Twelve years ago yesterday, Michigan played its first NCAA Tournament game in over a decade, beating No. 7 seed Clemson to advance. There were a few bumps in the road, but that began a remarkable run in which — yes — U-M morphed into a basketball school.
Deny it if you want to. Football will always pay the bills, of course, and if and when the Wolverines ever get back to competing for championships in a climate in which the deck is truly stacked against them, that will flip as quickly as Michigan State basketball’s fortunes down the stretch of a First Four game.
But head coach John Beilein built something special in Ann Arbor, competing for not only Big Ten, but also National Championships, winning four of the former and coming achingly close on the latter.
College football gets more eyeballs, but it’s stale. The same handful of teams amass the majority of the talent by any means necessary, none of the postseason matters except for three games and it’s a better bet than not you’ll know who’s going to win heading in.
Upsets happen occasionally, but only among the powers. If stragglers somehow sneak into the four-team playoff by working through a weak schedule, they’re quickly put in their place.
But as we saw yesterday, basketball is much more unpredictable. There’s still an arms race for recruits, but smaller schools with players with chips on their shoulders can blow up brackets on day one as Ohio State and Purdue backers can attest). Beilein’s formula in the long run proved just as effective as the one-and-done factories — building senior-laden teams with NBA players who learned each other’s every move on the court – one or the reasons the Wolverines are where they are today as a No. 1 seed.
