basketball previews

THE ESSENTIALS

WHAT	#14-seed Michigan (8-23, 3-17 B10) vs #11-seed Penn State (15-16, 9-11 B10)
WHERE	Target Center, Minneapolis, MN
WHEN	9:00 PM
THE LINE	Kenpom: PSU-4 Torvik: PSU-4
TELEVISION	Peacock (link)

[After THE JUMP: Many Nits to pick.]

THE ESSENTIALS

WHAT	#124 Michigan (8-22, 3-16 B10) vs #34 Nebraska (21-9, 11-8 B10)
WHERE	Crisler Arena, Ann Arbor, MI
WHEN	Sunday, NOON
THE LINE	Kenpom: Neb-5 Torvik: Neb-5
TELEVISION	BTN (link)

THE OVERVIEW

Before Michigan was eviscerated on the road by Ohio State and Rutgers, Nebraska did the same thing. Most years the third on that list would seem like the most surprising, but this year the Huskers are firmly in the Tournament. It took three miserable seasons, one just-bad one, and the entire Big Ten East collectively sacrificing their basketball programs to the football gods, but Nebrasketball has reached a point where they should be able to travel to Michigan without much fear of a loss. Or they would if they didn't turn into Michigan when they're on the road. Torvik:

HOME vs B10	ROAD vs B10

I mean…

NEBRASKA ROAD vs B10	MICHIGAN HOME vs B10

…there's a chance.

However, Hoiberg's Huskers avoided a perfect home/road W/L dichotomy by beating a bad Indiana team on 2/21, and Michigan is now without Nkamhoua. So if there is any trepidation on the trip from Lincoln, it's that Michigan might use the opportunity to court Hoiberg.

But for that to happen they'd have to fire Juwan Howard. And for that to happen, as I understand it, Santa Ono would have to fire Warde Manuel. And what's standing in the way of that happening? At this point, I don't know.

[After THE JUMP: Nebraska hasn't changed, but Michigan has.]

THE ESSENTIALS

THE OVERVIEW

The recent history of athletic directorship at Michigan and Ohio State is a study in reactivity versus proactivity. Representing the latter, and without going into the conspiracy section of this history, soon-retiring OSU AD Gene Smith was the most powerful voice in American university athletics administration for the last few decades, and used those positions to direct every NCAA and Big Ten institution from the basketball tournament to the current response to NIL.

Recently Smith voluntarily reported a suite of violations to the NCAA, along with measures taken. All were more consequential than anything Michigan's been accused of in more notorious cases--including tampering and lying to the NCAA about it to acquire the top player in the portal--but Smith knows the system he helped create, and how much it weighs whether a violation was reported by one's self to one's friends, versus by one's rival's to one's vindictive enemies.

Smith also recently, proactively, fired his heretofore pretty good basketball coach Chris Holtmann following a stretch where Holtmann's team lost 9/10 games, including one to hated, abysmal Michigan. That game was arguably an anomaly--Ohio State had better looks and possession metrics, while Michigan shot 20 points better than their average on a high volume of threes. One could say the same of some of the post-Holtmann wins.

But ADs and coaches are rarely graded on what their results should have been. In the realm of what is, Holtmann's team was well out of the Tournament, while interim basketball coach Jake Diebler already has an upset over #2 Purdue, followed a week later by an upset *AT* #21 MSU. Diebler's reinvigorated squad is coming off another authoritative win versus Nebraska despite playing Keisei Tominaga without the Buckeyes' own star point guard. They're currently the 12th team out to Heartbreak City, but it's a volatile bubble this year, with little to separate OSU from several Big East teams hanging on the 10-11 line.

Likewise, there's no way the extremely deliberative, reactionary Warde Manuel could have predicted his basketball team would have two wins since December 19th. Except to the perpetually negative, precipitory events like chasing G-League-bound "5-stars" who were mediocre one-and-dones in college (including the coach's defense-repellent son), banking on transfers who didn't have their degrees, and other warning signs about roster construction and program culture issues are only manifest in hindsight.

That's the trick with being an AD: small sample sizes don't make for any kind of surety. It could be Diebler's 3-1 start is fool's gold, that Michigan's fifth-year, first-time coach's mistakes are all behind him, and that Manuel's patient lethargy will be rewarded when Juwan Howard is the greatest coach in basketball by 2027-'28. Did we judge George Washington from his first command? Nay! It could be that the patient man will prove the more prescient, and that in the years to come Gene Smith's aggressiveness—for example in selecting TV man Tony Petitti to maximize the B10's TV revenue and playoff exposure at the cost of everything else—will come back to haunt his legacy. For the moment, Ohio State hasn't beaten Michigan in football or basketball in its last three tries. So who's to say?

[Hit THE JUMP: How did we beat these guys? Oh right.]