Wolverine247 Board

Clark, it starts with mentality.

Before I worked in football, I used to think that I would end up being a basketball coach. And there's actually a number of similarities between the two games when it comes to defense.

In my opinion, defense is really a function mentality. I'd go so far as to say that good defense is almost a state of mind.

When a player is committed to playing good defense, he demonstrates effort, hustle, aggression, determination. You see it in a guards that works very hard to deny penetration by stonewalling the opposing ball-handler in the perimeter. You see it in a forward that expends a lot of energy in ball denial or tries to clog a passing lane. You see it in a post player that hedges hard to cut off a guard's visual field.

I rarely see any of those things from our guys. A number of players on this team are guilty of playing matador defense. And not only is that problematic, it's unacceptable.

This Michigan team is capable of excelling in transition offense. And the way to create transition offense is to defend well and force bad shots or turnovers. That's what allows for the run-and-gun style.

It actually upsets me that this team hasn't fully grasped the notion that "good defense leads to good offense."

it all starts with the coach. i remember when we played Upper Sandusky in the District final my junior year. Jon Deebler was a senior on their team at the time. Their philosophy was score has much as you want, we will just score more then you. We had a pretty good guard on our team; ended up playing D III ball. He put up 32 on Deebler. Deebler could have cared less because he put up 48 himself. The final score was in the hundreds for a high school basketball team.

Beilein seems to have the same mentality that RR did. Defense is an afterthought.

Morgan is the heart and soul of our D. That is why he was in the game.

He can't close out on every shooter himself.