Michigan is still completely terrifying

The Wolverines are one game away from a place in history

Photo credit: Associated Press

Dan Hurley made no secret of his distaste for the way UConn was discussed before its national semifinal win over Illinois Saturday — intentionally interjecting the take after an unrelated question, just to make sure he got it out there.

“You’re coming into the game as an underdog versus a team that you beat by 13 points earlier in the season, which was kind of surprising, that that’s how we kind of came into the game,” Hurley said after the Huskies’ 71-62 win. “Obviously I’ve been waiting to say that and now I forgot your question.”

It was, in retrospect, a bit silly to think of UConn as the plucky outsider. This is a program with two titles and three Final Four (and now national title game) appearances in the past four seasons. This is a coach with an unthinkably brilliant record in the last two weekends of the NCAA Tournament. This is a sustained, historic run of success much else in modern college hoops history. Doubting UConn is dumb.

Which is why it was so funny to hear Hurley talk about Monday’s game against Michigan, in which he thanked the basketball gods his Huskies only need to beat these guys once:

“Really, you don’t have to be the best team,” Hurley said Sunday. “You don’t have to have the best season to win this tournament. These are all one game, Game 7, single elimination. There’s been plenty of times in the history of this tournament where the best team hasn’t won it. You’ve just got to be better for one night. … The good thing for us, it’s not a seven-game series. Just got to play one game on Monday night.”

What a difference 12 hours, and two Big Ten opponents, makes. Sunday’s presser at Lucas Oil Stadium was notably low on the kind of swaggering cash talk you occasionally get from “the best coach in the f***ing sport.” There was no winking, actually-I-think-we’re-better stuff. Later, Hurley told The Field of 68’s Jeff Goodman he was “checking to see if there’s a judge who will let my ‘24 team come back to Indy and help out.” He didn’t even push back on Jeff’s David vs. Goliath joke! This is freaking UConn we’re talking about. The undisputed reigning king of the sport, leading a blueblood with an unmatched history of modern postseason success, sounded like a mid-major guy stoking blind faith, in contrast to all available evidence, that his team really could shock the world.

This is what Michigan has done to this Final Four.

Frankly, we should have known. It was right there all along. Even if you thought Arizona’s interior-obsessed offense would struggle against its worst possible matchup in Michigan (and we did) it felt crazy to expect the extent of the whooping Dusty May’s team delivered. And yet Saturday night, and basically the entire UM run, has felt like a reminder of a truth we all first discovered in November:

Michigan is completely terrifying

Sometimes, first impressions are right. The best team is just the best team. Conference play, with all of its rigor and all of its quality opposition, can almost become distracting. Tommy Lloyd had an interesting thought about this after Arizona’s blowout loss Saturday: Even if you’re really, really good (and Arizona was), Michigan is the kind of historically dominant squad that takes time to get used to, and if you don’t have that they can kill you before the game even really starts:

“I think they’re one of those teams -- I would say, like, Houston’s like that, or even Iowa State’s like that, teams we played, you have to play them a few times,” Lloyd said. “After you kind of get used to playing them a few times you get more comfortable. I think that’s probably why you saw more closer games in the Big Ten for them towards the end — because teams probably got comfortable playing them and had a better plan.”

This seems right. Coaches’ deep understanding of their own closed competitive ecosystems — how players on X team match up with your own, and thus opponent Y, etc. — undoubtedly help too, even if you haven’t played Michigan twice. Purdue’s Big Ten title win was the most notable example: A Matt Painter tactical masterclass built on the Boilermakers’ own unique strengths (using Braden Smith’s dribble sense and Trey Kaufman-Renn’s 15-foot push shots to pull Michigan’s bigs out from under the rim), deployed against a team it had faced just three weeks’ prior.

This is not a luxury most tourney teams have. At every stop, Michigan’s opponents have looked exactly the same as the teams Michigan hammered once it figured things out in late November: overwhelmed, shellshocked, finished in a flash.

The formula remains the same. It is uniquely designed for postseason surety.