Name: University of Michigan
Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan
Where precisely is Ann Arbor, anyway? Well, depending on your understanding of Michigan geography, I could say that it’s not that far west from Detroit, sitting about 45 miles away from Ford Field downtown. If you want more of a “where on the mitten?” explanation, then Ann Arbor is about where your thumb connects to the rest of your hand.
What is an Ann Arbor, anyway? Take the two words separately, and I bet you can guess. Ann Arbor was founded
in the 1820s by John Allen and Elisha Walker Rumsey, both of whom had a wife named — you guessed it — Ann. Combine that with the fact that there were a whole bunch of oak trees in the 640 acres they had purchased from the federal government and arboriculture is the cultivation and management of trees, ta-da: Ann Arbor.
Founded: 1817, although technically earlier if you wanna play “Trace The History” all the way to its fullest destination point. Sometimes I like to play around in the winding history of the creation and development of a university in this section, but there’s just way too much going on here so I’ll just link you to the Wikipedia page and keep it moving.
Enrollment: 53, 488, with 35,358 undergraduate students as of Fall 2025. Generally speaking, Michigan enrolls about as many freshmen every year as Marquette has undergraduate students in total.
Nickname: Wolverines
Why “Wolverines?” It seems like no one really knows. No less a source than the university itself offers up theories ranging from the trading of wolverine pelts at Sault Ste. Marie, gluttonous appetites of the French settlers, or whether it stems from one side or the other labeling the Michiganders as Wolverines during 1803’s Toledo War between the Mitten State and Ohio. What is a pretty safe bet is that it’s not because wolverines are actually all over the place in Michigan, as there wasn’t a verified sighting of one in the state borders until 2004.
So definitely not because of the X-Men? Definitely not, it goes back before James Howlett debuted in Incredible Hulk #180 in 1974. I do have to acknowledge that Wolverine was wearing an awful lot of maize and blue in his debut, though.
What’s the deal with the football helmets? It’s called a winged helmet, dating back when helmets were leather and there was literally a different colored piece of leather attached to the helmet. Herbert “Fritz” Crisler believed that the multi-colored helmet had tactical advantages in terms of finding teammates down field and brought the winged helmet usage with him when he transitioned from Princeton head coach to Michigan head coach and athletic director in 1938.
Their fight song is pretty famous, isn’t it? Only if you consider John Phillip Sousa calling The Victors “the greatest college fight song ever written.”
Notable Alumni: Nine different Nobel Laureates; Gerald Ford, the 38th President of the United States; Ilhan New, founder of La Choy Food Products; James A. McDivitt & Ed White, the crew of Gemini 4; David Scott, Alfred Worden, and James B. Irwin, the crew of Apollo 15 (Scott & Irwin left a Michigan Alumni Association chapter plaque on the moon’s surface); Google co-founder Larry Page; playwright Arthur Miller; actor James Earl Jones; designer Tony Fadell, credited as the “father of the Apple iPod;” actress Gilda Radner; writer and cartoonist Judd Winick, who also gained fame as a cast member on MTV’s The Real World in 1994; Henry W. Bloch, co-founder of H&R Block; director Lawrence Kasdan; assisted suicide advocate Dr. Jack Kevorkian and his lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger; Bill Ayers, co-founder of the Weather Underground; Chip Davis, founder and leader of Mannheim Steamroller; US Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy; Dr. Wallace Abbott, founder of Abbot Laboratories; attorney Clarence Darrow; Edgar Gott, co-founder and 1st president of Boeing; Benj Pasek & Justin Paul, the songwriting duo behind the music in Dear Evan Hansen, which has earned them all four parts of the EGOT; John De Lorean, General Motors Vice President & designer of the car that bears his name; Cathy Guisewite, creator of the Cathy comic strip; Branch Rickey; General Manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers when Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s racial barrier; Ann B. Davis, aka Alice the maid on The Brady Bunch; William James Mayo, co-founder of the Mayo Clinic; character actress Margo Martindale; William J. Bell, creator of Another World, The Young & The Restless, and The Bold & The Beautiful; Mark Metcalf, aka Neidermeyer in Animal House & The Master in Buffy The Vampire Slayer; author Brad Meltzer; Sid Meier, creator of the Civilization computer game series; author Chris Van Allsburg, best known for Jumanji & The Polar Express; Dr. Gregory House; NFL Network host Rich Eisen; boxing expert Bert Sugar; George Getty, founder of Getty Oil; television journalist Mike Wallace; Edward Mead Johnson, co-founder of Johnson & Johnson; and finally, Ted Kaczynski, aka The Unabomber.
Last Season: Pretty good, if you consider going 37-3 and winning the national championship to be something to aspire to in your life. Michigan started 14-0, lost at home to Wisconsin, won another 11 in a row, lost on a neutral floor to Duke, won another six in a row, lost in the Big Ten title game to Purdue, and then won six straight games against in the NCAA tournament, defeating UConn 69-63 in the title game.
Final 2025-26 KenPom.com Ranking: #1 out of 365 teams, up from their preseason rank of #11
Final 2025-26 BartTorvik.com Ranking: #1, up from their preseason rank of #3.
Preseason Poll? The Big Ten only released a Preseason All-Conference team officially, but Michigan was picked to finish third in the league in a media poll put together by the Columbus Dispatch. The Wolverines did receive one first place vote.
Current 2026-27 KenPom.com Ranking: #30 out of 365 teams, down from their preseason rank of #28
Current 2026-27 BartTorvik.com Ranking: #20, down from their preseason rank of #14.
Head Coach: Mike Boynton, in his first season with Michigan and eighth as a Division 1 head coach. He went 119-109 in seven seasons as head coach at Oklahoma State, but that carried with it a 51-75 record in Big 12 play. He is the head coach here because he happened to be on Michigan’s staff when Dusty May left for the Dallas Mavericks job, just like he happened to be on Oklahoma State’s staff when Brad Underwood took the Illinois job after one season.
