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I know we get heated here,…

I know we get heated here, and I don't mind us throwing a few rhetorical elbows over points to be debated, but I'd like to point out that we're getting a little inflammatory here. Nobody in this subthread is a bad poster on this board. We just disagree. 

Actually, if the anti-Manuel…

Actually, if the anti-Manuel sentiment were grounded in known facts, it *should* be associated with hockey much more than it is. That's because the Mel Pearson contract / investigation / scandal / sort-of-firing saga is a clear situation where Warde mishandled things in multiple ways on multiple fronts over the course of months. One need not even agree with the outcome of firing Mel Pearson (the details are more specific and important, but in effect we have a hostile work environment issue here, a category worth mentioning due to an apparent recurrence in a different sport in the same athletic department under Warde's watch) to understand that Warde having the information and just hanging things out to dry for months was complete malpractice.

Once that occurred, I believe Warde handled the subsequent interim coaching transition just fine, from making Naurato the interim coach to keeping that tag on him for most of the season when the team was playing well to ultimately hiring Naurato for the permanent job. But if one found the timeline difficult, it's because Warde put himself in that position. He had the facts of the investigation (in which, incidently, he comes off as disengaged or at least lawyered-up in his interview answers) for months while Mel Pearson continued to function as the hockey coach without a contract, a bizarre situation even without knowledge of the seriousness of the allegations. And then it leaked and there was public pressure and Mel was "fired" and Brandon Naurato had a couple of weeks to read "college hockey head coaching for dummies," and re-recruit the roster. And he promptly took the team to the Frozen Four. 

It's not that the hockey fanbase is disappointed in the program. It's that Warde mishandled this issue so clearly and publicly. 

There's people at Michigan…

There's people at Michigan that absolutely hate our sport teams that have way too much power and would like to see it fail.

Who, and how? What, exactly, does it mean that they want to see it fail, and how do they bring this about? 

Advocating for an actual,…

Advocating for an actual, reasoned understanding of the facts, instead of jumping onto an outrage dogpile that regularly traffics in rumors, half-truths, and imagined offenses that don't exist, is not being a PR manager.

Anyway, I continue finding…

Anyway, I continue finding myself defending Warde Manuel and I don't know why

I'm basically here, too.

The Warde hate is a runaway train, a pyramid of often imagined complaints building upon each other. It began almost as soon as he took the job, has continued every since, and continues to trade in a large volume of specious assumptions about what his job is and what he is doing that are divorced from reality.

There are real issues that Warde has mishandled. But those issues are buried in an avalanche of hate (and that is the right word) built upon imagined offenses or assumptions utterly ungrounded in reality. Warde is blamed for things and then never given credit when those things turn out to be fine.

And the net effect is that the real issues are ignored. People would rather be angry than actually address what goes on. There are reasons to think that Warde might not be the right choice going forward, but the people who want him gone the most don't care about those reasons.

The whole year is kind of…

The whole year is kind of the same story on repeat, and then Michigan wins a couple of games and I'm eyeballing the drive to St. Paul because I can't help myself. 

I don’t care what the…

I don’t care what the fanbase thinks. But he still needs to nail the hire, and evaluating him on it is 100% fair, *after* he completes the process. 

Yes, it would be. 

Yes, it would be. 

You and hundreds of others…

You and hundreds of others would have blamed Warde if Juwan hadn’t been fired, so now that he has fired Juwan promptly, it’s “questionable.” Warde literally can do no right in the eyes of some people. If you want to blame him, you need to credit him too.

And this is important from a public pressure standpoint; so much of the criticism of Warde is specious, which makes real shortcomings harder to see clearly. I respect criticism that focuses on known issues like the Mel Pearson fiasco. It is, additionally, fair to connect that situation with scrutiny of the basketball program’s culture. But most of the hate directed at Warde is packaged with no evidence that he is actually responsible for the presumed offenses, or traffics in assumptions that are not proven by the facts, and often build suppositions on events or presumptions that are not known at all.

Internet hate is a stupid thing. Warde has shortcomings, and I thought he would be gone last summer. It’s frustrating seeing so much of the hate directed at him be for things that are either not based on fact or not his responsibility at all.

Edit: you appear to have edited your post. And the new text is still bad. You say it’s questionable because we “know that Warde’s preference is to do nothing.”

