6B — Friday, February 22, 2019
Michigan Basketball
2006 Michigan navigates scandal, turnover
2007-2018
BEILEIN ERA TAKES SHAPE
MIKE PERSAK
Former Managing Sports Editor
It all started with a car crash. Just over 22 years ago, about 5 a.m. on Feb. 17, 1997, a Ford Explorer driven by Michigan men’s basketball player Maurice Taylor rolled over on M-14. Inside the car, along with Taylor, were four other Wolverines: Louis Bullock, Willie Mitchell, Ron Oliver and Robert Traylor — who suffered a season-ending arm injury in the crash — as well as five-star recruit Mateen Cleaves, who was on a recruiting visit to Michigan at the time of the crash. The five were driving back from a party. The details surrounding the crash caused questions. For one, the party itself was likely illegal, though that in itself was not grounds for great punishment. However, the ownership of the expensive Ford Explorer, and how exactly Taylor came to get it, was unclear. Then, when Michigan discovered that the late-night trip had included a stop with booster and friend-of-the-program Ed Martin, the puzzle pieces began to fall into place. After investigations from Michigan, the Big Ten and outside law firms revealed nothing, in the end, a grand jury investigation revealed that Martin paid four Wolverine players — Taylor, Traylor, former All-American and two-time national championship runner-up Chris Webber and Bullock, the school’s thirdleading scorer in history. Martin had paid each more than $100,000 with the expectation he would be paid back when they made it to the NBA. Over the years, Michigan had given Martin hotel rooms and tickets in return for his donations to the team. In 2002, Martin pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to launder money, while his other seven charges were dropped. He was forced to cut all ties with the program. “We have always been interested in finding out the truth with the case surrounding Ed Martin,” said thenathletic director Bill Martin after the guilty plea. “Today’s plea bargain is a step in that direction. We hope to have the opportunity very soon to sit down and speak with Mr. Martin, so we will be able to bring this matter to a close.” The Wolverines fired coach Steve Fisher in 1997 amid the investigations and were forced to vacate their 1992 Final Four appearance, the 1992-93 season which ended in a national championship loss and all 65 of their wins from 19961999 — removing four banners from Crisler Center as a result. Additionally, Michigan was banned from postseason play for the next two seasons, was docked a scholarship a season from 2004-05 to 2007-08 and was forced to disassociate from Bullock, Taylor, Traylor and Webber until 2013. Today, the results of the scandal still live on. Those Final Four banners have yet to be re-hung in Crisler Center. Taylor and Bullock both voiced their excitement to re-associate with the program when their ban ended in May 2013, and Bullock’s third-all-time scoring record has been restored in the Wolverines’ record books, albeit with an asterisk. Traylor died of a heart attack in 2011, before his disassociation with Michigan had expired. Webber officially received $280,000 from Martin, and admitted to paying back $38,200 before eventually pledading guilty to a charge of criminal contempt. He has little to no relationship with the Wolverines. Webber returned to Ann Arbor for the first time publicly this fall to be an honorary captain for the Michigan football team. While he was there, however, he had no contact with Beilein or anyone on the basketball team. As for Ed Martin, he died of a pulmonary embolism in 2003 while awaiting sentencing. After the sanctions were passed down, the Wolverines spent years scratching and clawing to regain the success they enjoyed in the early 1990s. They have only recently gotten back to that level, making it to two of the last six national championship games. On Sunday, Michigan will commemorate the 30-year anniversary of its one and only national championship in 1989. The most successful team of the Wolverines’ past will stand on the same court as the current team, which has national title aspirations of its own. The two teams represent two golden eras of Michigan basketball. It is the period those eras are bookending, however, which is the greatest — or at least most publicized — black mark in the program’s history.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Culture shift starts immediately under newly-minted head coach MAX MARCOVITCH Managing Sports Editor
FILE PHOTO / DAILY
Just months after Michigan fired Tommy Amaker and hired some coach from West Virginia in April of 2007, the men’s basketball team opened offseason workouts. It was a directionless program, desperate for national relevance and one — only one — NCAA Tournament berth. It was day one of the John Beilein era. And, little did anyone know, day one of perhaps the greatest sustained period of success in Michigan basketball history. At the beginning of the workout, then-assistant coach John Mahoney barged into the weight room, hooting and hollering. “We’re trying to win a motherfing national championship,” he yelped. “And that’s why we’re here.” Guard Jevohn Shepherd gave his teammate Anthony Wright a glance. Wright still recalls what Shepherd said next. “Man, this guy has to calm down.” *** “Culture shift” is a phrase that gets thrown around in sports, when change wants to be sugarcoated with a smile. It can often be meaningless and exaggerated in its tone. There are countless examples of failed attempts at culture shifts in sports because culture, as it turns out, is hard to shift. This isn’t one of those stories. As with everything John Beilein does, this change took time, and it was a process. But the results have been on display for nine years now. The national runner-up Wolverines are a shining beacon of a college basketball program, and it’s easy to forget it hasn’t always been that way. “When he first started recruiting me in 2007, the program … was obviously not in a good place,” said center Jordan Morgan, a member of the Wolverines from 2010-14. “At that point in my life, Michigan going to Final Fours and winning Big Ten Championships, it was a little bit hard to fathom at the time just because of where Michigan was at.” At the start of Beilein’s tenure, “where Michigan was at” could only be classified as oblivion. It hadn’t made the NCAA Tournament since 1998, and at a school in the heart of the Lloyd Carr era in football, the basketball team toiled with mediocrity more than disaster. Well removed from the Fab Five era, with the 1989 national title a faint memory, Michigan had yet to turn a page on the court. Final Fours? This team just wanted to make the damn tournament. Internally, though, the overhaul began immediately. “I’m not sure I really knew what ‘rebuild that program’ meant,” Morgan said. “But from the minute that I met him, he used to talk to me about rebuilding. Rebuilding a program. Building something special. Being a part of rebuilding that. And that was what made me want to go to Michigan in the first place.” Before practices even began, Beilein and his staff instituted a number of tests — tests of skill and of athleticism — that each player needed to accomplish before he could even step on the practice court. They ranged from conditioning requirements, like running a mile in 5:30 or less, to skill-based measures, like making 50 threes in five minutes. “You have to learn how to win,” said Michigan guard Zack
