rutgers

1 hour and 16 minutes

The Sponsors

Thank you to Underground Printing for making this all possible. UGP makes custom apparel such as t-shirts and sweatshirts and was founded by 2 Michigan alums over 20 years ago. They have 3 retail locations in Ann Arbor and offer thousands of University of Michigan athletic products for sale, ranging from clothing to accessories and memorabilia. Check them out at ugpmichiganapparel.com.

And let’s not forget our associate sponsors: Peak Wealth Management, HomeSure Lending, Ann Arbor Elder Law, Michigan Law Grad, Human Element, The Phil Klein Insurance Group, Prentice4M, and made possible by SignalWire.

The Video:

[After THE JUMP: the player and what we said]

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]

It's like Speed except I have to keep talking about Nico Collins. I mean:

15% of all throws to Nico Collins this year, including those negated by penalties, have drawn a DPI penalty

— Jarad Evans (@Jarad_Evans) November 4, 2019

So on 47 targets Collins has 22 catches and 7 DPIs for a total of 544 yards, 11.6 yards per target. And that's with two extremely tenuous OPIs wiping out 38 and 45 yard catches. If those hadn't gotten called you're looking at 13.3 YPT. Collins not getting a zillion targets remains the most frustrating WHY U NO of the Harbaugh era.

[After THE JUMP: Harbaugh's playoff, people are just in charge, Taggart]