We don’t know that. Many internet people assume it. A big plank of that assumption is the assumption that Warde didn’t want to fire Juwan and the further conclusion that this was because he didn’t want to go to the effort of hiring another coach. Well, he fired Juwan. You don’t “know” anything.

I’m sorry, I'm tired of this. That is stupid. Circular evidence-free reasoning that should be beneath Michigan fans. 

So are all the people who…

So are all the people who pre-emptively hated on Warde going to admit they’re wrong or just move on to the next imagined complaint? 

Sanderson was gone the…

Sanderson was gone the moment the incident happened. Firing Juwan when that occurred, if the incident does not merit firing on its own, looks bad and leaves open the question whether he was able to coach well. Depending upon circumstances could even look ugly and publicly embarrassing.

Michigan needed to give him a chance to coach the full season. On-court performance simply didn’t merit dismissal before this year’s results, and as we should recall the Sanderson incident happened before he was even all the way back from surgery.

It happened as soon as the…

It happened as soon as the season ended. Michigan lets coaches, particularly lifetime Michigan men, finish seasons. There is nothing wrong with the timing at all.

People just want an excuse to be mad. 

Very sad. Always a Michigan…

Very sad. Always a Michigan man. But there was no other choice. 

As Michigan fans are usually…

As Michigan fans are usually fond of pointing out, Michigan is not Georgetown or St. John’s. Whether Michigan *should* have such a view of itself is a matter that is open to question, a question I am willing to ask. But the reality is that this is how Michigan thinks of itself. 

Since I am not interested in…

Since I am not interested in arguing for Howard’s retention, I’m not really interested in parsing this out, but acting like it’s not the same thing doesn’t pass muster. When you look at the program from the perspective of the athletic department, the parallels are very visible. Howard is a Michigan man. He produced a really good team, too—that 21 team was a hair’s breadth away from the Final Four and would have gone if either Livers hadn’t gotten hurt or Franz Wagner hadn’t lost his shot completely in the Elite Eight, and while those were mostly Beilein guys there were also key parts that Howard brought to the table. The locker room is a problem, but as I discuss above that was a question with Harbaugh, too. The circumstances were awful in 2020, but with surgery you’ve got a circumstances argument here, too.

Many of us overreacted to 2020 in football, but the team was bad. It just was. Bad breaks on personnel were real. But so have been Howard’s bad breaks on personnel. A complete revamp of the staff was needed after 2020, and that certainly seems the case this year.

If you want Howard gone, arguing that there aren’t parallels to 2020 is useless. The athletic department is going to see the similarities. They’re there. Michigan has a longstanding culture that moves slowly on this stuff, sticks by its people, doesn’t fire in-season. We have benefitted from that at times, including after 2020.

Someone who believes that Howard should go won’t accomplish anything by pretending that these parallels aren’t there. The athletic department will see them, will remember all the noise from people like me after 2020. Saying “it’s not the same thing at all” just suggests to them that the noise can be ignored the way it was ignored in 2020.

Instead, argue why the parallels are insufficient. Why Howard is not likely to succeed with a new staff and another season the way Harbaugh succeeded. Why the strategy that worked in 2020, if applied the same way, will damage instead of benefit the program.

Those arguments exist. Some have been made; I’ve just made a few. Your last point in particular is real (I would suggest that an unexplored issue is whether or not Juwan is well suited to coaching *college* as many coaches struggle to cross over from the pros). But that point does not mean that there aren’t parallels. It is an argument that the parallels are insufficient. Pretending there aren’t similarities just makes it likelier that the real arguments will be ignored. The arguments that are right there for us. Arguments like: 8-24. 

8-24

Hard to say much more…

8-24

Hard to say much more than that.

But if I must:

The mitigating factors are this:

  • Howard is a Michigan man, will always be a program legend;
  • Howard did, indeed have a serious health issue that played a major role in the lead-up to the season;
  • It was mostly not players he recruited, but Howard coached a really good team just a couple of years ago and made multiple tournament runs, with last year being the first year he missed;
  • Howard has, in fact, had a hard time building the roster with guys he successfully recruited to come due to policies that are not necessarily his fault and probably do warrant some self-reflection from the University.
  • Michigan is not a rush-to-fire school and chose to stick with a program-legend coach after a losing season and won a national title, so there is precedent for a give-more-time strategy working.

