THE ESSENTIALS

THE US

The early season flame-throwing Michigan team has backslid a little bit once they cleared the early conference portion of the schedule. Ten games in and faced with a series of teams outside of the top 100, it's natural to slacken a bit. Once you grind out an 8-point win over Western Michigan it's time to tighten the ol' belt and once more get locked in.

Air Force isn't very good and it'll take a catastrophic shooting performance on both ends for them to win, but the manner of the victory will mean a little something. An emphatic one points towards disinterest as the main cause of this minor hiccup. Another scuffle and things get a wee tiny tad bit concerning as Michigan heads towards a knock-down, drag-out Big Ten season.

THE LINEUP CARD

Projected starters are in bold. Hover over headers for stat explanations. The "Should I Be Mad If He Hits A Three" methodology: we're mad if a guy who's not good at shooting somehow hits one. Yes, you're still allowed to be unhappy if a proven shooter is left open. It's a free country.

Pos.	#	Name	Yr.	Ht./Wt.	%Min	%Poss	ORtg	SIBMIHHAT
G	12	AJ Walker	Fr.	6'2, 191	56	20	100	No
NR FR shooting 44% from three and 32% from two. Nominal PG.
G	4	Sid Tomes	Jr.	6'4, 200	68	19	83	Yes
Shooting 43/26 with twice as many threes as twos. Six attempts at rim all year. I'd say he's just a shooter if he could shoot.
F	44	Keaton Van Soelen	So.	6'7, 190	60	10	113	Yes
10% usage is mostly spent trying to finish on shots others create. Some OREBs.
F	12	Lavelle Scottie	Jr.	6'7 225	74	25	86	Meh
Slashing wing gets to rim a fair bit and finishes very well once there. 27% 3P shooter but 35% last year. Giant TO rate, few assists. Black hole. Bad at line.
F	34	Ryan Swan	Jr.	6'7, 235	79	27	115	Yes
Stretch "5" given AF constraints. 75% on twos this year; 50% last year. Competition level. Good but oddly infrequent 3P shooter. Some OREBs. TO rate has spiked.
G	5	Chris Joyce	So.	6'5, 185	47	22	94	Yes
Only guy on team other than Walker with an assist rate > his TO rate. Not by much. 60/23 in early going.
G	22	Pervis Louder	Sr.	6'4, 187	54	16	96	Yes
PERVIS LOUDER. (Giant TO rate, few assists, shooting well on twos against bad comp.)
G	0	Caleb Morris	Jr.	6'4, 185	35	19	107	No
Not Just A Shooter hitting 50/44 after a 57/35 last year. Rim or 3 guy. Usage decent; emerged into 30 MPG starter in last three.
F	11	Ameka Akaya	So.	6'6, 215	33	20	105	No
Data thin after nearly no minutes last year. 76/50 on 31 shots this year. Giant TO rate (32).

[Hit THE JUMP for the rest of the preview.]

THE THEM

Save for an aberrantly good first year, Air Force under Dave Pilipovich has been a reliably bottom-tier Mountain West program. (Side note: Pilipovich was apparently a Tommy Amaker assistant, and has a little history with Beilein as a result. Also his teams turn the ball over a ton.) The Falcons have finished with between 4 and 6 conference wins the past five years and have a tight Kenpom range that spans from #204 to #252. That latter happens to be Air Force's current ranking.

This is an off season even by Air Force standards. Air Force enters with a 4-6 record, the highlight of which is a win over South Dakota and a double OT loss to 16-seed darlings UMBC; losses to High Point, Pacific, and Army stand out to the negative. Air Force's only outing against a major conference school was a 93-56 hammering at the hands of #62 Colorado at home.

Air Force's main problem is a lack of size. And turnovers. Air Force's main problems are a lack of size and turnovers. Also they give up a ton of good threes. Air Force's main—

Anyway: as is tradition nobody taller than 6'7" sees the court for the Falcons. The last Air Force player with more than a cursory backup role to breach that barrier was Marek Olesinski in 2015. And he was from… ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO. So I think we know what that means. Hmm? Hmm? [cocks eyebrow].

