NET rankings

1/3/2021 – Michigan 85, Northwestern 66 – 9-0, 4-0 Big Ten

The Book™ is one of the most durable sports clichés because it has the dual advantages of being accurate and exciting. Very good players with exploitable flaws exist. Coaches who can see just as clearly as anyone else that the regular stuff isn't working can tinker up weird stuff to go after those flaws. When it works, the very good player gets blown up. You can see why, even as a schmoe watching from home. Expectations get upset. Question marks about the future abound. The player has been Booked, and all opponents going forward will throw The Book™ at him until he finds a way around it. If he finds a way around it.

The canonical Booking also results in a paradigm-shifting upset. I probably do not have to tell you, the Michigan fan, this. The football program is currently in its throes of misery largely because they got hit with an all-time Booking in the 2018 Ohio State game. Michigan entered with the #1 defense in the country by metrics both basic and advanced. Incredibly to modern ears, they were favored to win.

Reader, they did not win. Ten million crossing routes later I was drinking whiskey in a forest while Don Brown began the three-year process of bleeding out on the table.

A less-depressing example: Ohio State stuck Aaron Craft on Nik Stauskas late in a win against the Burke team and it resulted in a crucial, dogged turnover. Tom Crean had some ideas about that, so he stuck Yogi Ferrell on Stauskas the next year. Stauskas scored 6 points in a gross 62-53 loss; Iowa then limited Stauskas to ten by putting Mike Gesell on him. Mike Gesell! There are hundreds of Mike Gesell pictures on the internet and four of them are of Mike Gesell playing defense. I don't want to paint with too broad a brush but generally speaking this guy, who is 6'1" and was coached by Fran McCaffrey, should not be shutting down the #8 pick in the NBA draft.

This is just my opinion.

The Book™ on Stauskas was to put your point guard on him and he'd freak out. Aaron Craft, defensive player of the century, was next up. Stauskas shot over him, going 3/6 from three, and that was the end of that, more or less. Watching Stauskas have a weakness and then overcome it was one of the more entertaining subplots of the year. And that's why people talk about books. They're real.

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Michigan's been on the disappointing side of bookings quite a bit. This is just the nature of where Michigan programs are in the firmament: usually good enough (or boring enough) to get by without weird adaptations, rarely so good that there aren't holes to exploit. Sunday's game against Northwestern is a rare instance of Michigan dropping it on someone else.

Northwestern entered with an explosive, pretty five-out offense that relied on Pete Nance being a perimeter mismatch for opposing centers. Michigan stuck Franz Wagner on Nance. This looked like a bad idea for a couple possessions on which Robbie Beran—currently a 13% usage guy—drove past Hunter Dickinson and dropped it off to Nance after Wagner had to help. Once Howard started icing ball screens, that spigot turned off and Northwestern was forced to start taking jumpers:

Collins had a great game plan early - pick/pop to suck Dickinson out + put Kopp/Nance on same side as shooter/dunker so that Livers couldn’t help on dumpoffs.

Juwan took all of 3mins to effectively end the game. He responds w/Eli icing the screen=no more Kopp/Nance on same side pic.twitter.com/0JptqKUSja

— LAbound (@LAbound2) January 4, 2021

Nance had Northwestern's first eight points on those two early dunks and two tough face-up jumpers. He had one bucket in the last 36 minutes. He finished with one assist and three turnovers. Northwestern's offense, which had been generating a ton of good looks fast, turned back into last year's pumpkin.

As this is happening, Robbie Hummel says that this is the new reality for Northwestern and they're going to have to adjust to it. Because Juwan Howard just gave them The Book™.

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I was pretty positive about Juwan Howard's hire when it happened and thought that he was a good bet to succeed because he did not have a profile like the various other NBA-to-college hires. I do remember thinking that Howard was going to have to recruit at a higher level than Beilein because no one was going to match Beilein's ability to spin straw into a hellish rain of three pointers.

A year and change later Michigan is playing gorgeous offensive basketball and forcing opponents into a Yaklich level of bad, long twos. The shooting splits are so, so sustainable. Michigan is top 20 in: forcing long twos, defending long twos, preventing shots at the rim, and converting at the rim. That latter is not just Hunter Dickinson. Brooks, Wagner, and Brown are all 80%+ there. Livers is 63%; micro-mite Mike Smith is 58%. Michigan is generating great looks for everyone.

This is not a John Beilein team coasting through on the experience of the departed. This site has pushed the "Wile E Coyote year" concept for a while now, the idea being that the dropoff from coaching turnover doesn't really show up until the second year because in year one you've got a lot of the same guys running the same stuff. This should be Michigan's Wile E Coyote year, and is in fact trending to be so in the turnovers department. But Howard's overcome that because his team has a 23-point gap between its two point offense and defense. And they just wrote the book on Northwestern.

This is going pretty well.

[After THE JUMP: NET approaches WAB]