However:

  • 8-24
  • You still have to put a roster together no matter how tough. If you roll the dice on hard-to-admit guys and get burned, you still were the one targeting the guys.
  • Some significant in-game coaching questions remain unanswered;
  • There are multiple data points of Howard struggling to control his temper; there's no reason to believe he will not struggle again in the future.
  • The big one to me: He lost the team.

He lost the team. Now, see the final point above: one of my big arguments for firing Harbaugh in 2020 is because I believed he lost the locker room, and it remains unquestionable to me that the collapse against Wisconsin that year was a situation where the team quit. So I have to have some humility here. But, c'mon. You may have roster problems, but guys can be coached to play defense, but this is two years where basic stuff just hasn't been bothered with. That's not talent. That's effort, and frankly it's the responsibility of the coach. 

I want to be painfully honest here: I suspect Juwan's tragic downfall has been recruiting his sons to the team. The relationship between fathers and sons is complex, and it can be hard for coaches to coach them properly. Sometimes they are too hard, or sometimes they aren't hard enough. There are plenty of examples, in multiple sports, of elite-level athletes with fathers coaching in those sports choosing to play for other teams. 

Crucially, it wasn't just one son. It was both a four-year backup-type *and* a blue-chip recruit that no one in their right mind would consider Juwan not wanting to have on his own team. But that blue-chip recruit didn't exactly seem to mesh with a good team basketball concept, and a team with a lot of really good talent on it never put things together. They couldn't play defense.

And I wonder if Juwan lost the locker room because he couldn't properly coax his sons to put the effort into doing the little stuff, and without that, nobody else would either. Juwan is a guy who cut his coaching teeth in the NBA in an awesome franchise culture, where the players are pros both technically and in the best sense of the word; you don't have to get after them to do stuff. You give expectations and guidance, and they put in the work themselves. Juwan came to college and you need to be able to teach and exhort guys differently. And each player on the roster could see that Jett and Jace didn't do the stuff and didn't need to. 

It's just supposition. I could be way wrong.

But: 8-24. 

These statements Bacon is…

These statements Bacon is using in this situation don't mean anything at all. I mean, I don't care that he's doing it, but people are insane to go nuclear over absolutely meaningless soundbites that have thin credibility through a "game of telephone" source chain at best, from a reporter plugged into the Harbaughs but demonstrably not well connected to the thinking of the AD, for whatever that's worth. 

I have yet to see any credible evidence indicating what Warde's actual timeline or plans are for after the season. And the statements made so far have absolutely no meaning with regard to the decision process, other than something that everyone knows and should understand: The decision won't be made until the season is over. Until then, the idea that Warde would "like to keep him" means nothing, because it could mean something almost everyone else would agree with: we wish Juwan were coaching well enough to stay. Or it could mean something else entirely. If it is even accurate, it still means nothing. "Maybe he's not so sure now" doesn't mean anything, either, even if it's somehow accurate, because we lack a timeline, and, again, the season isn't over. 

It's quite possible that Warde could bungle this, but people assuming that he *is currently* bungling it because of these tweets are not being wise. 

High-quality post. Both…

High-quality post. Both information *and* some scheme stuff explaining why; much more of this is welcomed.

I do, however, have one objection:

They are not ex-Michigan players. They will *always* be Michigan players. 

It argues for easier non…

It argues for easier non-conference opponents and completely destroys what you wrote in the OP suggesting that the schedule was easy. Because it wasn’t.

If you meant “less challenging non-conference opponents,” you should have written that.

Michigan’s schedule wasn’t…

Michigan’s schedule wasn’t easy at all. We played a ton of excellent teams.

What the schedule *did* provide was a backload of weight. The early games were all minnows. And that did, indeed, give the team some flexibility in rotation and trying stuff.

But, easy? Michigan had a loaded finish, played most of the top defenses in the country and perhaps the top offense. It was incredibly hard. The wording of the title and OP suggests that the schedule was soft, and I find that repugnant.

Not overloading the front of the non-conf schedule? Though? I understand it. Because the later part is the schedule *is* difficult, and only more so now with the expanded conference.

 

They will have party…

They will have party affiliations whether they are listed or not. May as well be honest about it. 

Jim Hackett spoke publicly…

Jim Hackett spoke publicly about Clemson’s offer for Gary and I said in here at the time that I really didn’t think speaking publicly about that was a good idea for this reason. 

