Michigan Basketball Snowflakes
How do you bring Juwan Howard back next year? This is far worse than 2020 Harbaugh. That team didn't finish last in the Big Ten. This isn't something that will be fixed by switching assistant coaches. Warde Manuel will be run out of town if he tries to bring Juwan back. If my athletic director makes over one million dollars a year, I want him to be able to realize when something isn't salvageable.
Last night’s score..
Rutgers 1st: 41, 2nd 41
Michigan 1st 26, 2nd 26
So that’s neato. It’s also the nicest thing I can say about this team right now. And Rutgers plays defense which is interesting to see.
I believe the word for this team is “shart”.
You go into it expecting something possibly gross, but it winds up far worse than you could have imagined.
How do you bring Juwan Howard back next year?
Warde will do nothing and bring back Juwan next season. Book it.
'How do you bring Warde back next season?' is the better question.
It would be so on brand for Warde to lose our national championship winning football coach while retaining our worst in program history basketball coach.
A critique with addressing the administrative barriers isn't fair. O$U fired their coach mid season because they gave him all the support needed, financial and administrative.
Per John Bacon if Michigan fans shows Warde more love, he will fire Juwan.
I don't have any idea what that means. Warde is going to retain Juwan ... out of resentment towards the fans?
I'm a big fan of Warde. I think he's doing a good job, and I will take a college football national championship, back-to-back Frozen Fours, and multiple trips to the Sweet Sixteen in basketball all day and twice on Sunday, not to mention all the success of our other programs.
The demands that he be fired are asinine and based only on fantasy. Warde is routinely blamed, somehow, for not continuing the legal challenges to Harbaugh's suspension as long as people think he should have, and for allowing Harbaugh to leave, but is not credited, on here, with private negotiations regarding Harbaugh's suspension that allowed him to coach during the week and was back for the post-season, so the crisis did not derail a national championship season, and he is not credited for retaining Harbaugh in 2020, despite extremely loud demands that he be fired.
The echo chamber here has decided that only the worst possible interpretation of events can be true, and Warde can only have exacerbated all the problems, and not possibly minimized them. As a result, the Regents' failure to fire Warde is perplexing. Is it possible that the people who actually know what Warde has done appreciate his work? Nope. No, clearly we, the uninformed fans, have the better perspective.
Anyway. The idea the Juwan's future depends on our genuflecting to Warde is really weird.
Calm down, Warde.
Okay, Warde.
Good try.
I agree it makes no sense... I wanna hear what Bacon says, maybe it was in jest.
Dude, he's joking about the BS Bacon kept spouting about what Harbaugh said he needed to stay at Michigan, bear hugs, showing the love, etc.
Yes, sorry thought it was obvious.
I think you're kidding, but I'll just say that Bacon doesn't know anything about the basketball program.
Give Nate Oats a blank check at this point. Team loses 5/8 top scorers this year with a few good freshman coming in and who knows what will happen with Dug. I don’t see how this gets better next year with him staying.
“Warde Manuel will be run out of town if he tries to bring Juwan back.”
Bring back Juwan!!!
If Juwan returns next year, the crowds at Yost will be bigger than the crowds at Crisler.
Juwan returns the crowds at Carol Hutchins Stadium will be larger also.
Since Juwan rejoined the team as Head Coach, the team is -165 in the 2nd Half of games this season.
That is not a typo.
So Sanderson was right...
Giving up 82 points to a team that's still below 40% shooting for the season should be rock bottom. If we somehow bring back Juwan next year, I don't think it will be.
This was about the 5th "rock bottom" of the season
If we bring him back next year, I'm not sure we'll even have a full team. Not real hard to see that as it looks right now, next year's team is likely to be even worse. Crisler will be empty, we'll be bottom of the barrel big ten and no way will anyone with other options want to come in and play for this corpse of a program. If you let a coach take a team from being one of top of the conference team when he came in to literally bottoming out as bad as possible and let him continue - that says alot about your judgment
I want to see an actual set we run . Dribble for 25 seconds and launch an off balanced low percentage 3 . Burnett has been terrible as well
There's nothing left to be said that hasn't been said already. So I will repeat myself here.
I don't think anyone saw this level of ineptitude coming, but entering the season anyone who hoped (let alone believed) that this was a tournament team was looking through maize colored glasses. Below .500 was completely predictable. 18-16 last year, and this team was decidedly worse. A bunch of spare parts slapped together that don't even make a reasonable roster.
Who is even an athlete on this team? Tray Jackson? The man was a bit part at Seton Hall and at 23 years old is past the college development stage.
No one else on the team is a plus athlete. Reed, Williams, Llewellyn, Nkamhoua, Burnett, Tschetter, Jace, YoYo...all a bunch of try-hards (at best) with not much natural talent or athleticism. The one guy there with upside left was Reed. Everyone else was already full grown. And this is who the optimists counted on for being a bunch of gritty defenders to lead us to a 7 seed because Juwan once went to the Elite Eight with Franz Wagner and Hunter Dickinson.
Yes, there's Dug. Good old Dug. Undersized, quick, a little mistake-prone but a natural scorer and good passer. The ONE ball handler (one!) on the team. He's a good piece on a good team--which is why he will be leaving at the end of the year.
Don't get me wrong, most of the other spare parts have some ability. I'd be happy with most of them as rotation players, maybe even the #5 option for a starting lineup, like Nkamhoua. But these are all dudes who couldn't get minutes on their previous teams or in the case of the non-transfers, shouldn't be getting minutes.
