John Niyo: Michigan finally gets burned after seeing plenty of red flags

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Everything wasn’t perfect.

Dusty May and the rest of his coaching staff knew that well before Michigan’s record finally agreed.

But now they’ve got all the proof they need after Wisconsin came into Crisler Center Saturday afternoon and upset the No. 2-ranked Wolverines, 91-88, handing them their first loss of the season. And the only question is what they’ll do with that evidence.

When it was over — both the game and Michigan’s two-month unbeaten streak — Nimari Burnett, one of the Wolverines’ veteran leaders, rubbed his chin thoughtfully and called it what it was.

“It’s like a smack in our face,” the sixth-year senior guard said. “And we have the chance to grow from it.”

His teammate, point guard Eliot Cadeau, agreed, calling it a reality check.

Yet as May was quick to point out after Saturday’s loss, legitimate concerns were growing long before the Badgers — ranked 43rd in KenPom coming in — delivered this stunning blow in Ann Arbor.

“In reality, it's been four games since we played really well,” said May, whose Wolverines — now 14-1 overall and 4-1 in Big Ten play — were one of only a half-dozen unbeaten Division I teams entering the weekend.

Alarm bells ringing

Michigan had escaped with an ugly road win Tuesday at Penn State — its first victory by single digits since mid-November — and prior to that the Wolverines walloped USC by 30 in a game where they looked sloppy and shot poorly (6 of 30 from 3) on their home floor.

And as May explained it Saturday after the loss, “Our grass was probably growing a little bit under our feet.”

More alarm bells were ringing in practice this week, both before and after the Penn State trip. And even though May felt his players “finally brought it again” Friday in practice, “like I told them in the locker room, we can't be celebrating having one out of three really good days of practice when you have as much on the line as we have.

“Our day-to-day habits have to be at a championship level or we're just going to simply rely on the other team not playing up their standard, or off talent. And that's not a real healthy way to go through a Big Ten season.”

Clearly, it’s not, as Greg Gard’s team reminded them Saturday, exposing some weaknesses in the nation’s No. 1-rated defense by knocking down a season-high 15 3-pointers — including seven in a row to start the second half — and shooting 50% from the field.

This one did look like it was headed for a different result earlier, though, as Michigan led by 14 with just over seven minutes to go before halftime. But that’s when Wisconsin’s John Blackwell (Birmingham Brother Rice) shook loose for back-to-back 3s and brought the Badgers’ bench back to life.

“That's the area in games where we've usually been growing that lead,” Burnett said, “and we just gave (them) confidence to shoot the ball as well as they did in the second half.”

Wisconsin’s stretch bigs took it to another level after the break, exploiting Michigan’s drop coverage and burying five consecutive 3-pointers in a blistering stretch. Four came from Aleksas Bieliauskas, the 6-10 Lithuanian coming off an illness — “I don’t think he made a shot in warmups,” Gard joked — as May and his staff scrambled to find a solution defensively.

'We need to be humble'

The result was more switching and more scrambling, frankly. And Blackwell and Nick Boyd — a former Florida Atlantic guard that May knows well — made the Wolverines pay for it with some big buckets driving to the basket down the stretch. Wisconsin missed its final three shots from the field Sunday, but went 17 of 24 (71%) in the second half before that.

“You make shots, it’s contagious, right?” Gard said. “It’s infectious.”

And if we’re being honest, it’s probably not all that healthy to be exposed to the sort of things this Michigan team has been hearing the last month or so. That goes all the way back to Thanksgiving, when the Wolverines started demolishing quality opponents — Auburn, Gonzaga, Villanova — and routinely topping 100 points in bench-clearing blowouts.

“We had a lot of kind of unrealistic expectations, like, talking about we’re gonna go undefeated the whole season and stuff like that,” Cadeau admitted after Saturday’s loss. “We need to be humble and not feed into those type of things.”

That’s easier said than done while you’re busy winning with ease, especially in nonconference play. But now that the calendar has flipped to January, and the Big Ten title race is officially underway, that has to change.

“Now it'll be, ‘How do we respond to this?’” said May, who sounds confident it will, starting with a trip to the Pacific Northwest next week to face Washington and Oregon. “It's a great time for us to go on the road and grow together and become more accountable to each other as a group.”

Still, as a group, this was a reminder of what happens when they’re not.

“No team is going to go undefeated,” Burnett said. “Obviously, we hoped to do it. But … even when we were winning, we were like, ‘We could be better. We can be so much better than what we're playing. So this is a lesson.”

Learned the hard way, maybe. But that might’ve been the only way.

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