That is such an absurd…

That is such an absurd reading of a boilerplate answer to a question asked about a coach you are not going to make any move on until the offseason. He is literally saying “we’re in the season now and I am not going to make a move during the season and I will support my coach and team during the season.”

Everything else you read there is just reading what you want to read to draw the conclusion you want to draw. Warde has said nothing at all about what happens in the offseason.

One of the reasons people like Bronx and me are constantly in these threads throwing water on the anti-Warde stuff is because is much of the anti-Warde stuff is based on stuff like this that has no actual relationship to what’s going on.

Judge Warde on what he does, not on meaningless quotes like this. 

7s is a lot of fun and it…

7s is a lot of fun and it requires a lot of skill, but it doesn’t even draw the best rugby players. Antoine DuPont moved to 7s for the year so he could play in the Olympics, and he’s instantly the best player on the field for France. Perry Baker has been a superb 7s player for the US for years (the US is competitive in 7s, unlike 15s) and he was a pretty run-of-the-mill D2 football player.

If there were more money in it, it could draw some impressive players. But the basic physical tools it requires are often found in guys who can make a lot more money playing football or more conventional rugby union or league, etc. 

A vague “more likely than…

A vague “more likely than not” from Bacon, who hasn’t always been right, and in a season when insider information has repeatedly proven to be wrong. And people are already just jumping to the most extreme conclusion, that it’s a done deal that Juwan returns.

Sorry, not drawing conclusions right now. I think it’s possible that Warde repeats his Harbaugh strategy, since it clearly worked with Harbaugh. But I don’t think we can conclude it’s happening from what amounts to a “maybe” from John Bacon.

BTW do all the people who pre-emptively blamed Warde for our roster being raided now think he should be credited for good retention, or does it not work that way? 

Yes, a lot of these guys do…

Yes, a lot of these guys do the Olympics, and the schedule is built around it. Fair number of guys will peak specifically at that race. 

Tadej is marvelous. I want…

Tadej is marvelous. I want to resent guys who win to much but he just races everything and races well.

Alas, he’s not winning the Tour this year; he’ll race it, but he’s racing the Giro this year and winning the Tour with a Giro in the legs is basically impossible. He’ll go for stage wins. Remco will compete at the Tour for the first time, but Jumbo’s annihilation of the field at the Vuelta last year suggests that he’s an underdog to Vingegaard.

It’s a pity, because the Tour has been incredible for a couple of years now, and the field will be star-studded, but it kinda looks like it will be a Ving parade with lots of stage-win fireworks behind him.

OTOH the spring classics should be a blast. Don’t miss MSR, which is the peculiar combination of the most boring idea for a monument and also the one for which there is the most wide-open question regarding who can win. And it’s *hard* to win MSR; just ask Peter Sagan, a rider seemingly perfectly built to win it. Ask Philippe Gilbert, for whom it is the one monument that got away.

It’s a great era of cycling,…

It’s a great era of cycling, definitely. You have a terrific (if one-sided) big man rivalry between MVDP and WVA, you have Ving, you have Remco. And you have Tadej, who can race and win against all of them.

Tadej winning Flanders last year was just astonishing, even for him. He podiumed on a flat WC course last year. Until he cracked his aggression against Vingegaard at the tdf last year was must-watch.

Any one of these guys could be the star of the sport on their own. To have them all at once is an embarrassment of riches. The only thing the sport is lacking right now is a charismatic sprinter.

 

I’ve been watching some…

I’ve been watching some rugby since the World Cup (I do actually like League too, but it’s not as easy to get for me) and enjoy discussions of it. TBH it is still challenging for me to discern how they evaluate who the “best” players are. It is very much a team game and even the clearly superlative athletes are basically dependent upon game situation for their flashes of skill. Stats aren’t as dependable, and a lot of the key skills are opaque to the casual viewer.

Yeah, good wings make some spectacular plays. Thats what they’re there for. Hard for me to tell what makes them instrumentally more important for a team’s success than a flanker or a No. 9. 

He’s excellent.

It’s hard…

He’s excellent.

It’s hard to draw straight comps with athletes in other sports. Rugby is tempting because of some shared action with football, but it doesn’t work perfectly; the players have to be built differently and be good at different things.

