The University of Michigan: Choke U.

Has any university’s basketball and football teams choked more often in the past few years than the University of Michigan’s?Aside from one friend of mine, every single Michigan student or alumni I know thinks that their school’s football team is a national power. The hoops team, to most, is a team on the rise, still basking in the glory of a recent national title.

What is wrong with these people and these myopic statements?

I know the U of M is a stellar academic institution, and with high school grade inflation, it, like many other “public Ivys” is becoming increasingly more difficult to obtain admission (much less pay tuition) to each year. But academic success and athletic achievement don’t go hand in hand. Just ask Columbia or Florida State.

Beginning with the story of the basketball team, when was the last time the team made the Field of 65? Not since the mid 1990s.

When was this national championship that people speak of so fondly? At the end of the 1988-89 season. This fall’s incoming freshmen were still in diapers. My cousin, a mid 30s schoolteacher with two kids, who graduated from Ann Arbor in the early 90s, was a senior…in high school when Rumeal Robinson’s two free throws beat Seton Hall for the title in Seattle. The Kingdome doesn’t exist anymore, and Robinson has been out of the NBA for a decade. Oh, and the championship runs that were made by the “Fab Five” in 1992 and 1993 are null and void since those banners were rightfully removed as key players were being paid six figure salaries to play collegiate athletics.
True success for Michigan basketball has been non-existent since beforethe Clinton Administration.

Since sniffing their last whiffs of achievement, Michigan has made the NIT finals twice, winning once. This season, the expectations for Tommy Ammaker’s club were incredibly high, especially after late January wins over Wisconsin and Michigan State put the Wolverines in the top 15 in the country, primed for a solid seed in their first NCAA tourney in nearly a decade.

But the Wolverines sloppily lost seven of their final nine games including an embarrassing loss in the Opening Round of the Big Ten tournament to a sub par Minnesota team. This collapse lost Michigan the chance to play in the big tourney, and even though they made the finals of the NIT, a crushing loss to South Carolina in the finals (you didn’t think they’d WIN a big game, did you?) made the season a remarkable failure. For Ammaker’s five years, they have ZERO NCAA appearances. He still somehow has his job.

And somehow so does Lloyd Carr. My intelligent, open-minded Michigan fan-friend has been calling for Carr’s head for years, but nobody seems to be listening.

At most big football schools, losing crucial rivalry games at the end of four of the past five years to arch-enemy Ohio State would be enough for the alumni to have the coach dismissed. Not at Michigan, though. The fact that Carr schedules seven of Michigan’s 11 games each year before 105,000 fans in Ann Arbor has led him to a lot of eight and nine wins years, as well as Rose Bowl appearances in two of the past three years.

However, he lost both those Rose Bowls, as well as this year’s Alamo Bowl to a very mediocre Nebraska team.

Most people, like ESPN Radio’s Colin Cowherd, can predict Michigan’s football season before it even begins:

Win most, if not all games (most games at home), lose to Notre Dame, lose to Ohio State, lose bowl game. I guess that appeases enough of the alumni and the higher-ups in the Athletic Department.

Either that, or the success of the hockey and  softball teams over the past couple of years assuages their angst. Somehow, I doubt the latter is true.