Jeff Riger: And The Dancing Begins!

There might not be a team in the Big ten that is more excited about the upcoming Big Ten tournament then Michigan. The Wolverines are in the NCAA tournament according to most national college basketball pundits, but the team itself doesn't want to leave anything to chance. The Wolverines will play Illinois on Friday in Indianapolis with the winner to move on to the semi-finals to take on more than likely Ohio State. The Wolverines understand that they don't have a win against a top 25 team and even though a .500 record in conference might be good enough to get them in, they are very aware of potential upsets that could happen in other conference tournaments with those teams maybe taking their place.

Many Michigan players talked about a player's only meeting that was held after the Maze and Blue lost to Minnesota at Crisler as to why things have been able to turn around so dramatically in the season. Junior Zack Novak claimed it happened at center court and just lasted 5 to 10 minutes but it helped immensely. Novak claimed that guys were "brutally honest" and since that moment Michigan has gone 8 and 3 after a 1 and 6 start in conference. Players were also very leery about getting too ahead of themselves when talking about what this latest run has meant for the "big" picture of Michigan basketball. The only thing that seemed to be top of mind for everyone was that this team has a chance at maybe doing something special and it would be a shame to let that chance slip away.

In other news from practice, I asked Darius Morris about Tom Izzo's comments saying that maybe he deserved to have Kalin Lucas throw a ball at him after the game because he was talking trash and trying to run up the score. Morris responded "His comments about me talking trash the whole game were false. For him to say that I was yapping the whole game was incorrect and then yapping at his place, the only reason why I started yapping was because his players were talking to me and I wanted to show them that we were not going to back down." Morris also did not understand why anything was said at all considering MSU handled Michigan last year and maybe ran up the score and nobody including John Beilein ever mentioned it. The sophomore LA native also says that he used to talk a lot more smack on the court but is trying to limit it these days.

Beilein stepped around a question if he uses the notorious Fab Five to help recruit saying "I haven't talked much about it right now and I haven't seen it and I will be at the Big Ten tournament but I don't know what's in it. (Talking about the upcoming documentary about the Fab Five on ESPN on Selection Sunday) I recognize what a great time that it was but I'm not a historian and I didn't follow it as much as other people did, but I will be interested in watching it."

Watch the videos below for complete interviews with players and Beilein.