And it’s hard to evaluate across sports like this. You’re using TEs as a comp for him, but TEs aren’t generally what you comp with a rugby wing. Part of what makes Van der Merwe effective, as I understand it, is that he can bring that kind of skill to the wing position; someone that is Gronk sized is usually going to be a forward in rugby. A better comp for a guy like van der Merwe might be prime Derrick Henry or something like that.

I think US rugby should add a plank of its recruitment strategy to try to get more football players into the pipeline; 8 years until the US hosts the RWC and it would be nice if they could win a game or two (making a deep run is out of the question). Meanwhile, Wales just lost a promising winger to the NFL pipeline.

But it’s hard to make 1-to-1 comps. Erling Haaland is tall and fast and might make a good receiver or TE too, except that he’d drop every ball thrown at him and couldn’t run a route. Blake Corum might make a good rugby winger, except he has no idea how to legally tackle or work a breakdown, etc.

Better to enjoy them for what they are. 

It’s what the team has been…

It’s what the team has been all year, plus some desperation in the own zone for most of the game, minus the starting goalie.

Agree with Robot. I accept, perhaps more than many, the value of MSU being competent and the cyclical nature of a hockey rivalry. But it stings that they’ve won the conference in the regular season. Quite a bit. 

My guess, and it’s only a…

My guess, and it’s only a guess based on memory, is that we’re seeing an effect of his natural inclination to leak out of compressing pockets to his right, and his ability to make successful throws doing that. And that’s good, frankly; suggests a maturity to know that doing a wild spin and roll to the left probably won’t see much success. 

Extremely good. 

Extremely good. 

Not just injury. He bulked…

Not just injury. He bulked up when Haskins left, and that took some of his top end. Watch his run against Washington in 2021 and compare it to his speed now; he was a burner.

But to be the man he had to be more than fast, and he became the guy who did everything. He still had the lateral agility in 2022 and a touch more top end; this year that stuff was a touch scarcer, though I actually think he was improving late—we just had a hard time noticing because the defenses we played were so good. Yet that run against Bama was everything he has always been.

No. It means that after the…

No. It means that after the incident Sanderson wasn’t going to work for Michigan anymore, and it took time to get the settlement right.

It means nothing with regard to Juwan’s job security after the season. It does reflect that Michigan found that the incident did not meet the threshold for a misconduct firing, and that Michigan was not going to fire Howard midseason due to on-court performance.

I suspect that there was no scenario in which Sanderson would stay. If there were, it would only be if Juwan was fired immediately. I know many here would now wish that would have happened, but Michigan is not a quick-trigger firing school, particularly for program legacy guys, and the season that the team has had really needed to play out.

I’m not saying that Howard is for sure fired, just that this doesn’t mean he’s staying. 

Shea had great OLs. Multiple…

Shea had great OLs. Multiple guys are still playing in the NFL.

He wasn't bad, but he wasn't elite.

It's in the past now. 

But the article is wrong on one count: Shea was not booed against MIddle Tennessee State. I was there. 

(Fun article, though). 

Team's bad. But football.

Team's bad. But football.

Mikey Sainristil and Blake.

JJ. Mason. Champs. 

This is a stretch, honestly…

This is a stretch, honestly. The article is almost entirely about playoff stuff, etc. One small section, in the middle, suggests that there are talks about whether to continue NCAA membership. Thamel does not say whether this is football only or all sports, nor what else is going on. He just quotes one person saying that "conversations are happening," and that some people feel strongly about it.

That doesn't mean that the B1G and the SEC are about to blow up the NCAA. It could mean a lot of different things. Without context, we don't know what it means, and people are supposing a lot.

But if withdrawing from the NCAA were a serious possibility, it would be headline news. That it's not shows you that even Thamel, who includes the quote, doesn't think this is something that's in serious motion right now.

So maybe let's pump the brakes a bit.

I'm not saying this will never happen, and it seems clear that the B1G and SEC are throwing their weight around quite a bit, but right now the main thing that's happening is that they're shaking down the playoff for concessions. The rest of the stuff is just talk, if it is even that much. 

