is justice. Meanwhile, John Beilein remains John Beilein:

Beilein said he will give away the coach of the year award as a trivia door prize at the radio show.

The first words out his mouth when asked about the award were about Tim Miles; he seemed almost annoyed he'd been handed a plague.

Meanwhile, Nik Stauskas is your Big Ten player of the year, Caris LeVert is second-team All Big Ten, and Derrick Walton is on your all-freshman team. On the snub side of things, Jordan Morgan is passed over for all-defense and Irvin for all-freshman.

It was probably tough for anyone to look at Michigan's defense and provide an all-D nod to them, even if most of the things going on weren't Morgan's deal. Irvin losing out to Purdue's Kendall Stephens is hard to defend since they were the exact same player and Stephens hit 37% of his threes to Irvin's 41%. But whatever, man.

Mmm, foreboding. John Gasaway puts together a list of the top players in college basketball($) that includes one Nik Stauskas, and sums him up from the opponent's point of view well:

At the moment, I'm not sure there's anything else in Division I ball quite like the deep foreboding experienced by opposing fans when the first 3 falls for Stauskas.

He's an Illinois fan, so he may be extrapolating from his most recent Stauskas experience.

Major blow to a contender. Kansas's Joel Embiid has a stress fracture in his back and is a "longshot" for the first weekend of the NCAA tourney. He's just plain out for the Big 12 tourney. If Kansas maintains their spot on the two line the toughest seed they can face before the Sweet 16 is a 7, but they just got beat by WVU in a game that would have been a blowout if WVU could handle a press.

For Michigan, a Kansas loss in the Big 12 tourney helps them in their quest to scoot into a Nova/Wichita region, and possibly Indianapolis. It would at least take a Villanova loss before anyone starts talking about a potential one seed for Michigan.

It's desperation time for hockey. [Bill Rapai]

The other bracket. Michigan is just about hanging on to a spot in the hockey tournament despite their inability to beat some of the worst teams in the country. They are 14th in the Pairwise at this moment; current hockey bracketology has them matched up against Union in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

At 14th, Michigan could withstand one bid thief but not two. There is an extra conference this year, and thus an extra tournament to worry about. At 14th, there's probably a 50-50 shot at a bid. Ferris State is the only WCHA team in the top 16; St. Cloud and North Dakota are the only NCHC teams in the top 16. The ECAC has three teams slated for the tournament, as does the Big Ten. Bid thieves are everywhere.

That's if Michigan maintains its current position. The bad news: this weekend's opponent is an excellent Minnesota team. The good news: a split will be massively helpful thanks to the new quality win bonus. Get swept, though, and Michigan will be either right on the bubble or right outside it.

These are the wages of going 5-4 against Penn State and Michigan State. If Michigan ends up on the outside looking in again, that is 85% of the reason why.

Worst best mascot ever. I see shots of old mascots that seem designed to engender years of nightmares and pine for their return. South Dakota School of Mines and Technology has my back.

His name is Grubby. Seriously. If Dave Brandon could guarantee that hypothetical Michigan mascot would be a homeless Wolverine named "Diseasy" I would support a mascot for M. Alas, it will just be a wolverine in a bread bowl.

Well that's (partially) random then. If you were wondering if student sections could affect free throw shooting, the answer is probably no since Northwestern crushed all comers in this department while MSU finished last.

While most of this looks like random variation, those gaps down to Nebraska and Northwestern are pretty wild. I wonder if that's repeatable. 148 attempts is kind of a lot for that to be totally random.

Next year's schedule. Michigan's preseason tourney next year will take them back to Brooklyn. They'll play a couple of warmup tomato cans at Crisler before taking on one of Villanova, VCU, or Oregon at the Jay Z Center in the "Legends Classic"*. I'd imagine they'll split Michigan and Villanova with the hope the two meet in the final.

*[Which sounds like a fictional tournament hosting Generic State, East University, Ivy Tech, and COLLEGE COLLEGE.]

Well, yeah. By FOIAing the Ann Arbor Police Department, MLive discovers that Michigan's Office Of Institutional Equity asked them for the Gibbons police report in October, which doesn't clarify anything as to when the athletic department knew about what was going down. The most interesting bit of the story is actually a comment from an MLive person:

For context, the Ann Arbor News has been requesting several documents and communications via FOIA from U-M, but they have declined all of our requests citing sections of the Freedom of Information Act that allows U-M "to refrain from disclosing information that would constitute an unwarranted invasion of an individual's privacy." We continue to file FOIAs with U-M, but it appears in this case our best bet for information is requesting it from other sources that U-M has communicated with in regards to this case, including the AAPD.

Other FOIA-covered organizations offer up their data. Michigan has a culture of secrecy that has nothing to do with the privacy of individuals, but rather seems to be focused on covering for people who may or may not have screwed up, whether that's in taking four years to act on the Gibbons information or as part of the massive PR debacle that ensued after actually acting.

Etc.: Scouting Jeremy Gallon. McGary and Robinson on list of folks whose draft stock has slipped. Kam Chatman named to one of those basketball all star type things. Lax getting competitive this year. Sloan Sports Analytics conference suffers fate of all things. Jordan Morgan's top moments.

Some detail on the ongoing title IX investigations at M and MSU. Iowa's defensive collapse under the microscope. Yogi and Troy Williams dissecting M.