Juwan Howard Politely Talking Shit After Beating Wisconsin Is Why He's So Damn Cool And Why Michigan Is So Good

Goddamn Juwan. How do you not want to play for this guy if you're a decent recruit now? Not only is he making Michigan a title contender, but he clearly has his guy's back no matter what. I can't stop laughing at the 'yes, I did' quote about going directly at Brad Davison right after the play. There's not video of the play out there, but essentially as Davison was going up for a layup he threw an elbow out and caught Mike Smith in the face. Now, because Brad Davison is the dirtiest player in the game, it got blown up a bit more than normal. But it's also something that you have to question because Davison does shit like this all the time: 

Now, I don't think what he did to Smith was intentional. He was for sure trying to use his elbow to clear out space, which is common but Smith is 5'8"ish and caught it in the face. It happens. My problem is the refs follow it up by giving Michigan a technical foul for arguing it and then reviewing it. Be better than that, Bo Boroski. But that's not here nor there, especially because Davison is just kinda bad this year. 

He is great at firing people up though: 

This is the second time Juwan Howard has fired me up this weekend though: 

The dude can coach his ass off. All questions about whether or not he'd figure out the college game should be gone by now. It's year two and he's turned Michigan into what I think is the clear 3rd best team right now. The fact they looked that good coming out of a longer pause is huge. We see teams typically struggle and it looked that way for Michigan early. Then Davison elbows Mike Smith and Juwan Howard goes right at him. Fucking love it. Then again it's nearly impossible not to be cool when you played for the Fab Five. That's still the coolest group of players in basketball history. 

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Now here we are with a 3-team race in the Big 10. Michigan, Ohio State and Illinois are ranked 3-5 in the NCAA Tournament committee. Michigan is up 2 on Illinois and 3 on Ohio State in the conference race. All 3 teams still play each other down the stretch here. It's going to be a wild finish and it has national implications. Despite not having travel, the NCAA Tournament is still having the same bracketing principles, meaning top-3 teams from each conference go in different regions. That matters because assuming they have two No. 1 seeds, which seems to be the case, the top Big 10 team is going to the 2nd region - either Baylor or Gonzaga. 

We need more coaches like Howard though. Admit you called a play for a guy to go DIRECTLY at someone. That's the shit we need. It works too! Michigan won that game because they turned shit around, something we see happen quite often in college hoops. How many times do we see a technical or a bad call flip the game? Howard knew what he was doing here and getting a technical.  

Michigan, confirmed basketball school.