The Michigan Wolverines' basketball team will face LSU tonight.

The NCAA Tournament's second round has been very good to the Michigan Wolverines' basketball program over the last decade, having served as a springboard to bigger and better things more often than not.

U-M has won its last five games in the NCAA Tournament's second round, a stretch that dates back to a 78-53 beatdown of VCU in 2013. The last time the Maize and Blue lost their Round of 32 game was in 2011, when John Beilein's No. 8-seeded Wolverines took No. 1-seeded Duke to the final possession in a heartbreaking 73-71 loss.

If you're a high seed (like Michigan is this year, at No. 1), the second round oftentimes presents a tricky matchup against a lower-seeded Power Conference squad hungry for an upset.

If you're the lower-seeded club, however, the round is a beautiful opportunity to pull off a monumental upset against one of the Tournament's top seeds. Michigan has been on both ends of the spectrum in recent years.

As a No. 1 seed, U-M is currently the "hunted" but played the role of the "hunter" in 2017, for example, when it was a No. 7 seed and knocked off Rick Pitino's No. 2-seeded Louisville Cardinals in the second round.

Will Wade's LSU Tigers are playing the role of the "hunter" tonight, hoping to taking down a Michigan program that has done an excellent job of avoiding significant upsets in the Big Dance in recent history.

Click the image to sign up for TheWolverine.com, free for 60 days!

That hasn't always been the case though. In fact, the storyline was the complete opposite for the Wolverines in the mid-to-late 1980s under Bill Frieder, with the second round having served as a major stumbling block for a Michigan program who underachieved in a big way in the postseason in those years.

Regular-season success wasn't hard to come by for Frieder's Wolverines (Big Ten championships in 1985 and 1986), but choke jobs on the game's grandest stage helped tarnish his legacy a bit.

The 1985 NCAA Tournament was also when the Big Dance expanded to 64 teams and took on its current form, with the annual event having held 53 teams in 1984, 52 in 1983 and 48 in 1982.

U-M's massive postseason disappointments were best on display during each of the two aforementioned seasons in '85 and '86, when Michigan entered the Big Dance as a No. 1 seed in the former and a No. 2 seed in the latter.