admissions fiascoes

Sponsor note. Trivia time! Leaderboard is here. Congrats to AdamW and BenT for leading the way with 22 each. Round 3 is here. Complete by 5 PM Friday to make the leaderboard.

If you've participated in rounds one or two you're invited to an Autograph event with Jake Butt and Blake Corum on Sunday, September 10 at 12pm ET. This event is a live documentary experience going into the story of Blake’s childhood, his journey to Ann Arbor, his experience as a Michigan Wolverine, and his expectations for the 2023 season. There will also be a Q&A portion for VIP Pass holders. Details of the three levels:

• Stadium Pass: Join the event for a private hangout with Blake and Jake.
• Field Pass: Stadium Pass + you will be invited to stay on after the show with 20 fans for a special post experience with Blake.
• Locker Room Pass: Field Pass + you will get the opportunity to interact with Blake and Jake and ask a question during the hangout.

It's an opportunity to provide some NIL and ask Blake Corum whatever you need to get off your chest. Don't be weird. If you are weird we will disavow you.

For everyone else, get in the game by playing the trivia. This is how we point the money cannon.

"Stanford? Never heard of it." Any questions about whether Michigan's transfer process is insane or not have been definitively answered. Myles Hinton:

“Right now I’m in General Studies because the credits kind of messed up. I was Human Biology at Stanford. And then, for some reason, they didn’t take a lot of the credits,” Hinton said on Monday. “All my bio credits just dropped. I don't know. It's crazy.”

A reporter replied with the question everyone in the room was thinking: Michigan really didn’t accept credits from Stanford?

“I was like, ‘What in the world?’ I took an intro writing class last semester, and I was like, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on? I took this class freshman year.’ It was crazy,” Hinton explained.

Alejandro Zuniga speculates about why that may be the case, bolding this section of the admissions rules:

Additionally, departmental credit cannot be used to satisfy distribution requirements or major/minor requirements without the permission of an academic or major advisor within the school/college.

This means if you transfer into Michigan all of your non-major classes are garbage and have to be retaken, resulting in a senior transferring in from Stanford re-taking an intro to writing class. So the score here:

• If you have a degree from anywhere, even Michigan State, you can pop on over into a grad program no problem.
• If you're a first-year transfer you can make it work because you haven't taken enough college credits to start capping out. So Michigan can bring in Ernest Hausmann without much difficulty.
• Second and especially third-year players are likely to get Terrance Shannon'd if they can't slog through the rest of their degree over the summer.

This goes beyond sports at this point and is another symptom of a sclerotic bureaucracy at Michigan that seems unassailable at this point. AAPS and Michigan are Spidermans Pointing at this point.

[After THE JUMP: …but fast!]

Why does this keep happening, says the only school where this regularly happens:

It is possible there is some explanation other than the one that keeps doing this to Michigan's transfers. I really hope so, but I'm not going to bet on it.

A year after Michigan's policies sank the transfer Terrance Shannon, the school with the only admissions department that acts this way appears to have done it again. The #16 overall recruit of 2020, Caleb Love must have thought his North Carolina credits would transfer to Michigan, a fellow AAU member, when he committed here on April 7. He also must have believed Michigan couldn't possibly be obtuse enough to let this happen again when Love shot down (with a now deleted tweet) rumors that his plans had hit a snag.

If there was a belief that Santa Ono could fix this, that's now dead as well, if he ever could do something about it.

The loss of Love is another severe blow to a program that missed the Tournament last year for want of a high-usage defensive wing like Shannon, and was already looking shaky this year thanks to Hunter Dickinson signing a top-market free agent deal with Kansas.

Michigan's Byzantine transfer policies have been a long-term issue for the school's athletic programs. Going back at least 30 years, transferring undergraduate credits have been under a severe chill effect, with the burden placed on the student to convert their previous coursework to Michigan equivalents, plus a high minimum of credits that must be taken in Ann Arbor.

