Sponsor note. Become an Alumni Association Member (or upgrade your membership) and you'll have a chance to win courtside(!) seats to the Indiana game on February 16th. See Tom Crean's pants up close and in person! I know he's no longer the coach but his pants are a grad assistant!

Sign up by the 9th to qualify; drawing is on the 10th. Enter the promo code LETSGOBLUE when you sign up.

The Wade family story. Andrew Khan gets the family background on Brandon Wade's departure from Duquesne and enrollment at Michigan:

In September 2018, before his freshman season at Duquense even started, his legs were hurting. It was more serious than shin splints and necessitated multiple MRIs. With treatment and pain tolerance, he gutted through the season, but his shooting numbers suffered. He finally shut it down for a couple of months in the spring.

But the Wades insist that even if Brandon had performed better on the court or gotten more playing time, he would have left Duquesne.

"We had some conversations last year that no parent wants to have," Keith says. "It had zero -- zero -- to do with basketball, which hurts a parent, especially me, more than anything else. Our family is such a basketball-based family."

Keith had coached his sons -- Ryan is a year younger and now a freshman at Holy Cross -- throughout their youth, both at Skyline and AAU.

Being part of the coaching fraternity, Keith says, "There was no way in hell I'm allowing him to transfer over some minutes."

It's been a rough few years for the Wades; hopefully that's in the past.

Is there a Don Brown problem? Michigan's defense has gotten blasted the last two years by OSU, leading noted Michigan twitter person Manuel Excel to wonder if Don Brown's defenses get worse as the opposition gets better. The effect, if there is any, is small, and the slope of Brown's line is up entirely because Michigan got nuked the last two years:

He describes this as an OSU problem, not a Don Brown problem. I'm a little more willing to put blame on Brown since OSU had Michigan downloaded the last two years—raise your hand if you're long-yardage conversion on a short throw—and Michigan had little to no response. That might be a program issue rather than a defense issue, but the offense was busy putting up as many yards as OSU gives up in a game in the first half. The defense couldn't fit OSU's most basic run play.

[After THE JUMP: Congratulations, Michigan fans: Illinois is good]

Underwood pulls a Beilein. Illinois is surging in Brad Underwood's third year, and a large reason why is a total overhaul of his system. Not everyone can step back and pull this kind of thing off:

"We knew from that we had to make changes defensively, even though we were turning people over at an extremely high rate," Underwood told me. "Second in the country, but on the back end it wasn't worth it. We were fouling too much, were starting almost every game down eight points at the foul line. We were not maximizing with free throw attempts for us or picking up offensive rebounds for extra possessions. We felt that combination was too difficult to achieve at the highest level, to balance it out. That forced changes."

Illinois is 10th in free-throw rate this season. It was 338th last season. It's No. 4 in offensive rebound percentage after checking in at 148 in 2018-19. This is, by far, the best interior defensive team of Underwood's career (45.1% 2-point defense). Other tweaks have helped. Freshman Kofi Cockburn has been tremendous on the glass. Underwood put the ball back in Trent Frazier's hands -- and he's had only four turnovers in 10 games. Ayo Dosunmu has since thrived off the ball.

"It's all kind of a mosh pit of change and growth and stuff that had to happen in the process of getting to this point," Underwood told me Tuesday. "You can't shortcut it."

This gladdens the heart of Brad Underwood's biggest fans: Michigan fans still cooling off after that ludicrous Oklahoma State-Michigan 7-10 game.

The above makes me wonder if some of Michigan's extreme stat outliers are worth it—particularly the opposing TO rate in the 300s. Michigan is in Illinois 2018-19 territory in FT rate but most of that is the team's personnel. Their main penetrator doesn't actually want to go to the free throw line because his shooting there is weak, and then you've got guys like Brooks and Teske who are more liable to pull up for a jumper than push to the rim.

The TO rate might have some personnel issues. Michigan doesn't have a lot of length in the backcourt. Michigan's drop coverage has a lot to do with that, but also there's a general lack of pressure on the perimeter. X dropped from a 2.9 and 2.6 steal rates to 1.6; Livers went from 1.9 to 0.6. Feels like Michigan hasn't found the right balance yet.

Alan Griffin pulls the Charles Barkley vs Angola. Am I remembering that right? Dream Team guy stepping on a dude? Anyway, Illini wing Alan Griffin got ejected from the Illini's resounding road win against Purdue for this:

"That's just absolutely ridiculous, uncalled for and he should be gone."

