brandon wade

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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]