As an 8th-grade US history teacher, I loved the president's discussion. 

they didn't touch on the possibility that dickenson could transfer to another school and try to win a title.

one good player at the 4 probably would have put this team into the tournament

No "probably" about that, considering this team was on the brink of the tournament anyway.  A quality 4 probably makes this a Big Ten title contender.

I'd also like to add that if you're going to sub-tweet me as "the guy who's way too positive and annoying" it was nice to do it early on in the pod.

In looking at bracket stuff today, I found this image interesting:

It classifies coaches based on trips to the elite 8 per trip to the tournament. I think we can simplify and just say elite 8 per years coaching, because coaches should be penalized for missing the tournament. So in that case, Juwan qualifies as a prodigy at 1/4. 

Based on that, he needs to make the elite 8 at least once in the next 2 seasons. I think that's a reasonable metric for deciding on his future. I've said on the board before, has to be final 4 in the next 3. But I'll take elite 8 in the next 2.

Bad luck and admissions caused 30 losses in 2 years…okie dokie

Most of the tournament teams I looked at are senior and of 4th year juniors besides a few outliers.  Texas I think has 4 6th year seniors and many other teams have all senior starters or 6th seniors with juniors.   I haven't looked at every team but the vast majority of teams have very experienced teams.   Marquette has juniors and Soph and that is one team that was different then add in the few blue bloods who get the top 20 players and most teams are way older then ours.   

Good luck to all! The two positions seem to be, luck and youth vs roster construction and some poor management during end of game situations. Michigan has been the 8 seed for three of Howard’s four years, which apparently is fine for some people. I see a dip in the program. Some say regression to the mean. We shall see! 
Count me in camp 1

Looking forward...Yo Yo has to have an blockbuster summer for team not to have deficiencies at 4 going into fall camp.

The key reason I'm still firmly enthusiastic about Juwan is his recruiting. So far he's recruiting even better than Beilein -- though, unfortunately, so well that the pros are cherry-picking our most talented players before they've had any chance to adapt to the college game. So be it.

But coaching, it seems to me, is something that can be fixed. Harbaugh, over the years, realized when something wasn't working (like Don Brown), and replaced it. I don't see why Juwan can't do the same thing. Find assistant coaches who can help the team with defense, with late game situations, with spacing, etc. 

I'm confident Juwan knows this is a critical time in his coaching-at-Michigan career, and will do what it takes to bring us out of the spin. Whether that's working the transfer portal, or replacing some of his assistant coaches, or devoting increased time in practice to things like blocking out and plays. Coaches can do that, so unless Juwan somehow is unaware of the problem, unwilling to fix it, or somehow unable to fix it, I don't see why we can't improve things.

But. One thing the head coach alone is ultimately responsible for is recruiting. (Obviously assistants do a lot of it too, but no kid comes to a program without believing in the head coach). And so far, I see no sign that Juwan isn't able to get top-level talent to come here (including via the transfer portal). If that begins to dry up, then we're back to Tommy Amaker- and Brian Ellerbe-era results, and that's when you've got to make changes.

And don't get me wrong -- if he misses the NCAA's next season too, we may start running into trouble. But for now, nobody's suggesting he can't get high level talent -- just that they leave too early. That's a problem, I agree. But it's such a better problem to have than an inability to get it in the first place.

I would love to see Juwan light a fire under this team and under his assistant coaches (or replace them). But I have confidence that he's prepared to do just that, as Harbaugh was. Do the post mortem, figure out what went wrong, and fix it. Go Blue.

There are plenty of small scale phenomena that don’t show up in large scale data.  If “nerves” are often equally distributed it will cancel like buy and sell price errors are supposed to in market models (they don’t always do this in practice), just to give an example off the top of my head.
 

I think everyone who’s played sports knows of times when someone makes a mistake because of pressure.  I never played much basketball under pressure, but this is pretty clear to anyone who has followed or played competitive golf.  Try hitting the 12 footer you just made but this time $5k is on the line.  I don’t think it’s a leap of faith to think that some athletes handle pressure better than others, but it might not correlate to much that this is macro observable.
 

 It’s plausibly connected to experience, but most players who are playing D1 have played pressure moments for years in lower level competition. Plus just playing at the D-1 level is puts pressure on players.  The ones that haven’t had that experience are typically not playing in crunch time at this level.  They’ll only pop up if the team is real bad (like lower divisions play) or if there are injuries, so it will be a small portion of the whole sample.  
 

It’s also plausible that good players aren’t any better than their normal in crunch time, but that bad players are below their normal.  Again, this will be hard to sleuth out given that the best players play at the end of the game. E.g. Michigans bad four might be even worse in the last two minutes.  I’m not sure how you sort this out without tracking individual player performance.

None of this is to say that “clutchness” is some feature of a team’s DNA, let alone that the lack of this clutch gene or coaching is why the basketball team lost so much.  But it’s too hasty to dismiss phenomenal experiences just because we can’t pry them out of messy large scale data.

Alex was losing me with the “some guys want the ball in the end, some guys crumble ….” narrative he was pushing. It was quite confusing to try and figure out what he was actually trying to say in relation to luck (or whatever we are calling it).  

That has to do with youth not luck

I agree with David, anyone who has played sports know that there are people who have "it" and don't and that it factor can manifest at different times and it doesn't always show up in the numbers

I'm late to listen but I don't think Seth is correct that low majors are more likely to be on the tail ends of the luck distribution than expected.

For one, there are like 60 P5 teams so any part of a random distribution is only going to consist of only about 15% P5 teams.

Of the top ten luckiest teams this year, Missouri is 9th and Kansas is 10th.

Of the ten most unlucky teams, Stanford was second, OSU was third (ie 361st!! in luck), and Rutgers was 8th most unlucky.

That's about exactly what you'd expect from a random distribution.