Previously: Part One

Don't forget to check out part one before diving in. There'll be a part three(!) next week addressing all the questions about next season and beyond.

Schedule Stuffing

Hey Ace, how do you see the schedule playing out post-pause? What are the chances all of the games get made up and what does that do to Juwan Howard's rotation if it means 3+ games/per week

— Bingle (@Calamari_Safari) February 3, 2021

Yesterday, Phil Martelli told Matt Norlander that the Illinois game will not be played as scheduled, while the Wisconsin game scheduled for February 14th is up in the air. This morning, Brendan Quinn reported there's "good momentum" going for the UW game to occur as scheduled.

Michigan has played nine Big Ten games. If the Wisconsin game goes on as scheduled, they'll have six games left on their original slate and five postponed games to make up. There's going to have to be some shuffling of the original schedule to get every game in because there isn't enough space:

You can maybe jam three games in there. Meanwhile, this is what's left to make up:

Home games: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan State
Road games: Penn State, Northwestern

The NCAA doesn't seem to be moving off its planned tournament dates, which means the Big Ten Tournament is supposed to end, as usual, on Selection Sunday. If you keep the tournaments in place and also try to get every game on the schedule, you end up with, well, what you'd expect when trying to cram 11 games into a period of 24 days. This is just an example and definitely not a suggestion:

Even before taking the ongoing pandemic into consideration, anything along these lines is going to be a ridiculous schedule to ask college athletes to maintain. If the above isn't an option—and I won't, at this point, put anything past anyone involved in sports decision-making—then the conference has three choices:

1. Don't make up all the games. I have no idea how the conference would determine which games to reschedule, or whether each team would play the same number of games, or how a champion would be determined if they don't play the same number of games across the board. Given we're probably not done with postponements, aiming for 16 games per team seems reasonable—that'd be slotting one extra game onto M's schedule, ideally Illinois since they haven't played yet.
2. Cancel the Big Ten Tournament. I'd rather see the league crown a regular season champion without running its players ragged than have a conference tournament this year. That week can be reserved for a late flurry of makeup games instead. You can even get Michigan back to the full 20-game schedule by making a couple adjustments in the intervening month. It's still a tight squeeze but it's not a full month of one-day turnarounds.
3. Do the football plan. In other words, don't have one! Roll with the current schedule, maybe make up a game here or there if programs are able to work it out on their own, and figure out how you're awarding the regular season title hopefully more than a week before it's over. I don't actually hate this in the case of basketball because (1) they've smartly not made any promises about awarding the title that they can break this time and (2) the teams should all have at least played enough games that going by win percentage won't produce a horribly unfair champion.

As you may have guessed, I'm in favor of option two, perhaps with a bit of option one mixed in depending on the number of postponements this month.

No matter what, Juwan Howard is going to need to be careful navigating the end of the season. I'm guessing we'll see a fair number of minutes for Austin Davis, Brandon Johns, Terrance Williams, and Zeb Jackson, and maybe a some additional tick for Chaundee Brown, as the team tries to avoid playing anyone too many minutes after the long layoff—you don't just worry about rust but also soft tissue injuries after a period of inactivity.

[Hit THE JUMP for how the layoff may impact performance, which elite teams to avoid in the tourney, the numbers behind Leigha Brown's absence, and the quarters versus halves debate.]

Post-Layoff Expectations

might not go right back to dominating [Campredo]

#mgomailbag with BB getting back underway again soon, what do you hope/want to see from the team for the first few weeks after an unfortunately timed layoff? Should our expectations be temporarily lowered as they get their feet back under them?

— Wil Jordan (@Tuba1060) February 3, 2021

To answer the second question, yes, we should temper our expectations for the first game or two after such a long layoff. Data from this season suggests the longer the layoff, the worse a team will perform coming out of it.

A team coming off of a Covid pause has an additional 2.3 point disadvantage on average so far this season, in a normal tempo game.

The longer the pause, the greater the disadvantage.

14 day pause is worth about a 0.5 point disadvantage.
21 day: 2.3 points
28 day: 4.0 points pic.twitter.com/eU72XmuWqq

— Evan Miyakawa (@evanmiya) January 29, 2021

Michigan will have gone 20 days between games if they play the Wisconsin game. Based on the above, they're liable to perform about two points worse than expectation. Without making this adjustment, KenPom favors Michigan against the Badgers—by one point. We've already seen the Wolverines lose to a team they'd previously blown out and it wouldn't be at all a surprise if it happens again. Hopefully they get their legs quickly and don't need to rely too much on jumpers that might be a bit less calibrated coming off the layoff.