The Falcons do put three of those 6'7" guys out there, and two of them are the go-two guys. Lavelle Scottie is a slashing wing who gets to the rim for a third of his shots and finishes at an 85% clip, hits a solid 41% of his other twos, and generates most of his own shots. His ORTG has sunk to a horrific 86 because of three main issues: he's hitting 56% from the line and 27% from two and his TO rate is an astronomical 29.

Scottie was 73% from the line and 35% from three last year so it's likely those are aberrations, but a ten-point spike in his TO rate probably isn't. Air Force is close to dead last nationally in TO rate.

Ryan Swan is very similar statistically but his 75% two-point percentage is obviously unsustainable—he hit 50% last year. Swan gets to the line a decent amount and is a good, if infrequent three-point shooter; he chips in a respectable number of offensive rebounds as well. Like everyone else on the team his TO rate has spiked. Even so he remains the most efficient option Air Force has, and at 25% usage that's not bad.

The third 6'7" guy is the exact opposite: Keaton Van Solem has 10% usage and only attempts a shot in dunk-or-desperation situations. He's been displaced in the starting lineup in the last two games by junior Caleb Morris, who has much better usage and a heavenly-for-this-team 14 TO rate. Morris fits into the Not Just A Shooter archetype where a solid majority of his shots are threes (which he hits at a 44% rate this year, 35% last year) but he will venture inside the line when closeouts give him the opportunity. He drives to get to the rim and then he's bad once there.

The two main guards are a guy who takes most of his shots from three and hits 26% and a guy who takes most of his shots inside the line and hits 32%. Freshman AJ Walker is the latter dude and has hit 10 of 23 threes in his brief career to date; he also has a higher assist rate than TO rate. He's just dying every time he ventures inside the arc. Sid Tomes is allergic to the rim—just six percent of his shot are there—and would be Just A Shooter if he was hitting more than 26% from three.

Air Force's bench is a bunch of guys with middling usage and big TO rates. One of them is named Pervis Louder, so that's cool.

THE TEMPO-FREE

Wild swings on offense:

• Air Force is 20th in two-point FG percentage and gets to the line a bunch.
• They are close to dead last nationally at TO rate (335th). Nearly one in eight of their possessions results in a steal.
• Ditto OREBs, where they're 338th.
• They shoot a lot of threes but are hitting just 32%.

Air Force is a notably slow team, especially in context. Beilein's teams have historically pushed the ball upcourt about as much an average team but their tempo seems so slow because they never turn the ball over in the halfcourt. Air Force is constantly handing the ball to the opposition but is still 279th in offensive tempo. A full 18% of their shots so far this season have come in the last 5 seconds of the clock. That's a ton.

They've survived that surprisingly well by launching a ton of late threes at a 35% clip. This is actually an improvement on their overall percentage and is thus ripe for regression.

Air Force is almost uniformly very bad but not terrible on defense. The one thing they've done well so far is clear their own boards; they're otherwise in the mid 200s in eFG% D, TOs forced, FTs allowed, and threes allowed.

THE KEYS

[Dianna Oatridge]

Feast in transition. Michigan should have 15 points or so on open-court turnovers.

Re-focus. Michigan's defense has experienced some misfortune in the last couple outings but has also been uncharacteristically sloppy. That was probably inevitable as Michigan got complacent against a slate of un-intimidating foes. WMU should be a wakeup; the next two games will hopefully be outings where Michigan recaptures its early-season form as they spring back into conference play.

Cut off straight line drives. Air Force has done very well at the rim for a bottom-end mid-major team: a third of their attempts and they're hitting 69% (nice). Michigan's astounding ability to defend without help defense has come under some fire lately and the various 6'7" slasher guys will again test Michigan from the perimeter. This is another flavor of "re-focus," sure, but step one in having a really good defense is staying in front of your man when he tries to put you in rotations by driving from the perimeter.

Don't fall asleep late. Air Force struggles to get shots, goes deep into a ton of shot clocks, and somehow comes out of that well. Probably just a fluke but get some extra contest on those late jacks.

THE SECTION WHERE I PREDICT THE SAME THING KENPOM DOES

Michigan by 24.