Why wouldn't the B1G and SEC…

Why wouldn't the B1G and SEC be able to leave for football only? And, frankly, why wouldn't the NCAA buckle if they tried? As you say, the schools already have club sports. This would be unusual, since it would be the premier sport breaking off... but there's a lot of sense to it. And, while the NCAA wouldn't likely, I think they would roll over, because the B1G and SEC (and, inevitably, ACC and whatever other schools want to/are invited to follow) leaving but keeping the rest of their sports in the NCAA stabilizes the major source of tension and protects the NCAA's most important product, the basketball tournament. 

NCAA football is a huge cash cow, the second-most popular sport in the country, ahead of the NBA and MLB and the NHL, fully professional enterprises. The current financial and governance situation is untenable. Something is going to happen; the NCAA could well realize a separately governed football arrangement with its own rules might be its ticket to keeping its legitimacy for everything else. 

The B1G and the SEC are throwing their weight around. They have a huge negotiating position. Not everything talked about is going to happen, or is even actually what the two big boys want... but stuff is going to happen.

It wouldn't lack legitimacy…

It wouldn't lack legitimacy. It would be missing a couple of big schools but have the vast majority of crucial ones. 

The B1G and the SEC have, in football, all of the clout they need. 

Michigan is not going to leave the B1G and is not going to threaten to leave. 

This is awful. How sad. 

This is awful. How sad. 

Character guy who has had a…

Character guy who has had a long career as a top 10 or 15 starter, good but not elite tools, makes the right plays, a guy that can start and win games for a playoff contender but isn't going to win a SB on his own?

I can see it. That's complimentary, IMO; remember, he's comparing JJ to NFL Cousins, not what Cousins was at MSU. 

Didn't injuries rob him of…

Didn't injuries rob him of the speed that was an essential part of his toolset at Michigan?

So, was Henne successful as…

So, was Henne successful as a UM grad? Absolutely. I absolutely reject assertions that he was a bust in any way. He started for a couple of years, and like many, many others QBs, he did not stick as a top-15 starter. As a second-rounder, he was never expected to be a top 10 guy in the League.

Instead, he forged a loooong career as a backup, which is a *really* good job that requires diligence and preparedness and humility. Being a solid backup QB is an excellent role in the NFL and I'm delighted Michigan has had several guys make it at that level. A good backup QB is not a 16 (now 17) week starter, but he's a guy who can come in, run the offense, and win games for his team when the starter goes down. And Henne won games for a team that won a Super Bowl. 

But... most successful career of any UM graduate? Points 2 and 3 are great... but we're talking about the school and position that produced Tom Brady. 

Second. Assuming you don’t…

Second. Assuming you don’t have knees that are incapable of rotating your feet inward (that’s me!) the basic snowplow/pizza technique is pretty easy to pick up and provides a good base for getting down a lot of hills and keeping yourself in control. Snowboarding requires a number of techniques that are just a bit more challenging to pick up.

Either way, an extra day of lessons is definitely worthwhile. 

Hey. A sweep. Against Notre…

Hey. A sweep. Against Notre Dame. 

I simply cannot imagine what…

I simply cannot imagine what it would be like to watch the game, knowing the stakes, not knowing the outcome, and having some sliver of hope for victory. 

Surely, a hard moment to top. 

The lesson is not, NIL isn't…

The lesson is not, NIL isn't much; the lesson is, be wise with your finances. Unfortunately, the keys to financial prosperity are far less emphasized and talked about in pop culture than the shallow blessings of materialism. 

Iconic.

To me, a good sign…

Iconic.

To me, a good sign of truly transcendant sports moments is when major rivalries take a backseat to respect for them.

When I go see Michigan play in Mariucci, I go visit their shrine for the Miracle on Ice. Herb Brooks is a Minnesota guy, and there were key Minnie players on the team. But on that day they played for all of us, and I feel nothing but respect and gratitude for Minnesota's contribution to the team. 

I feel the same way about the Jesse Owens plaque at Michigan. A fitting tribute to a transcendant athlete who set four world records in the space of an hour at that spot. It is, to me, a privilege Michigan has to be able to pay tribute to an Ohio State athlete whose accomplishment there, but more importantly in Berlin, transcends sports.

 

Yes, it's too early to panic…

Yes, it's too early to panic. C'mon.

This is absurd. And packaging the MBB program experiencing its worst season in at least a generation with two other programs that have been in really good shape (WBB literally the best it's ever been) that happen to be competing with MSU programs having good years (in hockey's case, its first good year in a decade) is silly.