Let’s Take a Detour: Shaka Smart and Mike Boynton were head coaches together in the Big 12 for four seasons. Smart was already at Texas when Boynton got the Oklahoma State job, and then Boynton continued onwards in Stillwater after Smart moved to Milwaukee. Here I present to you their head to head matchups in those four seasons, and it’s listed in chronological order for that season. Feel free to do whatever you want with this information.
2017-18: OSU won at home, 65-64; Texas won at home, 65-64
2018-19: OSU won at home, 61-58; Texas won at home, 69-57
2019-20: Texas won on the road, 76-64; OSU won on the road, 81-59
2020-21: Texas won at home, 77-74; OSU won at home, 75-67 in double overtime
Bigs? JP Estrella measures in at 6’11” and 240 pounds. The Tennessee transfer averaged 10.0 points and 5.4 rebounds in about 18 minutes a game for the Vols last year as a part-time starter. So far for the Wolverines, he’s putting up 17.0 points and 10.5 rebounds in 28 minutes a game, but he’s been incredibly foul prone. He fouled out of their opener against Oakland in just 21 minutes, but still got the KenPom.com MVP for that contest, and then he finished their loss to UConn with four fouls. He managed to play 32 minutes, and so he had 19 points and 9 rebounds against the Huskies, but WOOF, those fouls are a problem. Estrella plays very much as an old school big man with just 12 total three-point attempts in his collegiate career and he didn’t take one at all until last season. KenPom.com has Estrella as the #8 offensive rebounder in the country a year ago, so keeping him off the glass is going to be paramount to Marquette’s success here.
Moustapha Thiam didn’t play against Oakland, but he started and played 15 minutes against UConn. The 7’2”, 250 pound Cincinnati transfer only had two points and five rebounds in his playing time, and the reason why he was so limited was the four fouls he racked up in rapid fashion. He averaged 12.8 points and 7.1 rebounds for the Bearcats last year and 10.4 points, 6.4 rebounds, and a Big 12 best 2.6 blocks per game as a freshman at UCF. Someone at both of those two places told Thiam that he’s a shooter, because he has 131 career three-point attempts. He is very bad at it, connecting on just 29%, and Michigan convinced him to not do that at all against UConn.
We should also mention Quinn Costello, who played 21 minutes against Oakland and 18 against UConn. the 6’10”, 220 pound freshman isn’t doing much in the way of rebounding — 5 total, only 1 vs UConn — but he is shooting it to the tune of 10 long range attempts against the Grizzlies and five more against UConn. That makes him 4-for-15 on the season, which is very bad. I’d imagine we’ll see the Massachusetts native at some point, but I don’t know what kind of impact he’s going to have.
Shooters? Based on what they’ve done so far this year? Trey McKenney, and that’s it. The 6’7” wing from Flint, MI, is already 7-for-15 (46.7%) on the year, and he hit for 39% as a freshman last year. The entire rest of the roster combined has 7 total makes together, and that means they’re all shooting under 15%. Elliott Cadeau was a 38% shooter last season, so he’ll probably get it together eventually after this 1-for-9 start, and Kenny Noland, a 6’2” transfer from Columbia, is a career 38% shooter from his four years with the Lions.
Michigan shot nearly 37% as a team from behind the three-point line last season, but a lot of that was Yaxel Lendeborg and Nimari Burnett. Both of those guys cleared 37% on over 150 attempts, and LJ Cason was no slouch at 40% on 82 attempts in 28 games. I don’t know if getting the whole squad back to that point is going to be critical to Michigan’s success this season, but if they want to take at least 40 more minutes to figure that out and keep shooting 23% as a team through, say, Thursday morning, that’s fine by me.
What To Watch For: This one’s a particularly hard one to figure out. Is Michigan still a Dusty May team in terms of composition because that’s who Mike Boynton needed his game plan ideas signed off on by last year and so he’s still thinking that way? Or is Michigan now a Mike Boynton team and they’re going to play more like his Oklahoma State teams? At a glance, at least through two contests, it would appear to be more the former, particularly in terms of the tempo that the Wolverines are playing at so far. It’s not a perfect one-to-one comparison, but if you line up what Michigan has done through two games here with the last two seasons under May and Boynton’s seven seasons at OSU, it’s more like the last two.
Looking at the UConn game last Friday in Boston is somewhat helpful for us here, as we can see that the Huskies struggled to shoot the ball inside the arc, connecting on just 42% of their attempts, and they weren’t all that hot at getting second chances at just 29% of the time. They were able to rain threes on Michigan, hitting 41% of those. Marquette has been better inside than outside so far this season, and MU has been outstanding at getting second chances, too. However, that’s partially because Mercyhurst and Detroit Mercy didn’t have that much as far as size goes to slow down Sananda Fru, Royce Parham, and Josh Clark on the glass. That’s not the case with Michigan, as JP Estrella has been great on both ends so far this year and Moustapha Thiam held up his side of things on the defensive glass for the 15 minutes he managed to play. This will be an interesting test of MU’s newfound ability to hit the glass, and win or lose, we could learn a lot about what exactly the Golden Eagles are going to look like in general against high major opposition this year.
All-Time Series: Marquette is 6-14 all time against Michigan. This will be the first meeting since November 2016, which was a 79-61 Michigan victory, and it was marked by the Golden Eagles debuting terrible gray uniforms and then playing terribly in them. Marquette hasn’t beaten Michigan since November 2009 when they toppled the #15 ranked Wolverines 79-65 in the Old Spice Classic down at Disney World, and they haven’t won in Ann Arbor since December 1954.
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