On Men's Basketball: Michigan football fans can learn something from men's basketball team
Jason Kohler
Daily Sports WriterNovember 30th, 2008
That sour taste in your mouth, the one from a 3-9 football season — that's not going away any time soon.
Despite an inexperienced offense and many holes in the defense, expectations were high for Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez's first season in Ann Arbor from West Virginia.
Fans expected the Wolverines to quickly learn a complicated new system.
Fans expected that Rodriguez would be good as the reputation preceding him.
Fans expected to win.
But expectations were lower when John Beilein, also a former West Virginia coach took over the Michigan men's basketball team.
Beilein inherited a program that didn't have such deep tradition. A team that was recovering from scandal. A team that hadn't made the tournament since 1998.
Although the Wolverines limped to a 10-22 record last season, Beilein faced less criticism.
Fans understood Michigan needed time to learn a complicated new system. They knew Beilein didn't have the players to fit his system yet and recognized the Wolverines were an inexperienced team.
Sound familiar?
"The parallels are all over the place," Beilein said at Michigan's Media Day in October. "When there's change, there's going to be a lack of consistency that you'd see when a coach is established over a long period of time."
A season later, the Wolverines (5-1) better understand Beilein's system and their roles in it. The experience showed in an upset of then-No. 4 UCLA two weeks ago, and helped place Michigan back into the spotlight of college basketball.
The Wolverines credit much of their early-season success to last year's failures.
"We had to lose last year as a stepping stone," fifth-year senior C.J. Lee said. "I think guys remember how they felt at certain moments last season, and I think that is going to push them through the walls that we're going to have this season."
In Beilein's 16 years of Division-I coaching, his teams have never had a losing season after his first year at a program. Two seasons after he guided West Virginia to a losing record in his first season as coach there, the Mountaineers reached the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament in 2005.
Beilein could be on a similar track at Michigan, but the Wolverines haven't put all of last year's troubles behind them.
This weekend, when Michigan surrendered a 20-point lead to Savannah State at halftime, memories of last season's losses to Harvard and Central Michigan flashed in the minds of many Wolverine fans.
Unlike last season, Michigan responded and came back to win 66-64 in overtime.
"Last year we had a couple games where we got down and we would come back, but we weren't able to get over that hump," fifth-year senior David Merritt said. "Today everything was thrown at us. They shot incredibly well in the first half, had us down by 20, but we never gave up."
If Michigan would've lost to the Tigers, few fans would've been surprised. When the football team falls to Toledo, there's an outcry because of the high expectations.
But Beilein's changing the culture of the basketball program to a point where soon it will be inexcusable to lose to teams like Savannah State.
Regardless of the outcome, the nail-biter against Savannah State brought back that sour taste for a lot of Michigan fans — a taste that's never gone away for the players.
"The key thing is just being a 10-22 team last year, and we know how it feels," sophomore forward Manny Harris said. "That taste in our mouth, we never want to experience anything like that again."
When Harris was asked when that feeling would go away, he said not until the team reaches to the NCAA Tournament.
Rodriguez, like Beilein, has the tough task of erasing the taste of a losing season.
But Beilein is already on his way of making a losing season the exception rather than the expectation.
Printed from www.michigandaily.com on Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:35:21 -0500