…Will Be Champions!!! My boys Novak and Douglass have proved that and I could not be more proud of my UM basketball team and Coach Belein for earning a part of the Big Ten Conference Championship. They deserve it I think. And hats off to an outstanding game played by OSU and MSU on Sunday.
Excerpt from the Michigan Daily:
The Michigan basketball team is Big Ten co-champions for the first time since 1986, and it still seems like just a dream bouncing around the heads of its unsung players.
The Wolverines were to picked to finish near the top of the league before the season, but most expected the Buckeyes to run away with it. Nobody expected Michigan State to be as strong as it is, or for the conference to be, far and away, the best league in the land. Yet Michigan navigated a tougher road than it imagined it would have to traverse in getting all the way to the top.
It’s a testament to Stu Douglass and Zack Novak, two seniors who have been the embodiment of leadership. They joined a program that was lying dormant and took it back to its rightful place, proving wrong all those who doubted them and their team the whole way through.
But mostly, it’s a testament to John Beilein. Behind the unimposing face of the mid-major lifer lies a searing basketball mind that never stops, never slows, in driving endlessly for ever-higher goals.
His team this season really isn’t that talented. It doesn’t have a bonafide all-star. It has a couple players that will probably make the NBA some day, but nobody that’s going to set the league on fire.
Michigan has been yearning for its program’s promised reascendance, for the return of the days when its name was synonymous with basketball power. This season isn’t over yet, but with this championship, that day has come. The sleeping giant that was Michigan is slumbering no more.
Chelsea
Evolving in the Emerald City 