Monday Quick Hits: Hockey Team Sweeps Western

By Sean · Monday, January 14, 2008 · 1:00 AM |  Share | 4 Comments 

• The Michigan men’s basketball team has finally won a Big Ten game. The losing streak was snapped on Saturday as they beat Northwestern 78-68 in Evanston. Michigan actually led by 30 at one point in the second half, but only won by 10 after Northwestern put together a big run. At one time I had some concern when the lead kept shrinking, but luckily the Wildcats just ran out of time, preserving the Michigan win.

  Highlights from the BTN:

• Speaking of basketball, the women’s team continued its great turn-around with a win over Michigan State yesterday in front of a record crowd at Crisler Arena. Michigan beat MSU 64-55 to pick up win #10 on the year, which amazingly equals last year’s entire win total. That is how bad the 2006-07 version of this team was, so kudos to Kevin Borseth on getting things going in the right direction. Aside from equalling last year’s win total, the victory also snapped a 9-game losing streak to the Spartans, so it’s nice to see Michigan come out on top for that reason alone. For highlights of the game: click here.
• Going back to the men’s team, senior Ron Coleman didn’t dress for the Northwestern game, meaning yet another scholarship player wasn’t available. The need for bodies got so bad that a manager actually had to put on a uniform for this game, which shows you how big the need for depth has gotten.
• One final thing to add on the subject of basketball is that former Michigan player Glen Rice was arrested for battery Friday morning. Rice allegedly “beat” someone he found in his estranged wife’s closet.
• Moving on to hockey, the #1 Wolverines were in action on Friday and Saturday against Western Michigan. Friday’s game was a 6-1 Michigan win at Yost and featured a special guest: Rich Rodriguez. Coach Rod was wearing a custom-made #23 hockey jersey during the press conference to introduce his assistants earlier in the day, as he was going to the game Friday night. Coach Rod sat near the student section with most of his assistants and also participated in Score-O, although he didn’t do too great of a job in that game. For highlights of Friday’s game, head on over to Varsity Blue (check out an interview with Coach Rod over there as well).

  Saturday’s game was at WMU, but the result was still great. Michigan won 5-1 thanks in part to 4 goals from Chad Kolarik. The Wolverines improved to 20-2-0 on the year with the sweep and face Notre Dame next. Friday’s game against ND is at Yost, but Saturday’s is at the Palace, which should make for a different atmosphere.

• As stated already, a press conference was held on Friday to introduce the complete coaching staff. The final addition to that staff was Stanford defensive coordinator Scott Shafer, who was the Western Michigan defensive coordinator before joining Jim Harbaugh out west. One of the biggest questions that came with this hire involves the type of defense Michigan will run. At West Virginia, the main defense was a 3-3-5, and many may have assumed Rich Rodriguez would the 3-3-5 to Michigan regardless of who the defensive coordinator is. Shafer said on Friday that there really won’t be any main set, meaning we should look for more than one type of defense.
  

  Although Rodriguez ran a 3-3-5 defense at West Virginia, Shafer stressed that Michigan will be a multiple-front defense.

  “Scheme is overrated, I’ve always believed that,” Shafer said. “What’s not overrated is getting your kids to play with great effort, great attitude and great enthusiasm. Those are things we can control on a daily basis, and that will be my primary goal. … The philosophy of our defense is attack-oriented, attack and react. We want to be a defense this is multiple, that is always putting pressure and forcing the hand of the offense. We want to be a penetrating defense.

  From that I think that Shafer will be able to run any type of defense he wants. I would bet we see the 3-3-5 once in a while, but it will probably not be the primary defense. To me, that is good news as there was some skepticism on how effective this type of defense would be in the Big Ten. I didn’t buy all of the wondering and thought the 3-3-5 would do fine, but seeing that Shafer will mix it up is even better.

• Former Michigan linebacker Steve Morrison anwers some questions about Scott Shafer.
• The new coaching staff is going to visit the current players to get to know them better.
• I’ve had a few of you e-mail me about the topic of recruiting, wondering how much I will cover it over the next few weeks. My answer to that is that I will cover it quite a bit, but the coverage really won’t be starting to get in-depth until next week and the week after. In-home visits will start again this week, but official visits don’t begin again for Michigan until this coming Saturday. That means that there will be 3 Saturdays of officials before signing day on February 6th.

  As far as what we should expect these next few weeks until signing day, I would say drama sums it up best. That is true for the homestretch every year in recruiting, but this year especially drama will be running high for Michigan. As I said already, officials start up again on Saturday, meaning we hopefully will see a recruit or two commit to Michigan by the time next Monday rolls around.

  I can’t put an exact number on how many more commits Michigan will get for the class of ’08, but I can say that we should see quite a few new names that haven’t been talked about before. With Rich Rodriguez being a new coach, you have the recruits that already were committed when he was hired, the recruits that were considering Michigan before and still are, and then some that are now considering U-M with Coach Rod on board. With that in mind, there will be the big names like Nick Perry and Terrelle Pryor making a decision that hopefully turns out to be Michigan, but at the same time, there will be some new names likely giving a verbal to Michigan as well.