Illinois vs Michigan Basketball Recap

Illinois 51, Michigan 44

The Illinois Fighting Illini looked very, very ugly on Tuesday night in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The sons of Champaign scored fewer points in a game than the Providence Friars and Syracuse Orange scored in separate halves of their Tuesday night Big East battle. ( Providence scored 52 points in the first half and Syracuse posted 52 in the second. The Orange won, 99-85.)

Illinois hit just 37 percent of its field goal attempts.

Coach Bruce Weber's team converted only four 3-point shots and committed 16 turnovers.

The visitors from the Land of Lincoln hit only 9 of 15 foul shots.

The boys in road orange jerseys posted just seven bench points and received double-figure scoring efforts from only two performers, forward Mike Davis (13) and guard Demetri McCamey (14).

With train-wreck-style stats up and down the line, you'd have thought Illinois - viewed by some as a bubble team for the NCAA Tournament - would have suffered a damaging loss in the final week of February.

But no, not to worry: The Illini were playing the Michigan Wolverines, by far the most disappointing team in the 2010 Big Ten campaign. For all the ways in which Illinois struggled at Crisler Arena, the home team proved to be worse.

It's been a nightmarish season for Wolverine basketball, as coach John Beilein - who guided UM to the second round in last year's NCAAs - has simply and thoroughly failed in his attempt to light a fire under his charges. In a scenario reminiscent of all too many games his team has played this year, Beilein watched the Maize and Blue hoist a ton of 3-pointers (31) and make a very small amount of them (6). Star guard Manny Harris - who went 5 of 17 from the field and just 1 of 5 from 3-point range - couldn't hit the side of a barn for most of this ugly 40-minute affair... even when the barn was right in front of his nose.

With Michigan still in the fight (down only 48-42) and half a minute remaining, Harris rolled through the Illinois defense but missed a layup that, at the very least, would have forced the Illini to seal the game at the charity stripe, where they had been shaky and sweaty-palmed. That one missed layup encapsulated so much of this lost season for a team that fully expected to return to the NCAAs. Instead, Michigan is on the fence for the NIT and could well be shut out of the postseason unless it accepts a bid to one of the minor-league tournaments, the CBI or CIT.

The Illini? For all their wobbles and stumbles on Tuesday, they walked out of town with a seven-point triumph, their 10th in the Big Ten this season. Only a full-bore collapse - with no wins at all over the next two and a half weeks - could possibly keep Illinois out of the NCAAs, and even then, Weber's program would probably still get a No. 12 seed somewhere in Bracketville.

Yes, Illinois played poorly on the road. However, its opponent simply turned out to be far too gracious a host.

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