Sometimes, there is such a thing as too much patience.

In the first half of Sunday afternoon’s men’s basketball game against No. 3 Kansas, Michigan point guard Darius Morris would look for his options from the top of the key. He’d swing the ball to his wing men, and they’d pass it back. He’d drive to the high post, hesitate and back it out to the perimeter. He’d look for one of his big men under the hoop, but they were consistently smothered by the Jayhawks' Morris twins.

All too fast, the Maize Rage would start counting down from 10. It was like a warning siren that suddenly owned Morris’s head, telling him that 35 seconds on the shot clock just wasn’t enough time to penetrate the Kansas defense.

He’d have to do it himself — he’d have to create his own shot.

And that’s exactly where Kansas coach Bill Self wanted the Michigan offense. As a sophomore, Morris has played with the ability of an upperclassman, pacing the Wolverine offense in points and assists along the way. But there’s no getting around it — Morris is still young. He still feels the pressure when facing one of the nation’s top defenses.

And in those situations, Morris’s athletic ability can be overshadowed by his lack of poise.

“It was just the atmosphere,” Morris said of the offense’s first-half play. “There were a lot of emotions going around. That’s normal for a big game like this — I’d probably blame it on that.”

But how many big games are needed before Morris and his team realize they can’t afford to get off to such a slow start? Everybody knows the Wolverines are young, but there’s likely an expiration date for the “we’re just too young” excuse.

Entering Sunday, Morris averaged 7.7 points and 5 assists per game against ranked opponents, including Wisconsin, which had the fourth most votes of unranked teams when the Wolverines played in Madison. Both are well below his season averages.

For the first half of Sunday’s game, it looked no different, as Morris finished up the opening frame 2-of-7 from the field with just two assists. He managed the shot clock poorly. He struggled to find scoring opportunities. And when there were openings, he failed to execute.

Then, a new Darius Morris stepped onto the court in the second half. He was suddenly his cool and confident self again — patient, but not too patient — no longer afraid to attack the Jayhawk defense aggressively.

“We were calmer,” Morris said. “Emotionally, we settled down, and we started running our stuff, just playing our basketball. Things started opening up, we kept fighting, kept fighting, and things went our way.”

Granted, outside of the clutch fadeaway he hit to send the game into overtime, Morris shot about as poorly in the second half as he did in the first. But there was still a mood change in Crisler Arena after halftime. Everybody felt it about a minute in, when Morris found an open Jordan Morgan on the pick-and-roll. With open space and neither of Kansas’s Morris twins in sight, Morgan, a redshirt freshman center, slammed one home with authority.

Nobody knows what could have happened in Crisler Arena on Sunday had the Wolverines played like that in the first half. With a combination of Michigan’s stout defense and Kansas’s poor shooting, it’s possible that the Wolverines could have come out victorious by the end of regulation.

So when Morris forced overtime with seconds left, Michigan proved one thing. Not that it has the ability to come back strong in the second half — people knew that already. Not that it could compete with some of the best competition in the country — it had already proven that too.

On Sunday, Morris and his offense proved that they need to stop being too patient and start games stonger in order to win the big matchups.