[Shirt? Shirt!]

3/17/2022 – Michigan 75, Colorado State 63 – 18-14, 11-9 Big Ten, Round of 32.
3/19/2022 – Michigan 76, Tennessee 68 – 19-14, 11-9 Big Ten, Sweet 16.

This year played out like a message board hypothetical. You know, the one where a guy posts something like "would you trade a win over OSU and Big Ten championship in football for a disappointing bubble season from the #4 ranked basketball team?" You're like "ehhhhh… okay" because the universe doesn't work like that. And then maybe the universe does work like that.

Perhaps there is a maximum amount of swag to go around and whatever barrels football tapped as they pumped it up this fall came from Michigan's strategic reserve. Or maybe we've got Zavier Simpson in a basement with tubes sprouting from him like so many spring clovers.

ELI BROOKS WITH THE SKY HOOK 😱

The Wolverines can taste the #Sweet16@umichbball #MarchMadness pic.twitter.com/UuR0UjW2cE

— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) March 19, 2022

I will walk away from this particular Omelas in three weeks, tops. Promise.

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As a person who lives in Ann Arbor and gets asked "what do you do for a living" with some frequency, I have a lot of experience with people being weird or dismissive about sports. Ann Arbor is the archetype of a liberal college town, of course, so anyone who doesn't already know who I am is almost certain to fall on the Sportsball Continuum. On the nice end of this continuum are people who apologize to me for not knowing anything about sports; on the not so nice end are people who actually deploy the world "sportsball." I have had many interactions with people who are puzzled or irritated that I am a guy who does the sports liking.

Sometimes I have tried to explain myself, or at least thought about what I would say if anyone seemed interested in an explanation. (For reasons likely related to cultural ubiquity, Sportsball Continuum people evince a profound lack of interest in why anyone would be off the continuum.) What I've come up with is this: sports aren't just numbers adding up over a set period of time. They are story machines.

One of the great delights of college sports is that the timeframes are generally long enough to see a player become what they're going to become and short enough that there is always someone new to see develop. The pros are more static, with colossi (Brady, Lebron, Baseball Man) bestriding the sport for a decade or more. In college whenever someone hits that they're gone and you've got to see what the freshman with dreadlocks might be up to. The stories are more than Who Is The Goatest, Skip?

These stories exist on various levels: players. Seasons. Programs. This game wrote down some history on all of these levels. It provided the definitive Eli Brooks Game for the longest-serving player in program history. It rewrote this disappointing season, at least somewhat. It reinforced the vibe around Michigan basketball—and unfortunately for Tennessee fans, reinforced the vibe around their program as well. This Jonathan Wilson passage I referenced after the USA-Algeria World Cup game always floats up at times like these:

Perhaps some of the Europeans there – certainly the French journalist opposite – were driven by anti-German feeling, perhaps some were instinctive Slavophiles, but when the three locals at the MTN (South Africa-based mobile telecommunications company) desk reacted to the final whistle with a group hug and collective dance, the appeal of Serbia's inner turmoil becomes difficult to deny. Unless they'd had a bet, I suppose, but when asked one said he'd decided to support Serbia because "they seemed to be trying to lose".

This is an intimately familiar feeling for any basketball fan, but it must be completely unintelligible to the Sportsball Continuum people. Explaining is difficult. Maybe it's less difficult now?

Now I can just say "Imagine that a fifth-year player everyone wanted to run off campus because he seemed terrified of basketball appropriated the delightfully weird shot a previous player—one denied a career culmination by covid—had painstakingly developed over the course of a few years; imagine that this one-time wilting flower of a player would uncork an audacious hook shot at a crucial juncture to defeat a heavily favored opponent, thus writing himself into annals of program history. If you were invested in this sort of thing, watching the maturation and development of this young man would not just be a guy hitting a shot, but the climax of a character arc. It's like Game of Thrones except the source material never runs out. Once you have the context that gives the numbers meaning the drama outstrips any planned fiction. Joy and pathos intermingle. We reach down into the vast beating heart of human striving and drink deeply of its nectar.

"Also sometimes Wisconsin shoots 9% from three."

This would not work because the other person would wander away and talk to someone else about organic hummus brands, but I could do it.

