Missed Opportunities

I must admit that when it happened, I was livid. How could you not put the golden child, Tate Forcier, back in the game? After all, hadn't he already led three fourth quarter drives to win or tie games this year? We only had 1:40 on the clock, no timeouts, and we had to go about 60 yards to get into reasonable field goal range. Surely this was the perfect setup for more heroics.
But no, Denard Robinson came back out on the field. Maybe Tate was injured, we had seen him shaking his hand like he had hit it on something earlier in the quarter. But we saw him start to run on the field, as if to say, "I'm ready to go" only to be told to sit down by Rich Rod. This was clearly a decision by Rich Rod to go with Robinson.

After the game, I stewed for a while, thinking about the missed opportunity to steal a game on the road against a top ten team when you commit five turnovers. As disappointed as I was that the game slipped away, I began to mellow a bit, thinking about how good the team had played in certain segments, and realizing that we were a nine point dog in this game and nearly won it.

As I poked around on various message boards, and saw discussions of the game, and of Rich Rod's decision to bench Forcier, I came across a comparison that seem particularly apt to me.
Late in the Big Ten basketball season, with the Michigan hoops fighting for their first NCAA bid in ten years, Michigan was playing on the road against a poor Iowa team. With tough games still to play against Purdue and Minnesota, most people felt this was a must win for our tournament chances. After blowing a large lead late, John Beilein benched his best player, Manny Harris for the overtime period, and we ended up loosing. At the time, many people were upset that the loss had cost us our chance at an NCAA bid. But Manny came out fired up a few days later and we beat Purdue, and then beat Minnesota, and he was the best player on the court in our big dance win against Clemson. In the end, Beilein's decision to bench Manny against Iowa probably cost us that game, but might have been the move that saved our season. We can only hope that Rich Rod's bizarre decision to bench Forcier will have the same consequences.

Bullets:
-Big picture, I'm very pleased with where we are. A year after finishing 3-9 (and being somewhat lucky to get one of those wins), we are 4-2 with two narrow losses, and most of our remaining tough games at home. 8-4 is a real possibility now, and that would be a huge one year improvement
-Boy did our line play look great. I think we beat Iowa on both sides of the ball, and they were supposed to have the best D-line in the league outside of Columbus.
-I love seeing Brandon Minor run downhill. We really need to get him more carries against the big boys. I would love to see him repeat the success he had in the first half against PSU last year against the Knitknees this year.
-I was very impressed with Denard Robinson in the next to the last drive. Everyone in the stadium knew he was going to run the ball, and they still couldn't stop him. I wish he had come in the game earlier. I hope he gets significant snaps in the scrimmage against Delaware State.
-Jordan Kovacs has turned into a serviceable safety. Now if we could only bring Mike Williams along, we might be ok (meaning average) in the secondary.
-Woolfolk also look good. I would guess he's our starting CB the rest of the year, regardless of what happens with Cissoko's suspension.
-Other than Zoltan, our special teams were quite poor. Why can't we find a decent punt returner. Isn't that something that slot ninjas are supposed to be good at?
-If I were the Illinois AD, I'd start raising money for Ron Zook's buyout and would get Brian Kelly on speed dial. The Illini look like they've quit on Zook.
-The Big Ten looks like OSU's to lose. Iowa is good, but not good enough to win in Columbus. While the Buckeyes might trip up once, I don't see them losing twice, and no one else in the league is good enough to run the table. I would put Iowa, PSU, and Wisconsin in the group behind OSU, with Michigan, MSU, and maybe Minnesota a step lower than them.
-Has anybody else in the country played as many exciting games as Washington? (Perhaps us)
-The post game interview with Bobby Bowden was painful to watch. They asked him what went wrong with the game, why they lost, and he couldn't offer much more than cliches. It's pretty clear that he doesn't have the slightest clue what's going on out there. I don't envy the FSU fans or decision makers. It's pretty hard to deal with the fact that the person that basically created your program is now like an anchor around its ankle.

DeShawn Sims is quickly becoming one of my favorite Michigan Basketball players

It's not just his improved play this season that has endeared him to me, it's some of the things he's said off the court. Before the Maryland game, he told the Detroit Free Press,

"People want Michigan to succeed. As much as the nation and everybody around wants us to succeed, we have to do the job by succeeding and making it happen. I look around and see so much Michigan stuff everywhere I go. It just puts it in my heart that we have to bring the program back for the fans. We're playing for more than ourselves."

