If you look through box scores from recent Michigan men's basketball seasons, it's easy to find big names and great achievement.
Chris Webber. Juwan Howard. Jalen Rose, Glenn Rice. National title games. And a national championship.
But if you take a closer look, those same box scores are peppered with names that flash in, flicker briefly, then disappear.
Leon Derricks. Olivier St. Jean. Bobby Crawford. And, most recently, Albert White.
For all of Michigan's recent success in the world of college basketball - both in terms of recruiting and competition - the Wolverines have had problems keeping players in Ann Arbor. Aside from players like Webber, who left school early for the NBA, there is a long list of players who have left Michigan for other programs.
For many of these players, departure simply came down to playing time.
"Guys that don't play aren't going to stay," Michigan assistant coach Brian Dutcher says. "They're not going to really stay in many programs."
Indeed, players leaving in search of playing time is not unique to Michigan. Other Big Ten programs have run into similar situations in recent years. For example, Minnesota lost its likely sixth man, guard Mark Jones, just prior to this season, and Purdue lost sophomore forward Luther Clay, who may have seen decent minutes this season on a squad with six freshmen.
But those programs haven't nearly matched the recruiting success of Michigan in recent years. With anywhere between one and five of the country's top high school players entering the program year in and year out, the talent starts to pile up, and something has to give.
Olivier St. Jean left Michigan almost two years ago for San Jose State, where he is beginning his junior season. His reasons for leaving Michigan had more to do with adjusting to American society within the context of playing in a big-time basketball program at a large university. He says he was aware of the problems caused by the influx of such skilled players.
"(Michigan does) recruit tremendous talent, and it's hard to make everybody happy," St. Jean says. "Let's face it, if you recruit the 10 best high-school players, five are going to be unhappy, because everybody has the skills, and then people begin to forget about team chemistry."
Makhtar Ndiaye, who transferred to North Carolina in July 1995, had similar thoughts on the talent problem.
"At Michigan, (head coach Steve Fisher) recruits a lot of talent, and everybody comes in here and thinks he's a superstar," Ndiaye told the Michigan Daily two summers ago.
Crawford, who left Michigan for Rice in 1995, says it was just this sort of talent overload that caused him to head south.
"At Michigan, where they have other people who are just as good, if not better than you around, you don't get a chance to show that," he says. "I think everybody feels like they could get a better chance going to a smaller school where maybe the talent level isn't that great, where you have a chance to do more things."
Another factor that Crawford says prompted him to transfer to Rice, which is located in his hometown of Houston, was a difference in how players coming from other states are treated compared to those players from in-state.
"All the alumni who support Michigan and who go to all their games, they've followed the kids from Michigan throughout their high school careers," Crawford says. "When it's time to see them in a Michigan uniform, of course they're going to have a little more love for the kids that came from Michigan.
"I'm not saying they don't support the kids from out of state, but it's just going to be different. Stuff like that I found would work to my advantage if I came back home."
In moving from Michigan to the much smaller, less-publicized Rice basketball program, one of the differences Crawford has noticed is the one between Fisher and his current coach, Willis Wilson.
"(Wilson) emphasizes playing hard and having tough play ... because the talent he gets is not as good as Michigan's, so he has to get more out of the players. He emphasizes playing hard for a reason," Crawford says. "(Fisher) gets more talent. He doesn't really have to harp on little plays like diving after loose balls and stuff like that, whereas over here you have to."
St. Jean says that, having come from overseas, he wasn't as familiar with U.S. college basketball and the particulars of a large program as he would have liked to have been. Because of that, he says he sometimes tended to lose sight of his goals.
"If you get thrown in a big-time basketball program like that, there are a lot of things that you will miss and that you will not think about," St. Jean says. "You're so blinded by what you do that you lose the most important reason you're in school, which is to get an education."
For Crawford, it was the glamour of the Michigan experience that he says blinded him to its downsides.
"You see everybody wearing Michigan jerseys or Michigan gear," he says. "You look at that, and you hear everybody talking about Michigan, and you see them on TV all the time. When you have a chance to go and be a part of that, you tend to overlook a lot of other things."
In recent years, the NCAA has instituted rules drastically reducing the amount of contact coaches can have with recruits. As a result, incoming players may not know as much as they should about the programs they're entering, and coaches may not know as much about their new charges.
Penn State assistant coach Mike Boyd, who was head coach at Cleveland State and an assistant at Michigan before taking his current job, believes the new rules are responsible for some problems.
"It's very hard to read that sometimes because the NCAA has taken us (as coaches) completely out of the loop," Boyd says. "It's very hard to get to know a kid with the opportunity of only calling him once a week and only getting to watch him play four times."
"When I was at Michigan, I had the opportunity to get to know those kids. You can always pick up some things by having the opportunity to know the kids you're recruiting."
Fisher agrees with Boyd's assessment.
"You don't get a chance to know (the recruits) quite as well, because of the shrinkage in the time you can recruit off-campus, and, more importantly, the limited number of contacts and evaluations you can have with the kids," Fisher says. "Even though you try to do your research as best you can, you don't, nor do (the recruits), get to know you quite as well as you used to."
But Fisher says this has nothing to do with Michigan's rash of transfers.
"If you look around the country, you can go into any program you want ... it's everywhere," he says. "Nobody wants to have it happen, but unfortunately that also comes with the territory when minutes and playing time are critical."
Michigan certainly is not in a unique situation when it comes to players leaving the program. If there are too many players in any program, playing time will be an issue, particularly if the players are of the caliber that a school like Michigan attracts.
The opinion among coaches is that players leaving programs is neither unusual nor unique to Michigan.
Former Wolverines, however, are of different minds about why players seem to be constantly leaking out of the program.
Whatever the reason, it is a trend that continues.