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BULLETS

[Holmstrom]

A coin flip. Michigan's win was not a fluke but neither did it feel ordained, so this measure of shot quality landing on a knife edge feels about right:

‼ 50-50 GAME ‼
Actual Score: Michigan 76-68 Tennessee
ShotQuality Score: Michigan 72-71 Tennessee
Based on the quality of shots taken:
Michigan wins 50% of the time
Tennessee wins 50% of the time pic.twitter.com/V5sCGcZCxS

— ShotQuality (@Shot_Quality) March 20, 2022

Tennessee should have hit a couple more threes, particularly during that second-half stretch where Michigan hedging was leaving guys wide open in the right corner, but also how many midrange jumpers did the #315 team in other twos hit? From your author's in-game perspective, a billion too many. It felt like about half of Tennessee's three attempts were not good—30 footers or contested shots—and most of the ones that were good were coming from a guy who's a 32% shooter. He hit zero of six.

But yeah where the Colorado State game felt like Michigan catching up and passing a team they were likely to reel in, this one felt like every bucket was the dagger until one actually was.

[Holmstrom]

Mr. Inside-Outside. Hunter Dickinson had two phases in this game. In the first half he was frequently in pick-and-pop situations and Michigan did not put him on the block much. It looked like Michigan wanted to use Diabate as the main inside threat; this should have worked out better than it actually did, with Diabate bogglingly missing a couple of bunnies and having a couple of Tennessee non-shooting fouls wipe out what would otherwise have been additional (possibly missed) bunnies.

The second half started with a left block Dickinson post-up and it was clear Michigan's focus had changed. Dickinson did have a late clock flash to the elbow and another three, but IIRC all of his other second-half attempts were out of the post. This may have been spurred by Diabate having a bit of an off game, or may have been the plan from the start—unleash Dickinson post ups after halftime, when the opposition doesn't get to have a long break to decide how to best combat them.

Pregame assertions in these parts that John Fulkerson's post defense just could not have been that good turned out to be accurate: Tennessee went with many more Uros Plavsic minutes than usual and Fulkerson got put under the basket a couple times when UT tried him out against Dickinson.

[Holmstrom]

Frankie does some things. Collins had just two points and two assists in this game to go with two turnovers but that stat line badly understates his performance. He had a Kobe assist to Dickinson on one of his misses and set Caleb Houstan up for three catch and shoot triples, none of which went down. He had another coulda-shoulda assist fail to occur because Tennessee got called for a blocking foul. He broke Tennessee ball pressure to the point where UT largely abandoned it.

Maybe more importantly, Collins was the only Michigan plyer who could consistently stay in front of Chandler and Zeigler. He had an early defensive possession against Vescovi where he nearly stole the ball three times that felt like it rattled him, and Zeigler spent the last five minutes settling for threes, barely testing Frankie's ability to stay in front of him.

He was obviously massive in the Colorado State game, going on a personal 5-0 run after Colorado State pushed it out to 28-13 late in the first half. He finished 5/5 from two and barely turned the ball over.

This weekend points towards Collins being the future at point guard even if his shot is unfathomably broken. The once and future Simpson.

Terrance Williams, junkyard dog. Williams finished this game out, acquiring two massive putback buckets in the closing minutes and calmly hitting a couple free throws. The announce team was accurate when they described him as just kind of a guy who does basketball. He goes out there and good things tend to happen.

Uh… isn't it time to dump more minutes on him? Williams is not high usage but he's shooting 53/39/77 on the season and he doesn't have a clear case of the yips. I'd much rather see him on the floor than Brandon Johns or Road Version Caleb Houstan right now. Maybe keep starting Houstan for appearances and in case he hits a couple early shots but once Houstan's 15 minutes deep into another bagel game maybe Michigan should plan on 25 Williams minutes.

A shirt I enjoyed. As per the title:

Ian Eagle's bizarre proclamations. Perhaps you were, like me, puzzled when Ian Eagle declared that Hunter Dickinson "had a fever" and was "really exploring the space." If so you should remember that Christopher Walken's character in the More Cowbell sketch goes by "The Bruce Dickinson." I had forgotten this.

Poor damn Devante'. Devante Jones missed the Colorado State game and played only twelve minutes against Tennessee. He missed the first game because of a concussion sustained in practice; against Tennessee he suffered a cut to his hand and then got his head banged by Diabate. The latter hit looked fairly innocuous, but when you're recovering from a concussion that's relative. He has five days to get healthy, but I wonder if the two head hits in close succession mean he needs to be on the shelf for longer than that to truly recover. I wouldn't be surprised if he's unavailable.

That's a shame dot gif. Carnage Sunday in the Big Ten saw the conference lose four of five games, with only Purdue surviving to join Michigan in the Sweet 16. Aside from seeing Iowa make it—a distant dream indeed—that's a perfect first weekend of the tournament. Brad Davison trudging off the court after Wisconsin lost a virtual home game against Iowa State was a true chef's kiss moment.