One or two semesters usually aren't an issue—see football transfers Ernest Hausmann and Josiah Stewart--but mid-career athletes tend to have a particularly hard time. Their problem here isn't "Admissions" per se but the individual schools, e.g. LSA, which make the students submit their transcripts, wait a few weeks, then find out they're a year or more away from graduating than they should be. There's an appeals process, which might explain why rumors of Love's transfer being up in the air were quickly shot down by Love, with today's news triggered by a denial of appeal. Other schools may have similar processes, but Michigan's schools are particularly obtuse and opaque about it, with credits exchanged at rates well below reasonable, and little to no interest in expediting the process for recruited candidates.

Grad students are also not a problem (e.g. Olu), but completing a hurried degree after entering the portal is its own challenge, as a player's old school isn't particularly motivated to help the process. That was the Shannon situation, and also might have been what tripped up Love, who entered UNC in Fall of 2020 and presumably, like most athletes, took summer courses along the way. Most schools have a good enough working relationship with their athletic programs that they can work with transferring athletes, or at least work quickly enough to set expectations before the program recruits a guy.

With the transfer portal now a major part of major college athletics, Michigan's transfer office needs to call Illinois and ask how they managed to make Terrance Shannon work, and find out exactly what it cost them in academic integrity. Who knows, maybe it's worth missing the dance.

There is swearing in the comments after the jump.

I am ready to call it: the tourney streak is over. Michigan is currently the 25th team out on Torvik, currently estimated to have an 0.1% chance of receiving an at-large bid. They've got about an 8% chance to sneak in by winning the Big Ten tournament, largely because the league is very very bad this year.

This is quite a fall for a team that is coming off four consecutive Sweet 16s and was a one seed two years ago. How did we get here? Let's assess.

The Number One Recruiting Class In The Country was fool's gold. Michigan's heralded recruiting class of 2021 has one player in a meaningful role: Kobe Bufkin.

The two five-stars were essentially busts as college players. Caleb Houstan was a mediocre, streaky, defensively-meh wing who contributed nothing when his shot wasn't falling—which it almost never was outside of Crisler. Moussa Diabate was less frustrating but was a 20% usage guy who had middling efficiency. He had a lot of promise as a defender, but offset that promise with a lot of freshman mistakes. Both guys left to be second-round picks and are currently buried on NBA benches, so Michigan ended up playing a couple of middling players for heavy minutes—Houstan especially was inexplicably un-benchable—and those growing pains are benefiting this team in no way whatsoever. You can argue that having Houstan and Diabate around last year is worse for this year's team because other players would have more on-court experience.

Meanwhile, Frankie Collins transferred away from a near-certain starting job after Michigan added Jalen Llewellyn in the transfer portal. Collins is not exactly good at Arizona State. He's shooting 40% from two and his TO rate is over 20. But he's improved his shooting, adding 20 points to his FT% and hitting 33% of his threes; he's also got a massive assist rate that's 24th nationally. He's ASU's highest-usage player; his ORTG of 100 is bad… but it's 10 points higher than Dug McDaniel.

The other two players, Isaiah Barnes and Will Tschetter, were always long-term projects. In year two it appears neither is ready to take on a significant role. They're both averaging 4 minutes a game. This in and of itself isn't a big problem except for the fact that the aforementioned three players are not here.

If there's a lesson to be learned here it's that certain five stars aren't worth it. You have a guy headed for the lottery? Ok, get him. One-and-done second rounders are not worth bothering with. Also, try to avoid players who have not spent more than one consecutive year anywhere since middle school. 

[Campredon]

Bufkin is good, and it's probably not a coincidence he's in the recruiting sweet spot that hits around #50. He was the #46 composite prospect, which is out of the range that the NBA is going to take you even if you're not any good yet because there are only so many people with NBA-capable bodies in the world. It is in the range where you can expect to at least get the "hey, NBA, check it out" year from a player.

[After THE JUMP: more bad things! No good things!]