basketball refereeing

Before it got excruciating, that was pretty fun!

Franz Wagner put on a show, scoring 20 points on only 12 shooting possessions, pulling down seven boards, and dropping off three assists that all led to dunks. The rest of the Wolverines spread out the scoring and took care of the ball. Michigan played suffocating defense that forced Rutgers into an evening of contested midrange prayers.

The officials also put on a show, in a different way, calling the second half so much tighter than the first that it was hard to believe the same crew was out there. Michigan led by 15 points with 16 minutes play, pushed the lead to 17 at the under-12 timeout, and kept the margin in double figures until 1:51 remained. Yet the half felt like a brutal slog because it contained 24 of the game's 31 fouls, most of them before Rutgers annoyingly took a few intentional hacks to shine up the score late.

Jacob Young's three-pointer with four seconds left mattered only to KenPom devotees and gamblers, to whom it mattered quite a lot. It was an unfortunately fitting capper to the half, albeit not the game, for which Michigan deserved a larger final margin.

hope you like contested fadeaways [Campredon]

It took a while for M's offense to kick into gear, but the defense held strong all night. Even with the late bullshit, RU didn't crest a point per possession, and their shooting got predictably worse after some early long fadeaways dropped. For most of the game, the Scarlet Knights sat on one made three-pointer, and they weren't getting to the rim much, either.

A pair of baskets by Brandon Johns sandwiched around a Wagner dime to Austin Davis finally gave the Wolverines some breathing room in the first half, and they carried that momentum into the tunnel when Wagner corralled a loose ball and dropped in a ludicrous baseline teardrop to beat the halftime buzzer.

Wagner came out hot in the second half, working the high screen to assist a Hunter Dickinson slam, draining a three off an offensive rebound, getting to the line for a pair of free throws, isolating a defender for a runner, and attacking a closeout to create another Dickinson dunk all before the second media timeout.

Wagner, the creator [Campredon]

From there, Mike Smith's steady hand at point guard and a steady stream of whistles took over. While Michigan went an extended stretch without scoring, the Scarlet Knights couldn't tighten the gap, and Smith repeatedly broke their attempts to press and trap him into turnovers. He finished second on the team with 12 points, hit a demoralizing scoop layup late, and only turned it over twice in 34 minutes despite heavy on-ball pressure, particularly from Young.

Rutgers couldn't score in the halfcourt and couldn't get the ball away from M's ballhandlers. Despite the offensive drought, the game was never in danger.

With Wagner starring and Smith chipping in, the team overcame an inefficient scoring night from Dickinson (ten points on 11 shooting possessions) and 4/15 combined shooting from Isaiah Livers and Eli Brooks. It's difficult to tell which player is going to lead the offense in any given game, though someone always steps up. The defense, meanwhile, is reliable as a metronome. Michigan is now 10-1 in the Big Ten, two losses clear of second-place Illinois, heading into Sunday's top-five matinee at Ohio State.

[Hit THE JUMP for the box score.]

1/12/2021 – Michigan 77, Wisconsin 54 – 11-0, 6-0 Big Ten

It doesn't seem real.

This isn't the usual mopey woe-is-we Michigan fan garbage. Set aside backslides from previous teams in various sports. Set aside emotional states entirely. Just focus on what usually happens when relatively equal, good basketball teams butt heads. The results are not this, literally ever in the history of college basketball:

Michigan is the 1st team in college basketball history to beat three ranked opponents in a row by at least 19 points. https://t.co/f7MqH09SjM

— Larry Lage (@LarryLage) January 13, 2021

This doesn't even cover it, really, since all of these games saw Michigan leap out to even more absurd leads than they finished with.

It doesn't seem real because Wisconsin has gone 18 years without getting clobbered by 30, and the only reason they didn't in this game was a stirring comeback after they were down 40. Wisconsin has lost a total of four games by 20+ in a decade. Michigan hadn't beaten a top-ten opponent this badly since 1987. If you're watching Michigan basketball games these days and you don't wonder about your sanity, you have far too much experience with psychedelic mushrooms. Nate Reuvers's face is melting. Literally? Metaphorically? Who can tell anymore?

Michigan has this effect not only on observers but also on their opponents. Early in the second half Tyler Wahl went Full Carlton:

What
The hell
Was that pic.twitter.com/vf6CFeBRna

— Due# (@JDue51) January 13, 2021

This was one of the more stupefying plays I've seen in the last decade of college basketball; at the same time it also fit right in there. Wisconsin entered the game on pace for the best turnover rate in the history of Kenpom; late in the first half Greg Gard called timeout because Franz Wagner's ghostly appendages had emerged from Badger sternums far too often for his taste.

An initial flurry of ferociously blocked post-ups led to a flurry of—uh—wide open three-pointers I was certain would go down. Once those didn't fall, the ancien regime of Wisconsin basketball devolved into a chaotic mess of contested two-pointers, turnovers, and guillotines. Wisconsin is a team of thousand-year-old vampires executing gloriously regimented plays; fifteen minutes in they looked like a Busby Berkeley movie after it got hit by a nuclear bomb.

You have to focus. You have to focus on it and assure yourself it's real. Michigan's third-most-common lineup over a five-game stretch including three ranked opponents and a feisty, weird Maryland team is the Kenpom Kids.

That ain't real! Nobody can tell me that's real! This is one of those prestige television episodes where the protagonist is unjustly confined in a mental institution, except it's completely awesome! No I will not take your drugs, Doctor Butthole, this is rad!

--------------------------------------------------------------------

The Matthew Loves Ball highlight reel we use for clips, like most other highlight reels, is almost exclusively focused on buckets. Blocks will show up, as will critical end of game possessions that end up empty. Misses are excised in the name of time. This game's highlight reel includes all of the last 49 seconds of the first half, in which no buckets are scored:

First Chaundee Brown forces Trice to give it up, then denies him on a dribble handoff. When Wisconsin gets it back to their tough-shot maker with ten seconds on the clock, Trice… gives it up to Tyler Wahl. Cheap foul on Wagner, fine.

The second sequence features Brad Davison trying to drive past Mike Smith; Davis slides over and Davison has to try to fit between a couple of closing doors. Smith gets his chest back to the front of Davison, and Davison humps up a shot through Smith that doesn't get over the rim. The wild rebound bounces off Brown.

The third sequence: Livers and Brown switch off, then switch off again on Trice. Livers cuts off a rim cut from Ford, and with the clock ticking down Brown comes over to double. Ford fumbles the ball into his feet, and Wisconsin doesn't get a shot up.

The bench erupts onto the court when the horn sounds. The announcers are flabbergasted. The halftime crew stares blankly into the camera for 15 straight minutes, unsure of the implications of such a display. It must be befriended lest it destroy us all. By the numbers, Michigan's offense is better than its defense.

[After THE JUMP: GUMBZILLAAAAAA]

It happened in the national title game. It actually happened twice: a screen of ref butts huddled over a monitor, poring over frame-by-frame replays of a routine, uncontroversial basketball play. Once they let the routine, uncontroversial basketball play stand. Once they said this was not Texas Tech basketball:

This clip is even better. Guy fouls Moretti and they overturn the out of bounds call. ‍♀️ #gamechanger pic.twitter.com/I4oPCLKIRu

— Karen Gregory (@karen_gregory) April 9, 2019

Michigan fans everywhere exclaimed I KNEW IT to normies around them, descending into paranoid spittle-flecked rants met with either polite incomprehension or, in certain cases, the nearest human saying "blarp" and falling over because they are drunk and/or an infant.

[After THE JUMP: blarp *falls over*]