The Wolverine: Covering University of Michigan Football and Sports
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signment — go play in Dayton on Wednesday, assuring the Wolverines would face five games in eight days, including the showdown against the Irish. Abdur-Rahkman went 38 minutes against Tulsa, Irvin 36 and Robinson 35. Those figures began adding up, and the shooting stats began going down. Michigan connected on 44.8 per- cent of its field goals in Big Ten regular-season games, going 36.9 percent from three-point range. The Wolverines dropped to 40.6 and 32.0, respectively, in the Big Ten Tourna- ment. They went to 40.2 and 30.8 in the NCAA Tournament. LeVert and Albrecht would have eased the minutes and scoring burden immeasurably. Almost every team faces injuries, but the ones the Wol- verines endured the last two years played a large role in first breaking U-M's streak of NCAA appearances, then nearly extending their absence to two seasons. ISSUES GOING FORWARD Beilein squads are never going to play beat-down, hand-checking, cutter-chucking, blatantly physically, overpowering defense. That said, the head coach knows the Wolverines have to defend better than they did this season. They wound up dead last in the Big Ten for field goal percentage defense, allowing other conference schools to shoot 47.4 percent. That's contrasted with Michigan State, which led the league in field goal defense at 39.4 percent. Of course, that's no guarantee of advancing any farther than Michigan in the NCAA Tournament, even as a No. 2 seed and a choice by many to win it all (MSU was bounced in their first contest by Middle Tennessee). But allowing opponents to shoot a shade less than 50 percent and sur- rendering 71.6 points per game — which ranked 10th in the Big Ten — clearly puts pressure on the scoring side of the equation. "It was a team that, collectively, if their offense wasn't great, their de- fense wasn't great," Beilein said. "We just have some growth to do in those areas, of getting down in the trenches. Individually, over time, guys will get better. "That was not a strength. We did not have great one-on-one defen- sive players. Part of it is you've got to have some more dog in you, part of it is quickness, part of it is an at- titude, part of it is us practicing it bet- ter. We've got to do all those things." On the other side of the coin, Beilein hopes his seniors next season will not only be fully available, but better than they were this year. He's convinced Irvin can take a strong jump from junior to senior year. He carried the Wolverines down the stretch in the 2014-15 season, av- eraging 14.3 points and 4.8 rebounds per game. This year, those numbers slid back to 11.8 and 4.5. Plus, Irvin's three-point shooting percentage has dropped every season following his 42.5-percent mark as a free-wheeling, fill-in frosh. He hit 35.5 percent from long range last year, and only 29.8 percent this