By John Leroi
If you thought Michigan looked really good in the first half, you were right.
If you wondered what happened to the Wolverines in the second half, you're not alone.
If a team could put together two halves that were polar opposites in the same game, Michigan did so yesterday.
The Wolverines were brilliant in the first, especially on the defensive end. They held Indiana to 34 percent shooting from the floor. No Hoosier had more than five points.
Heck, the whole team had just 25.
And despite hitting only 40 percent of its shots, Michigan got to the line 13 times, capitalizing on 12 of them. The Wolverines had five first-half steals and forced 11 Indiana turnovers.
The second half was not so good.
The Hoosiers shot an unbelievable 64 percent from the floor. A.J. Guyton lit Michigan up for 24 second-half points, including six 3-pointers. Indiana scored 59 points after the intermission.
"As phenomenal as we were in the first half, they were in the second," Fisher said. "We just played really, really poorly."
It didn't help that Michigan shot just 14 percent in overtime either.
The seeding game: Today is February 17. It says so at the top of the page.
That, in and of itself, is not so exciting, but when you count the days from now until the NCAA announces the pairings for the 64-team tournament, you'll get 20 days.
The Wolverines have six games before then: three tough road games (at Iowa, Purdue and Illinois) and one not-so-tough one (at Ohio State). One of Michigan's home games is against No. 3 Minnesota (the other is against Northwestern).
It doesn't exactly take an engineering professor to see that the Wolverines' tournament seed is up in the air. ESPN projected Michigan as a three-seed in the Southeast bracket as early as last week in a projected bracket on its Internet site.
If Michigan wins its final six contests and ends up 23-7, a three-seed is likely. But, if Michigan drops two or three more games - a distinct possibility - it could receive anywhere between a five and a seven seed.
If the Wolverines end up losing the three road games to Iowa, Purdue and Illinois and lose at home to the Golden Gophers, they're looking at a seed considerably worse.
A small price to pay: The Athletic Department's budget was set back a couple hundred bucks this week after the custom mask Maurice Taylor wears to protect his broken nose was cracked this week in practice.
Fisher said it cost between $400 and $500 to get a new one made, but the expense must have been worth it: Taylor scored 14 points in both games he's worn the mask.
On the rebound: To say the Wolverines have had trouble rebounding lately would be like saying betamax VCRs were a minor disappointment.
Despite one of the meatiest and most talented frontcourts in the nation, Michigan has been outrebounded more often than not this season, many times by smaller opponents.
Even though the Wolverines grabbed four more rebounds than Indiana in the first half of yesterday's game, the Hoosiers ended with just as many boards as Michigan: 41. That marks the fifth-straight game Michigan hasn't won the war on the glass and the seventh time in its last eight games.
Lofty comparisons: No one would dispute that Guyton played an enormous factor in the yesterday's Indiana win. It would be hard to find anyone who would say Guyton's 3-pointer with 2.1 seconds left in regulation that tied the game at 75 wasn't a huge play.
But Indiana coach Bob Knight laid it one pretty thick when answering reporter's questions about his freshman phenom's clutch shot in the post-game press conference:
"That's as good a play as I've ever had a kid make under that kind of pressure," Knight said.
"Well, maybe Keith Smart's shot in the '87 national championship game was a little more important."
Smart hit a running jumper with five seconds left in the 1987 NCAA title game against Syracuse that won Knight his third national championship.