But it's worse than even that. Losing by 20 to the worst MSU team of the last 30 years, by 20 at Nebraska, 30 at Illinois, 30 at a not good Rutgers...the wheels have come off. It's interesting because when they were only losing by a 3 to 10 points earlier in the year, there still wasn't anything good about the defense and the only thing good about the offense was some nights they could really shoot. But passing? Movement? No. These NBA schemes we're running are so good you can't even see them.
The Juwan defenders have mostly stopped pretending there's anything left to defend. Now it's more about "But who could do better?" I don't know, almost anybody, I guess? Yeah, NIL, admissions, those are constraints. Doesn't mean we should be getting our teeth kicked in every night.
Or it's about how "This shit works" and he was able to have success his first three seasons. Well, he was mildly successful in 2019-20 and definitely underachieved in 2021-22. He has some coaching ability (presumably) but he's not John Beilein. His success was going to be built on recruiting. Isaiah Todd, Caleb Houstan, Frankie Collins, Moussa Diabate, Jett Howard...these were the big time gets. Guys played either 1 or 0 seasons here, and all of them were raw with no development in their short time here. Bufkin is the one real feather in his cap.
He went after transfers (Shannon and Love) which blew up because of our school's rules. Lesson learned, possibly, but it's too late. The window on his recruiting ability is now closed.
Sure, give him another year, see if he can take an even worse group of rag tag kids and make this shit work. Honestly, it's fine, I don't care. We've reached full on apathy and if it's important to Warde and a handful of others to see this through even more, I'll survive. And frankly, you can never say never, so maybe they win 25 games next year. But if that happens, when all the told-you-so people come out, you're kidding yourself if you think your faith was based in anything real.
Going to say it AGAIN to those who should listen.....Michigan had more consensus Top-100 players on the court last night than Rutgers.....still think it's all about Admissions and NIL money?
I was a defender last year and impressed that people saw it coming and I didn't.
Nkamoua is the plus athlete, not Jackson. Put him on another team and you'd see it.
If Juwan stays, who is going to be on the team next year? Seems like most of the minutes and points are gone through graduation/eligibility or likely attrition (Dug?). Another year of misfit parts
Phil Martelli will be like “‘Sadi has done a great job with this defense “ …..
With those ellipsis replacing, "...especially considering that Howard only gives him five minutes of practice per week to work on it."
I don't know how you bring Juwan back next year, but I'm sure Warde will find a way. Warde and his tendencies for inaction always remind me of a great Ron Swanson quote.
"Normally, if given a choice between doing something and doing nothing, I choose to do nothing. But I will do something if it helps someone else do nothing. I'd work all night if it meant nothing got done."
It appears that Warde either lacks the internal will and drive to push for absolute athletic greatness (do whatever it takes), thereby being more than content with mediocrity as long as we do things the "right" way, or he's utterly incompetent and doesn't even comprehend the concept of furiously pursuing dominace in the major sports.
I seriously suspect it's the former.
By all appearances Warde is the classic "Michigan Man". He doesn't rock the boat, he doesn't color outside the lines, and his idea of reaching for the stars is being smack dab in the middle of the pack. #GoodEnough
It's no wonder he and Harbaugh clashed which ultimately ended in personal dislike. Harbaugh literally emodied the concept of pursuing winning with a ferocity unknown to mankind. Warde is literally Harbaugh's opposite. Harbaugh literally strove to beat Ohio State and win championships or die trying...We won the national championship INSPITE of Warde Manual...mark my words.
Warde will do nothing about Juwan until he's beyond forced to act. The fact that Juwan is still coaching is evidence of this fact. This level of dumpster fire would never be tolerated at top baskeball programs across the country, yet Warde allows it to continue.
We need a motivated, driven, "do whatever it takes to win" AD from one of the southern programs who knows what it takes and has the balls to do it. Enough with this "Do things the right way (ie. mediocrity) / Michigan Man" bullshit.
I've started every b-ball post with "I knew Juwan and love Juwan..." as a preamble to contextualize my criticism as coming from an objective POV with a subjective foundation. I knew Juwan and love Juwan, but the the gravity of the team, fair or not, is on him. Its makeup, its portal and roster misses and basketball IQ are all grounded in a set resonant bad decisions that have been exacerbated by an unhelpful admissions department, IRL health concerns and one too many intemperate interactions. Some bad luck, sure? But he has not set up the team or culture to survive modern day athletic travails.
The Harbaugh comparison is no analog. To state the obvious, his track record and rope was much longer that Nook's. That's just real talk. I also feel like with bball, you can turn around the culture much quicker and this season feels like 2 year's of precipitous fallout with no realistic hopeful foundation in sight.
Again, love the guy and what he's done for the U, but it all feels off and futile to keep this regime.
This has gone beyond hopeless. It looks like the players have packed it in for the season. Juwan should not have to prepare his team for every game. The players should be up for these games. They should also be watching film on their own to self prepare.
Maybe the big donors will also force Warde into making sweeping changes to the MBB program. I also hope Santa Ono is paying attention.
Juwan will land on his feet and likely head back to the NBA. A totally new coaching staff is needed and then Sanderson can return and do his strength and conditioning thing.
This narrative that Howard was the only good option available and the coaching carousel was over and we could not find anyone of quality is such made up nonsense.....Howard was announced a week after Beilein departed....the plan was already set in motion. No one kicked the tires on anyone else.
Stop pretending that there was no one good available when no one bothered to pick up the phone....lazy with zero administrative diligence - it was a rush into a mistake....period.