Then today after the huge win over Duke, he told the Detroit News:

"Sometimes you start to question yourself when you're not getting a lot of minutes. Coach Beilein believed in me. He's building a foundation and I'm glad I'm a part of it. He puts the c, the o, the a , the c and the h in coach. And he coaches you on an interpersonal level. It's amazing. I'm a better player than I've ever been and I know more than I've ever known."

In those quotes I hear a young man starting to grow up and starting to find his home. It reminds me a little of conversations I've had with some of the UofM students I've worked with in Academic Games. No matter where you come from, or what your major is, there is something special about being at school when the world opens up for you, and you realize that you can make a place for yourself in the world. Over the last few years, Sims has had a lot of times when he could have left Michigan, and nobody would have blamed him. Heck, it took a big leap of faith for him to even come to Michigan, when his former HS coach won't even talk to the Michigan coaching staff now.

It's clear that this team is going to be significantly better than any we've had in a long time, and has a good chance of actually going dancing. But equally important, this team is taking a look of a team that you want to root for, that you feel good about representing your school. Given the recent history of the UofM basketball, that is the perhaps the most important development.

Welcome Back!

I remember exactly where and when I last cared as much about Michigan basketball as I do right now. It was the morning of October 11, 1997 and my dad and I were on our way to Michigan Stadium to see the 4-0 Michigan football team play Northwestern, a team that had beaten them two years in a row. The pregame show on the radio announced that Steve Fisher had been fired as Men's basketball coach, just a few weeks before practices were to begin, because of the investigation into the activities of one Ed Martin At the time I was furious at the lack of loyalty shown by the University towards the man who had brought them their only national championship, and had brought in the Fab 5. All through the football game, all we talked about was Fisher, Martin, and the basketball team.

Of course, as more info came out, my opinion on Steve Fisher changed. And although I remained a Michigan basketball fan, my interest began to wane on that day. I watched Brian Ellerbee run a talented team into the ground by recruiting deadbeats, projects no one else wanted, and Webster look-a-likes. I cursed the TV when Tom Izzo left his starters in and ran up the score on a hapless Michigan team. I died a little with each late season choke job by Amker's teams, and with each recruiting near-miss. I prayed for years that they would get rid of Ellerbee, waited a few years, and then prayed a few more for them to do the same to Amaker. And little by little, my passion for basketball died. Although I would still watch the games and would check the scores, I never expected much, except to be disappointed if I allowed myself to believe anything positive could happen.

All that changed at about 11:30pm last night when Anthony Wright fed a perfect backdoor pass to a cutting DeShawn Sims who slammed it home emphatically for his seventeenth and eighteenth points of the night to give Michigan a four point lead over the #4 team in the country with :34 seconds to go in the game. I jumped off the coach and screamed at the top of my lungs, probably causing my brother in Austin, with whom I was on the phone, to go temporarily deaf in his left ear. I ran around the room pumping my fist not holding the phone in the air while my phone exploded with text messages from all of my friends who were still up doing the same thing as I was: Watching a game with no expectation of victory, just a slight sliver of hope that maybe, just maybe we could see some progress from last year.

Now this win doesn't make us a top ten team, it doesn't even make us a tournament team. There are bound to be ups and downs throughout the season and into the future. But it does mean that we are on the right track, and the light we see at the end of the tunnel is not an oncoming train. For the first time in a decade, that little part of me that had been slowly fading away bit by bit has returned. It's the part of me that used to idolize Ricky Green almost as much as I idolized Ricky Leach. It's the part of me that remembers walking up the driveway, reading the paper that the Judge, Antoine Joubert had signed with Michigan. It's the part of me that would go crazy when Steve Stokyo would enter the game, because he was the original human victory cigar. It's the part of me that would yell "Hell ya" with every Loy Vaught rebound, every Gary Grant Steal, and every Glen Rice triple. It's the part of me that danced in the light rain on South University with 10,000 other kids when Rumeal Robinson sunk two free throws to give us our basketball championship.

God, it's good to have a basketball program we can be proud of again.