Illinois' Alan Griffin was ejected after stepping on a Purdue player. pic.twitter.com/LzG9GWqkap

— ESPN (@espn) January 22, 2020

Probably not suspension-worthy but something to keep an eye on. Illinois's next game is against Michigan.

Signs of the apocalypse. Rutgers is ranked. In basketball. Matt Norlander attempts perspective:

The Scarlet Knights went almost 41 years between appearances, having last made it in the final poll of the 1978-79 season. … That's a 738-week hiatus, making RU the team with the longest drought between appearances of any power-conference school ever. Butler going 53 years (1949-2002) is longer but BU was a mid-major through and through for that run. Now the longest power-conference drought is with Oregon State. The Beavers are at 538 weeks without being ranked, dating back to 1990.

They're doing this after losing Eugene Omoruyi to a transfer out of nowhere. Steve Pikiell gets coach of the year, and find the last ten awards and give 'em to him too. I'm putting his last name in my spellcheck. He's gonna be around. It's big time.

The compromise is we call it amateurism after changing it completely. The LA Times Daily alum Nathan Fenno obtained a copy of an internal NCAA document that features various highly-placed university employees bemoaning the current state of the discourse. Some of these people are slightly out of touch:

“The biggest threat is that the court system will force us to start paying athletes. And that will be the end of amateur sports as we know it,” one commented. “I think if we did a better job to show the academic benefits of playing college sports, it would take a lot of wind out of the balloon. All of the perks like letter jackets, cost of attendance, ring, etc.”

And some saw the South Park parody and thought it was a documentary:

"I know people fear the pendulum will swing too far to support student-athletes’ rights."

But even amongst this group of people whose salaries are bloated by the fact that their workers get paid in company scrip there seems to be a growing acknowledgement that amateurism can and probably must "evolve":

“It is a hard environment with these sports writers who think amateurism is ludicrous. I think there is room for the definition of amateurism to evolve. In some sports, it is okay for students to compete in non-collegiate competition, like the Olympics, where there is an opportunity to make money through endorsements. And this inconsistency is ridiculous to me. Treat student-athletes like other students. If a pianist got an endorsement from Steinway, we go, yay. If it is an athlete, totally different story.”

That's evolving into not amateurism, but if you need a fig leaf fine. Fig leaves for all.

Former NCAA guy says obvious thing. Former NCAA honcho Mark Lewis says something anyone who's attended a football game in the past ten years knows in their commercial-soaked bones:

"The priority is to monetize the sport," Lewis told ESPN this past week. "That's taken precedent over everything else. If that's the model -- and there's nothing wrong with that -- then you can't expect the players to live by the same set of rules [as they did in the past]. To me, it's just a question of fairness." …

"…in this drive for revenue now, the boxes line up the same. Colleges are doing everything that pro sports leagues are doing to make money. So how come you're treating the participants radically different? You can't justify it."

It is grating that all of the people with a plantation mindset the previous section happily suck up seven-figure salaries while trying to justify the current state of the organization.

In his defense it was a stool, not a chair? If you missed the end of the Kansas-Kansas State game you missed a wild brawl:

HUUUUUUUUGE brawl at the end of K-State-Kansas pic.twitter.com/vtdpBlKqnt

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) January 22, 2020

This angle provides more details:

An all-out brawl just happened. pic.twitter.com/73MBmr0RNf

— Riley Gates (@Riley_Gates) January 22, 2020

The guy wearing 22 is Silvio De Sousa, who is the guy who got Kansas in hot water with the FBI. Also he picked up a chair at some point. Given the current trajectory of Kansas basketball, expect him to be named university president by Thursday. They'll release a video with Bill Self throwing chairs at puppies on Friday. Saturday, Snoop Dogg will have sexy chair dancers mock-beat him at halftime.

Also… uh:

Why is a KU cheerleader holding back a police officer from intervening? pic.twitter.com/GHZlUMUHeW

— Baby Mando (@VinceintheBay) January 22, 2020

"Stand back, I've got this under control. I'm a cheerleader."

Camp is ghosting everyone. The Dolphins announced their new staff. Absent:

The Miami Dolphins unveiled their new coaching staff yesterday. No sign of Anthony Campanile, who was reportedly leaving Michigan for a job on Brian Flores' staff. https://t.co/qK47Oy1KK7

— Aaron McMann (@AaronMcMann) January 21, 2020

Etc.: Joe Moorhead lands at Oregon to be OC. That's not in the Big Ten, so it's good. 2021 D commit Luke Hughes profiled. Josh Uche starting to get some pre-draft praise. OT Coy Cronk grad transfers from Indiana to Iowa. Dwumfour ends up at Rutgers.