The big question facing Michigan basketball in the 2020s is not whether the Wolverines will do well. A program which has made two of the past seven national championship games and has a highly popular head coach who himself played in two national title games at Michigan — Juwan Howard — should be able to succeed at a reasonable level. One should see some Sweet 16s and some high NCAA Tournament seeds for Michigan.
The better question is: Will Michigan be able to stay at the top for a long time, with minimal interruption? The best question: How will Howard try to do this?
I ask that last question because as great as John Beilein was and is, the former Michigan head coach was not a conventional college basketball coach. Beilein came to Michigan from West Virginia (and before that, Richmond and Canisius), where he used unorthodox defenses with less-than-overpowering athletes to overachieve.
Yes, Trey Burke was an elite, NBA-level player, but that is an exception, not the rule, to Beilein’s tenure at Michigan. He was still winning games because his defenses were in the right position and his teams limited cheap giveaways to the opposition. When Michigan went to the national title game a second time, in 2018, the Wolverines had only one good shooting game, the regional semifinal against Texas A&M. They shot the cover off the ball in that game, making 14 of 24 threes. It’s easy to win when everything is going well, but Michigan shot poorly on threes in the other four games it played in that NCAA Tournament before the national title game.
Michigan was 5 of 16 on threes against Montana, 8 of 30 against Houston, 4 of 22 against Florida State, and 7 of 28 against Loyola-Chicago in the Final Four. That’s 24 of 96, or 25 percent, but Michigan’s defense answered the bell every time.
Can Michigan maintain that identity under Juwan Howard? Can Michigan improve recruiting to the extent that it can get easy baskets and not endure horrid perimeter shooting performances? We are all interested in whether Michigan maintains a high standard, but how Michigan operates is the mystery which will determine what the Wolverines do in the 2020s.