ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Two and a half years ago, I walked out of the Crisler Center feeling cautiously optimistic about the Michigan basketball team.
Nobody expected much from that 2023-24 group. The previous two seasons had been underwhelming, and there wasn’t any buzz surrounding the program.
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But, man, did they look good that night. Top transfer Olivier Nkamhoua dropped 25 points in his Michigan debut. Dug McDaniel hit four threes. Tarris Reed was perfect from the floor.
I know, I know: They were facing UNC Asheville. But maybe, just maybe, this was going to be a better year than we thought?
Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope.
That ended up being the worst season in Michigan basketball history. The Wolverines went 8-24 and finished four games worse than anyone else in the Big Ten standings.
I vowed not to overreact to the first game ever again. But this year’s team made that a really hard promise to keep.
On Nov. 3, 2025, my dad and I left those same seats in the Crisler Center, walked out the same exit, and had what was probably a very similar conversation to the one in 2023.
The Wolverines had dropped 121 points against an Oakland team that’s well-respected around these parts. Michigan’s five best players were four transfers and a true freshman -- they weren’t supposed to gel this quickly!
I kicked myself the following week when Michigan struggled against Wake Forest and TCU. “I can’t believe I fell for it again.”
But that thought was fleeting. We all realized how good Michigan was when it went to the Players Era Festival in Vegas and beat San Diego State, Auburn, and Gonzaga by a combined 110 points. Two of those teams just missed the NCAA Tournament, and Gonzaga was a No. 3 seed.
There was the 28-point beatdown of Villanova. A 112-71 shellacking against McNeese. Then, the team that had finished last in the Big Ten by four games in 2024 went on to win the league by that same margin.
Michigan was the first team ever to win 19 Big Ten games. The first team ever to go undefeated on the road in conference play.
Just like nobody will argue that the 2023-24 season was the worst in Michigan history, none should dispute that 2025-26 was the best.
This is the peak of Michigan basketball. The best season in program history. Period.
Yes, Michigan won a national title in 1989. And I know the Fab Five had an everlasting effect on the sport.
But come on -- this one was definitely better.
Michigan’s 37 wins shattered the program record. They came against the No. 1 strength of schedule in the sport, during a season that’s widely regarded as having perhaps the most talent in college basketball history.
I wasn’t alive in 1989. But I know that team lost seven games, finished third in the Big Ten, and received a No. 3 seed.
This year’s squad was a different animal. It dominated a Big Ten that put six teams in the Sweet 16. It won at Michigan State, Purdue, and Illinois -- all by double digits (seriously, who does that?). It became the first team in history to score 90 points and win by double digits in each of the first five rounds of the NCAA Tournament.
When Michigan and Arizona met in the Final Four, it was supposed to be the game of the century. Two No. 1 seeds that served as co-faces of this college basketball season. Both ranked among the five best teams ever on Kenpom.
But the game didn’t live up the hype. The Wolverines led wire-to-wire, won by 18, and even led by 30 midway through the second half. It was a thorough annihilation of the team that finished right behind the Wolverines in the final Kenpom ratings.
Oh, and by the way, Michigan’s First-Team All American barely played due to injury.
Even the sloggy national championship game reaffirmed Michigan’s greatness. Against the sport’s modern-day dynasty -- a UConn program that’s won two of the last three national titles and six in the past 27 years -- Michigan shot 2-of-15 from three, gave up 22 offensive rebounds, managed just one fast-break basket, and still led for the entire second half.
Michigan is the highest-ranked national champion in the history of the Kenpom rankings. And if you don’t believe in that well-established, proven metric, go ahead and check your own ranking of choice. It’ll tell a similar tale.
This roster doesn’t necessarily look like the other all-time greats. The team leader scored 15.1 points per game. Nobody averaged a double double or shot 40% from beyond the arc. Heck, the starting point guard was run out of town by a program that spent most of the NCAA Tournament trying (and failing) to poach coaches who still had actual games to worry about.
But don’t let that take away from the absurdity of what Michigan accomplished. The headline of 2026 isn’t individual stats or superstars. It’s the way a bunch of players -- most of them castoffs in one way or another -- came together to accomplish something historic.
Do you think Roddy Gayle could have started more than one game somewhere else? What about Trey McKenney? Did Nimari Burnett ever complain that his shots decreased each year in Ann Arbor? Could Will Tschetter have played more than the 14.7 minutes per game he averaged at Michigan?
This roster is littered with guys who sacrificed and bought into a team-first mission -- a unicorn in today’s college sports landscape.
So don’t listen to the bitter, coping outsiders who claim the way this roster was built takes away from the championship. If anything, the characters who ended up wearing the Block M made this run even more special.
Did you listen to Yaxel Lendeborg interviews? Or watch Morez Johnson stand stone-faced in the background? Or see Aday Mara embrace the “Big Goof” nickname?
Five, 10, and even 50 years from now, when these players return to the Crisler Center to remember this amazing run, nobody will care that they got here from the transfer portal, or how much NIL money they made.
They’ll look up at the Big Ten championship banner. Remember their dominant tournament run. That magical weekend in Indianapolis.
And the greatest season in Michigan basketball history.