What I want to see from there depends on how the schedule plays out. If Michigan's playing a game every other day, making it to the finish line in one piece would be a major accomplishment. If it's a more reasonable slate, I'll hold out hope that there's enough film study between stints of competitive minutes for one or two of Johns, Jackson, and Williams to secure a more prominent role in a way that makes Michigan a more complete, versatile team—as opposed to them just trying to survive while eating up minutes to rest the main rotation players, especially in the case of the freshmen.

NCAA Matchmaking

From a matchup perspective, which nationally elite team would you choose to share a regional with and which team would you rather see on the other side of the bracket?

— Abraham A May (@Smoothitron) February 3, 2021

I want nothing to do with Baylor. That goes for everything, sure, but it's also my answer to this question. Yes, it's an obvious one, since they've been in a top two along with Gonzaga that's well ahead of the rest of the country this year. They also look like a team that'd give Michigan a lot of problems. They play hellacious defense that forces a ton of turnovers. They shoot 44% from three as a team. They're undefeated despite playing in the second-toughest conference. While I can see Michigan winning against anyone, this is a tough path to take.

I should feel similarly about the Zags given their lofty standing, big backcourt, and NBA-level talent. Their defense isn't quite on the level of Baylor's, though, and their offense is more reliant on scoring inside the arc, where M's defense is stingiest. I wouldn't exactly love that matchup but I'd take it over the Bears.

Beyond those two, I'm looking for teams that are imbalanced—more Iowa than Illinois, if you will. That means, among teams not from the Big Ten that are currently in the top three seed lines on the Bracket Matrix, I'd rather face the likes of Villanova (#5 offense, #36 defense) and Tennessee (#70 offense, #1 defense) than teams like Houston, Alabama, and Virginia that are relatively strong on both ends of the floor.

Losing Leigha

Leigha Brown's scoring and playmaking have been sorely missed [JD Scott]

(WBB) It has seemed this season from an anecdotal perspective that Michigan looks like a completely different team when Leigha Brown is able to play. Am I succumbing to results bias here? Exactly how important do you think she is to their ceiling moving forwards? #mgomailbag

— Noah Coffman (@coffman_noah) February 3, 2021

Michigan has, conveniently for this exercise, played four non-cupcake opponents* with Leigha Brown in the lineup prior to her missing the last four games. The good/bad news is it's not your imagination: the Wolverines are a much worse team without Brown. (Data via Her Hoop Stats.)

The competition was slightly tougher in the sample with Brown in the lineup, as if those numbers weren't extreme enough already. Brown's inside-outside scoring and shot creation take Michigan from a decent, defensive-oriented team to a fringe top-ten team. Her replacements are role players and the Wolverines need another star to pair with Naz Hillmon; there's no greater testament to Brown's importance than M losing a game in which Hillmon scored 50 points.

I haven't seen news of when the women's team is expected to return to play—it should be either Feb. 11 at Purdue or Feb. 18 at Indiana—or when Brown is supposed to return. She's been on the sideline in recent games before the pause, so hopefully she's close to hitting the court again. The team needs her.

*except for Wisconsin, a terrible Big Ten team that Michigan's played twice, once with Brown and once without, and Illinois, another terrible Big Ten team that Michigan has only faced without Brown

Quarters vs. Halves

Hi Ace,

After five and a half seasons of women's hoops shifting to quarters, and the corresponding changes to the bonus and foul resets, do you like the changes and the way they impact the game? Do you think men's basketball will make these changes at some point?

Thanks,
Nathan

I love the way the women's game flows. The shift to quarters took away a media timeout and the powers that be in the women's game (which is under a different rules committee, notably) haven't pushed too hard to make up commercial time beyond tacking a media timeout onto the first team timeout of the second half.

Therein lies the rub. Women's basketball, which often isn't televised or is relegated to subscriber-only streams, generates less ad revenue than men's basketball. Would the men's committee make the switch to quarters without largely defeating the purpose by extending team timeouts into full media timeouts? I doubt it and I'm not alone.

The other difference is in the way bonuses and fouls work, but it's apparently not as impactful as one would think:

Right now, a team reaches the one-and-one bonus when its opponent commits its seventh foul of the half. Once the opponent commits 10 fouls, that team shoots two shots for each one committed thereafter. In the four-quarter system, a team shoots two free throws on the fifth team foul, but that resets to zero at the end of each quarter. So that’s a big difference. ...

You would think the argument to go to four quarters would center on a desire to reduce team fouls and free throws, and therefore speed up games. However, those things did not happen in the women's game. During the 2014–15 season, the last where the women played two 20-minute halves, teams averaged 17.52 fouls and 18.13 free throws per game. After the change, they averaged 17.55 fouls per and 17.15 free throws per game. The length of games was also roughly the same.

The problem isn't the structure, it's the number of stoppages that are turned into media timeouts, and I don't see that changing regardless of the format of the game. The men's committee has already passed up the opportunity to make the switch to quarters since the women's game moved over; given their incentives, I'd be surprised to see a change down the road.