Is there anyone who, at the beginning of the season, would have been "disappointed" with a 21-4 record at this point?    Young teams always hit a rough spot, when coaches adjust to them.  Now, they have a few weeks left to adjust to the adjustments.  

The losses were in the four toughest places to win in the Big Ten.  This team is fine.  It is much better to hit the rough spot now than in March.

Remember Titanic?  Our 4 game tough stretch went about as well as Titanic did.

That said, I think a bold prediction is to go 6-0 to finish the season.  We are 29-1 at Crisler (FUUUUU PURDUE ON SENIOR DAY SRSL!?), so if we win the games we should (twice against PSU, Illinois, and @Purdue) then it's going to come down to the magic of Crisler.

I'm not quite sure what to think of the MSU matchup on the 3rd, originally I was expecting to split with them, home team winning each, but that was before their evisceration of our bball team when we were down 31 points or something stupid like that.

I'll say we drop 1 more game of the regular season, no conference title barring some pretty significant upsets (which, like, totally could happen Illinois/Indiana HALOL).

Final Record:
26-5 (13-5)

And you know what?  That's not that bad at all, especially in what turned out to be a brutal, brutal Big Ten.

We're solidly a 2 seed for the tournament, and that's what really matters.  Personally, I'm not all that interested in the Big Ten Tournament, despite the potentially awesome matchups, because we don't need to get beaten up right before going into the NCAA tournament (see our most recent 4 games to see how well our tired/beat up team does away from Crisler).  Wouldn't even fret about an early exit from that.

The past 4 games have really taken a lot out of the other 21, we're in excellent shape, and JB deserves tons of credit for bringing us out of the crater of NCAA sanctions and the basement of the Big Ten.  If we can sustain 25+ win seasons, who would complain about that?

Great post at umhoops analyzing what's gone wrong.

http://www.umhoops.com/2013/02/14/whats-wrong-with-michigan/#more-42450

Bullets:

-Two point D has fallen off a cliff in past four games, 40% in first 8 B1G games vs. 54% in last 4. Reasons: Morgan injury, Stauskas being exposed.

-Offense has become too P&R focused. Scoring from transition and cutting have declined dramatically. This has most effected GRIII who gets most of his points from those two sources.

Diagnosis: Get Morgan healthy. Concentrate on getting rebounds because UM's impossible to stop in transition.

Beilein has Michigan ranked in the top 5 well into February with a squad that clearly isn't top 5 in terms of talent, experience, or depth. He's been playing with house money the entire season as far as I'm concerned. It was inevitable that the chickens would come home to roost at some point, but even the extent of it has been overstated. We lost a competitive road game to the #1 team in the country. We lost another road game to a solid tourney-bound team on what was essentially a lucky shot. We beat Ohio. The loss at MSU was admittedly ugly, but with our level of inexperience (are there any other top 10 teams that play as many freshmen as we do?), we were bound to have one of those at some point. It sucks that it came against our biggest rival, but at least we have an opportunity to avenge it. 

It looks like IU will run away with the B1G title, but without any true road games after the end of the regular season, I don't see any reason why we can't at least make some noise in the B1G tournament and the NCAA tournament. 

This stat should bring everyone off the ledge: of all the teams in contention for the B1G title, we're the only ones who haven't lost any games that we had no business losing. MSU and Wisconsin both lost to Minnesota. Wisconsin also lost to Iowa. OSU got blown out by Illinois. And Indiana had a meltdown in the last 3 minutes against Illinois that cost them the game.  

The only game we lost that we arguably should have won was the game at Wisconsin. And when you lose a road game in overtime to a ranked team because of a half-court buzzer beater, there's not much more you can chalk that up to than "shit happens".

Was a kick in the balls.  This team is the best Michigan team in many years with a ton of athletes.  The thing that stands out in the losses has been the play of the freshman.  McGary is the only one showing improvement at this point in the season.  Blame that on the freshman wall, scouting, whatever you want but how they adjust and getting Jordan Morgan healthy will be key.  Burke and Hardaway are established, it will come down to how far the youngsters can take them.

 

I'm not sure how far this team will go in March.  I can stil see an Elite 8 appearance if things go well but at the same time could see us ousted in the Sweet 16 (MAYBE even second round to a bad match-up with a 8 or 7 seed).  This team just has too many flaws.  Many times those flaws are covered up by good-great play by Trey and THJ and some good "plays" here and there by other guys.  But when our maing guys are shut down we have no back-up plan.  A dirty-good defensive team, as we just saw (and saw against Ohio) could spell the end of the season for us. 

GRIII is a bit of an issue.  What people aren't realizing is how much of a role in the offense he hasn't been, even all season.  He's put up good numbers through the fist 3/4 of the season BUT much of that came from transition, which isn't anything to sneeze at, and clean-up type-plays.  His deficiency in the set offense shouldn't be mezmerizing.  It shouldn't be this bad, either.  The shots he took the other night were horrendous.  He took a shot off a dribble at the free-throw line and he took a wide open three off a drive-and-dish.  The shots were not confident in any way.  What to do about that....

For some reason our offense has changed, Beilein is trying to use Burke's talent and by doing so he has created a mess IMO. The offense now involves way too much dribbling and basically ball screens for trey. The defense really doesn't guard GR3, Mcgary, and even leave THJr and stauskas, though they are staying at least close enough to contest the 3. The offense has become VERY easy to defend causing us to settle for jump shots. We have also struggled on defense with our rotations, leaving people wide open, losing 3/4 to the best competition we have faced all year, teams have shot the lights out on us. Finally, we appear to be very soft, this goes along with our defense. Overall, Beilein needs to reconfigure the offense to get more movement toward the hoop instead of having Mcgary or Morgan set a high screen for Burke while he dribbles around or throws it out to a perimeter guy to shoot a 3. If we don't improve offensively and defensively, we will not get out of the 1st weekend in tournament.

Michigan State is still and will continue to be the  better bball team in Michigan until Belien recruits better big men to match up with them.  You can't continue to throw a small forward out there as your powar forwerd.   We too small for the Spartens.