After an underwhelming regular season left the Michigan men’s basketball team on the Selection Sunday bubble, the Wolverines took on a new attitude. Juwan Howard said it best last week before Michigan left for the NCAA Tournament round of 64 in Indianapolis.

“It’s a new season,” Howard said. “This is the postseason.”

This past weekend, the Wolverines made the most of their blank slate. Exactly one month ago, Howard made contact with a Wisconsin assistant coach during a postgame altercation, resulting in a five-game suspension and $40,000 fine. Few believed Michigan would even make the tournament at that point.

Fast forward four weeks. The 11th-seeded Wolverines pulled off a pair of upsets in Indianapolis this past weekend, toppling No. 6 seed Colorado State and No. 3 seed Tennessee en route to their fifth straight Sweet Sixteen berth. Michigan rallied back from a 15-point deficit against the Rams and overcame DeVante’ Jones’ injury-riddled weekend to punch its ticket to San Antonio.

And with a chance to build on an already impressive NCAA Tournament run, there’s still room to improve.

“I don’t think we're playing our best basketball, like to our potential,” fifth-year senior captain Eli Brooks said Saturday. “We still have a lot of mistakes that we have to clean up. Turnovers, miscommunication. That's the scary thing with this team. If we keep on staying connected, good things are going to happen down the line.”

For a team that debuted at No. 6 in the AP Poll in November, advancing to the Sweet Sixteen may not sound like a season-defining accomplishment. But the Wolverines’ frustrating regular season featured far more valleys than peaks. They dropped seven of their first 14 games, fell to Big Ten bottom-dweller Minnesota in Ann Arbor in December, lost Howard to suspension for two weeks at the end of February, failed to win back to back games for more than a month from Feb. 10 to March 19 and choked away a 17-point lead in the second half of a Big Ten Tournament game against Indiana.

In the worst way possible, this season’s narrative proved to be everything last year’s narrative wasn’t. In 2020-21, Michigan entered the season as a relatively unknown commodity before winning an outright Big Ten title, earning a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament and advancing to the Elite Eight.

On the other hand, the Wolverines began this season as a trendy national title pick. Howard recruited a trio of McDonald’s All-Americans and brought back All-American big man Hunter Dickinson, but Michigan cratered back to Earth in mid-December. The Wolverines weren’t on the national radar for most of the season after their slow start.

That is, until now.

“Making it to the Sweet 16 is, as literal as it is, sweet because nobody believed in us,” Dickinson said. “Everybody thought we shouldn't be in the tournament. And now people that were hating on us are going home and about to watch us next week.”

Now, with a trip to San Antonio to face No. 2 seed Villanova looming, Michigan has a chance to erase any painstaking memory of this season’s struggles. In one weekend, the 2021-22 Wolverines can turn a disappointing four-month narrative on its head. Michigan can rewrite its legacy with a few big moments, and it has the talent to do exactly that.

“There wasn’t really any doubt that this team is special,” Brooks said. “That starts with our coach believing in us and just the group of guys that are in the locker room. We have a good group of guys that have the same drive, the same passion. And that’s a credit to Juwan, the coaching staff, finding those guys out there that you like to be around. There wasn’t a second that anybody shied away, and bought into the system, and we’re in the Sweet Sixteen.”

And if they stay on the trajectory, the Wolverines have what it takes to advance even further than that.

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