Burke says Indiana, not Michigan State, is the toughest team Michigan's played this year

I agree with his viewpoint. I think that indiana is a tougher team than msu. We just played absolutely horribly against msu. I bet nix will get asked about this and he will rant about how burke thinks that the #1 team in the country is better than the team they swept (msu) and how unfair that is to msu.

Burke gives reasonable answer to trolling question; it gets spun. This plus "Fragel, Michigan fan and - iirc - son of Michigan alumnus would have picked Michigan SIX YEARS AGO if Carr hadn't retired" just seem like something rather desperately not journalism.

Obviously I don't play college hoops but man both MSU and IU are really really good teams. It's gonna be interesting when they come to A2 to play. 

This shouldn't be news.

is that they imply what we all know:  Michigan was playing better basketball when we played Indiana than over the past week or so.

Given that Indiana has gone into MSU & OSU and returned victorious, I'd have to agree.  And further, that lowers the likelihood of Mich winning a share of the B1G.

I tend to agree with Burke. I think MSU is still kind of puzzling, my girlfriend is an alum so we watch every damn game. It seems like this MSU team is great at winning ugly. They are terrible to watch, almost up there with Wisconsin but somehow I look up at the end of the game and they're usually up like 6-8 points. We always comment on how it seems like they are a worse team than they were a year ago but the record and ranking sure don't reflect that. 

To me, the difference in the outcomes of those games was about timing more than anything else.  If we had played MSU when we played Indiana and Indiana when we played MSU, the Indiana game probably wouldn't have been pretty (and the MSU game would have gone much better).

In the three games immediately before MSU, Michigan played:

1. The most hyped game that had been played in college basketball this year (Indiana).
2. Arguably the best game that had been played in college basketball this year (OSU).
3. An overtime thriller at a brutal place to play (Wisconsin).

Aside from the physical exhaustion, it's really hard to get up for game after game like that.  Honestly, I expected the MSU game to be ugly.  That's as rough a stretch as I can remember and an insane path to a game against the local rival who hates us more than anything and resents that we're good this year.

Indiana is number 1 and went 2-0 vs. MSU, so I suppose there are a few people that agree with him.

Definitely agree, especially given Indiana's two wins over MSU.  Timing is key, we played Indiana to kick off our brutal stretch.  Faced Ohio State and Wisconsin.  The stretch before that game was brutal and honestly I expected to lose by double digits because it's hard to go through what Michigan did and then step up ready to play that game.  Had the games been reversed, we probably would've beaten MSU (or came close) and lost ugly to Indiana.

"Those are some of the top teams in the country. ... To be able to go through that stretch and learn from it, we didn't finish it the way we wanted to, but we watched film on it, learned from it and got better from it." - Trey Burke

Worse, that four-game stretch took place in the space of ten days, so this team didn't really have much of an opportunity to sit down and think and learn from the Indiana game, much less the games which took place right after it, at least in while it was happening. The exhaustion shows up a little in the stats for the last seven games:

I have to think that, by the time you get to Wisconsin, you can see some of the issues against tougher defenses in effective FG%, but you can also see in the numbers this team struggling with fatigue, which is rather why I chose block percentage here.

The great thing is that the rest of the season comes at an overall slower pace and most of it will be played here at Crisler. That gives Michigan a much better chance to be fully rested for each of the remaining games, I would think.

I heard Izzo and Hollis are upset

It would be hard to argue against Indiana being the best team in the country. They are very talented and have a good mix of players in terms of skills/experience - if they play well they are tough to beat i.e. their best game is better than everybody else's best game. This can be seen from their losses thus far being in 'let-down' games rather than in what would be considered 'marquee' games.

Indiana is a more complete and well rounded team than MSU and there is a reason that they are the number one team in the country right now. Is state playing better than they started the season? Yes, but they are still a very flawed team. Having played with two of the players on their current roster for awhile, I can personally tell you they are playing some of their best basketball I've seen from them and they still lost to Indiana at home, and should have lost by more.

This doesn't really provide "bulletin board material," becuase MSU hates the Wolverines more than anything in the world, and they always play against MIchigan like their lives are at risk if they lose.  It will be interesting to see if Nix's "groin incident" with Zeller means that they are even closer to fully adopting a 40-minute version of their football team's "60 minutes of unneccessary roughness."

no respect meme from Izzo in 3....2......1.......