Novak. “That’s a real thing. Just the way that we competed in practice, every drill. … He just had us learning how to win, how to execute when the pressure was on.” But learning how to win doesn’t automatically translate into winning. The players struggled to grasp the complexity of an offense that has since come to be accepted as one of the most efficient in the country. At the time, its genius was also its biggest flaw. “There are so many plays, and there are always plays within the plays,” Wright said. “And there are always counters of the plays within the play that can change just by someone doing an action.” Confused? You wouldn’t be alone. Bewildered players asked questions that often took 30 minutes for Beilein to explain before his team could execute it all. And this frustration seeped onto the court. In his first season on the job, Michigan scuffled to a 10-22 record, the most losses in a single season in program history. In his first three seasons, Beilein guided his group to a middling 46-53 record, and couldn’t crack a single top-30 recruiting class, according to 247Sports.com. Questions sprouted about the direction Beilein was leading, and with good reason. Beilein’s propensity for nabbing lowerranked recruits who fit his scheme and the culture of the program he wanted to cultivate began to draw ire. According to Morgan, Beilein paid no mind. “For him, he’d rather fail putting together teams like that than to succeed and sacrifice on his integrity.” But “failure” and Beilein don’t often compute. Over the next decade, the program’s faith in him would be rewarded in droves. *** Charles Matthews called his teammates back. Following a particularly rough practice before the NCAA Tournament, Matthews and his teammates broke the huddle and began walking back to their locker room. The redshirt sophomore wasn’t satisfied. “Charles said, ‘No, no, no, come back. We’re national champions,’” recalled freshman Isaiah Livers. “And he does it again. ‘National champs. National champs.’” This time, 11 years after Shepherd and Wright shrugged off their screaming assistant coach’s vision, Matthews’ team was all ears. It became a rallying cry — a motivator to “play on Monday night,” as the team referred to the title game. No one asked him to calm down and no one thought his proclamation was the least bit unreasonable. It was a chant the Wolverines kept through the April 4th title game against Villanova, coming just short of bringing the dream of a national championship to fruition. And it wasn’t just a chant. It was symbolic of a mindset — an entirely realistic annual goal — of a program with sky-high expectations. This is no longer the meager program in a timeout huddle pleading to keep the margin close in order to maintain its waffling NCAA Tournament berth. It’s a program telling you it won’t settle short of a national championship. And meaning it. *** On occasion, Beilein will distance himself from the intensity of his day-to-day grind and reminisce with Greg Harden about the state of the program 11 years
ago. Harden, an executive associate athletic director, was Beilein’s administrator then and is again now. Harden and Beilein are two of the only remnants from an era that is now a deeply suppressed memory. “We talk about a few of those days,” Beilein said last Wednesday with a hearty chuckle. He’s allowed to chuckle now. There wasn’t much chuckling then. “I look at them fondly, as it’s part of the foundation of growing. There’s things that happened in those days that were not great for me or the program. I saw a great quote that came from Sean McDermott of my beloved Buffalo Bills, ‘You don’t lose, you learn.’ When we lost, we learned and we got better from it. And we’ll lose again, and we’ll continue to learn.” He can say that now — just weeks removed from the winningest season in program history, fresh off his second national title appearance in six seasons — and it’s taken with sincerity. As well it should. Over a week removed from the end of the season, Beilein still regularly wakes up at 5:45 a.m. instinctively to review tape and prepare for the next game, only to recall there’s nothing left to prepare for. He’s as process-oriented as any coach — any human — out there. But while that focus is so finite in its implementation — from tape to meetings to the practice court to games, rinse, repeat — it rarely comes with a necessitated end goal. None of that is to say the losses, particularly in the two title games, don’t irk him. Beilein waited months before re-watching the Louisville game from 2013. He tried to re-watch the Villanova game, but shut it down after seeing two plays that drew frustration. “I’m still mad about that (Louisville game), too. It’s, like, pointless,” Beilein said when asked about watching those games. “Pointless right now.” Still, it’s a near certainty that John Beilein has never said, “We’re trying to win a motherfing national championship.” In fact, it’s a safe bet that the mildmannered coach has never said “motherf-ing” in his life. But it’s no longer a mindset worth chiding. To Matthews, Livers and every athlete who walks into the locker room at Crisler Center these days, it’s the expectation. It’s now an implication that John Beilein’s name is perpetually prefaced with “Hall of Fame” and “greatest coach in program history.” It’s not even worth an argument. The only thing left unetched on his plaque is whether he adds a “national champion and…” in front of that esteemed title. Regardless of how his career finishes or when it finishes, Beilein has written his legacy into the apex of Michigan history. There’s only one hill left to climb — the same one John Mahoney was yelling about all those years ago. Will it happen? “I hope,” said junior Moritz Wagner, happy to weave in and out of questions about his NBA draft status. Three days later, Wagner became Beilein’s 10th early departure for the NBA in the last nine years. Does it need to happen? “People always say this, ‘Coaches are great when they win national championships.’ That is true. But there is a lot more — especially in college basketball,” Wagner said. “You can’t just measure that with national championships.”