Their BBall coach is Steve Fisher, who was Eldon Miller's assistant coach at WMU when I came to campus---adequate ball player in the prof's noontime game but not real hot. When he got hired at Michigan, I was surprised as he wasn't impressive at WMU. Bill Frieder was their coach.
When Frieder jumped to Arizona State for the big bucks, Schembechler uttered the famous "Michigan is going to be coached by a Michigan Man!!!" and thus began that particular form of nonsense. Fisher stepped into the HC job for the NCAA tournament, and stood meekly on the sidelines while a great guard led a veteran team to a championship. Fisher had very little to do with that.
But the first example of the Bill Stewart Phenomenon then occurred. Fan hysteria created Administrational hysteria and Fisher was named head coach officially. People who knew at least squat universally felt that this was a colossal screw-up [just like folks following WVU felt about hiring Bill Stewart---most of you know that Bill Stewart is a family friend, so it pains me to be saying this].
Fisher masked his incompetence because Juwan Howard did him a lifetime favor. He signed with Michigan and immediately campaigned to recruit two of his [AAU, I believe] teammates, Jalen Rose and Chris Webber---Webber was the number one target in the whole country, a bit of an immature jerk at the time, but a real problem for opponents. They'd already added two above average players from Texas, so it was the Fab Five. Webber et al were almost impossible to deal with as you know, and Michigan rolled until Webber, then Rose and Howard left early for the NBA.
Fisher building on this facade of greatness, continued to get top of the line recruits, but it became increasingly obvious that it was his limited ceiling coaching that was slowly deteriorating the chances for a return to a final four. Ultimately, he got his walking papers. This probably occurred just as he was about to emerge as a mature coach.
Perhaps he has bounced through the profession long enough that he really knows what he's doing; perhaps he's just doing the thing that he was always fairly good at--recruiting. He was always a pretty nice guy at WMU, and so I hope he's matured as a coach and is no longer the guy the players just called "Fish" instead of "Coach".
