INDIANAPOLIS — After destroying Arizona in the semifinals of the NCAA Tournament on Saturday in the battle of top seeds, Michigan opened as a 7 1/2 point favorite over UConn in Monday’s title game.

UConn coach Dan Hurley called Michigan’s front line the “Monstars,” the cartoon super-team from “Space Jam,” and said the Wolverines were “scary” and a “machine.”

On the other hand …

“I don’t know that we necessarily feel like a huge, huge underdog,” Hurley said. “Obviously, we acknowledge Michigan’s greatness, the team that they are, but we’re a 34-win team, coming into the game.”

Michigan is trying to become the first Big Ten team to win the tournament since Michigan State in 2000, and dominated all season until struggling in the Big Ten Tournament, losing to Purdue in the title game. Coach Dusty May said they just needed a “reboot” and made no “wholesale changes.”

“It’s a good thing for us, it’s not a seven-game series,” Hurley said. “We’ve just got to play one game on Monday night.”

Hurley made a point to mention after Saturday’s win over Illinois that the Huskies were underdogs despite beating them by 13 points in November. I asked UConn star Alex Karaban, who is 18-1 in 19 tournament games and gunning for his third title in four years, if the Huskies ever feel like their impressive pedigree is ignored.

“I feel like we were overlooked against Illinois, we were overlooked against Duke, and probably 50/50 against Michigan State (in the Sweet 16),” Karaban said. “We’re used to being in this position. We’re used to having this chip on our shoulder right now during the season … We’re not necessarily worried about what other people think of us, or (being) underdogs. We want to act like how we are as people, the experiences we’ve been through and how close we came through all the adversity.”

They don’t boo nobodies

UConn was booed during the postgame on Saturday, and while some of it was for beating the local favorite, Illinois, some of it was anti-UConn sentiment from their success. Even UConn fan Bill Murray was booed when he appeared on the video board.

“You try not to pay attention to any of it,” guard Solo Ball said. “It’s kind of like chosen cluelessness.”

Karaban said it was a byproduct of being a successful team.

“I didn’t even know we got the boos until a friend sent it to me, and I was confused as to why,” he said. “Illinois fans were booing us, I guess naturally, but I didn’t realize it was the whole arena. I think it comes with a lot of success. People don’t want to see the same team win over and over again, and what coach Hurley has been able to do these last four years has been incredible, and it’s just adding to the history of college basketball.

“We’ve been able to kind of relate it to the (Kansas City) Chiefs. They won back-to-back and continued to make the Super Bowl. A lot of people don’t want to see the Chiefs make the Super Bowl.”

Injury update

Michigan star Yaxel Lendeborg had an MRI on his left knee after an MCL sprain while rolling his ankle during the first half of Saturday’s 91-73 win over Arizona.

“It came back clean and he’s getting treatment and doing rehab,” May said. “I’m sure he’ll want to give it a go. But it’ll be entirely up to him and the medical staff.”

Lendeborg came back in the second half and wound up with 15 points, including 3 of 3 in 3-point shooting.

“We were laughing, (saying) he played the second half like a 38-year-old at the YMCA — and a really good 38-year-old at the YMCA,” May said. “Whatever version of Yaxel we get, it’s going to be someone who helps us play better basketball.”

Ball suffered a foot sprain in the first half of the win over Illinois but also played through it. Hurley said they weren’t sure of the extent of the injury since he wasn’t sure if Ball could get an MRI on Easter. He was then informed that hospitals were still open on Sunday.

“Hospitals stay open? Even on Easter?” he said, feigning incredulity.

Men in the middle

Aday Mara, the Wolverines 7-foot-3 center who scored 26 points with nine rebounds against Arizona, combines with Lendeborg and Morez Johnson Jr. to pose a significant challenge in the paint for the Huskies.

“For us, we’re going to do things to make our opponents move defensively, maybe more than they’re accustomed to,” Hurley said. “And hopefully that has a compounding effect for us over the course of the game, where it could just wear an opponent down a little bit, run around and chase people and off-ball movement more than they’re accustomed to.”

UConn was able to hold off Illinois despite shooting only 35% and missing a ton of open shots. Hurley said, “that’s been kind of the story of the season, it’s been ‘bricks away’” on occasion.

“We’ve been laying bricks at different times,” he said.

But Michigan is not Illinois, he noted, so it can’t continue.

“We had great, great shots (against the Illini)” he said. “The fact we shot 30-whatever percent speaks to the struggles at times to make good shots and transition finishes. We’re not going to get away with that on Monday night.”

Low talk time

NCAA president Charlie Baker held an impromptu media session in the press room Saturday, but he’s such a low-volume talker that no one in the scrum who wasn’t standing right next to him could hear a word he was saying.

According to reports, Baker said nothing newsworthy about President Donald Trump’s executive order to limit eligibility to five years, except he agreed a bipartisan agreement in Congress is needed. As for the ridiculous idea of expanding the NCAA Tournament to 76 teams, Baker said: “We were told by the basketball committees to stop talking about that until after the tournament, which I think is a really good policy because we got all kinds of great stuff going on in Phoenix, going on here. So let’s play the games and then we can talk about that.”

Stay hot, Charlie.

____

©2026 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.