Although their paths did not cross, they were practically mirror images, and their dominance was evident by the victories they racked up against quality teams, often by large margins. Back in Thanksgiving week, when Michigan ended the Players Era tournament with a 40-point victory over Gonzaga, while Arizona had already posted wins over Florida, UConn and UCLA, it wouldn’t have been a good idea to suggest they would be on a collision course for the Final Four.
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“There were glimpses of this happening,” Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel said Sunday amid the net-cutting celebration at the United Center, where the Wolverines had dominated Tennessee, 95-62. “But it was a long season.”
A long season that will end as it began: with the two teams that showed the first Final Four potential facing off in the Final Four.
“We always wanted to play that team,” Michigan forward Yaxel Lendeborg said. “That’s what everyone goes to college basketball for, to play those blockbuster games. They’ve got a lot of NBA guys. We’ve got a lot of NBA guys. It’s going to be a fun matchup, man, and I hope everyone’s ready to play because I am.”
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Is it the de facto national championship? That’s probably unfair. UConn and Illinois, who will be paired in the other semifinal, are excellent teams.
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Should the Final Four be reseeded? Now that is It’s a good topic of debate because it certainly looks like the two best teams (and the two best teams of the entire season) will play on Saturday night instead of Monday.
How hard is it to be as good as Michigan and Arizona from start to finish? Well, you saw it on Sunday when Duke, the overall No. 1 seed, collapsed in the second half against UConn.
College basketball deciding its champion with a six-round single-elimination tournament has long been the blessing and curse of the sport. It makes the stakes of each game very high and creates Cinderella stories out of thin air. It also means that the national champion is sometimes not the best team, but the team that warmed up at the right time and avoided bad luck or injuries. The uniqueness of March Madness has made that trade-off worthwhile.
But thanks to Michigan and Arizona making it this far, there will be no such warnings this year.
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Even before conference play began, you could have reasonably watched those two teams destroy everyone in sight and conclude that they were a level above everyone else.
This wire-to-wire trend, however, goes against much of what we’ve learned over the decades about college basketball. Sure, there have been a handful of outlier teams that were locked and loaded from the start, but coaches have generally viewed the season as a way to prepare and peak for March.
When a team shows national championship potential as early as Michigan did (there was a 10-game stretch in November and December when the Wolverines were beating teams by an average of 34.5 points, including some real quality opponents) it’s almost problematic.
“The hardest part is everyone starts getting a lot more attention, advice, literally everything they get more,” Michigan coach Dusty May said. “And it’s hard not to make it about yourself because the people you’re talking to make it about you. There’s just a lot of distracting information, and if you’re not mature and you’re not connected to this group and you’re not willing to be accountable to the staff and to each other, then it’s not going to work.
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“And once it gets in, it’s almost impossible to take it out. So our guys never let it in. And believe me, they all had different fires that lit.”
Brayden Burries and the Arizona Wildcats have not lost since February 14. (Eakin Howard-Imagn Images)
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Putting this tournament together with last year’s, where the top four finishers made it to the Final Four, it seems like we’re moving away from an era of parity in college basketball and toward a group of superpowers. Michigan won its four tournament games by an average of 22.5 points, while Arizona’s margin was 20.5. Neither faced a real challenge in the second half on their way to the regional victory.
Tennessee was a top-15 team in predictive metrics and not a mid-range team with great performance, but it was almost comical how overmatched the Vols seemed trying to generate decent offense against this Michigan team.
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“Some teams have a little more room for error than others,” Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said.
In some ways, college basketball and college football have switched roles in the NIL era. Whereas there once wasn’t any parity in college football because of how stacked superpowers like Alabama and Georgia were, conference commissioners are now talking about expanding the playoffs beyond 12 because we could be leaving out viable teams.
Meanwhile, March Madness has run fairly faithfully for two years in a row.
It’s hard to know exactly what to do with that. You can point to the transfer portal and the ability of a program like Michigan to pry an established star like 23-year-old Lendeborg out of UAB, but here’s Arizona with three freshmen in its starting lineup. Maybe there’s something to the idea that teams like Michigan and Arizona, which play big frontcourt lineups and don’t rely on making a lot of 3-pointers to win, aren’t as susceptible to getting upset.
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Still, college basketball programs are judged by what happens in March. And we have decades of history telling us that it is extremely difficult, and rare, for two teams to be on a collision course all season long and actually end up playing each other in the Final Four.
“This was obviously one of the goals because of the talent we had,” May said. “We have a sign in our locker room: ‘April Habits,’ and from Day 1 we have challenged these guys to develop championship-level habits that would allow us to win a Big Ten championship and also allow us to turn the calendar from March to April. Now we put ourselves in a position to do that.”
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Even though Michigan and Arizona showed four months ago that they were probably a level above almost everyone else in college basketball, there was no guarantee they could actually figure it out on the court. There are so many obstacles to overcome and land mines to avoid.
But they will finally touch gloves next Saturday in Indianapolis. Let’s get ready to rumble.