A Juwan Howard and Matthew Stafford Therapy Session
Juwan Howard and Matthew Stafford are legendary figures in the Detroit sports scene. One no longer works here after tapping out to the misery and is living his best life on the west coast, a Super Bowl-winning quarterback that has talking heads now discussing his Hall of Fame credentials. The other has the next three weeks off after smushing an opposing coach’s face during a postgame handshake line.
Emotions are running high in this town. Time to talk about the things everyone is talking about.
Michigan man?
Let’s start with the topic du jour. Juwan Howard was in his feelings after Wisconsin handed Michigan its 8th(!) double-digit loss of the season on Sunday. Badgers coach Greg Gard called a timeout with 15 seconds remaining in the blowout, which was the criminal act that almost got Howard to skip the handshake line entirely. Maybe Howard should think about reducing the number of times his team gets smacked around, which will eliminate the likelihood of an “unnecessary timeout”.
Unfortunately for Wisconsin assistant coach and former player Joe Krabbenhoft (is there a more Wisconsin basketball name than Joe Krabbenhoft?) Howard did join the “good game” line and decided to do some smacking of his own. Hey, if you can’t beat ’em, beat ’em, amirite? After Gard made the brilliant decision to grab the arm of the 6’9″ 240lb giant who was mad at him, Howard went into “self-defense” mode and chaos ensued.
Howard has been suspended for the remainder of the regular season, which sounds like a more severe punishment than it actually is. He will only miss five games before being eligible to return to the team for the B1G and (fingers crossed) NCAA Tournaments. But Howard’s suspension isn’t the one that is unfair (if anything, it’s light). Those would be the one-game suspensions handed to Moussa Diabate and Terrance Williams II (as well as Wisconsin’s Jahcobi Neath) for taking part in a coach-instigated brawl.
Howard should be ashamed that two of his players were suspended for coming to his defense and modeling the behavior of their nearly 50 year-old-coach. The guy that gets paid handsomely to be a leader of men and represent the university with class. It’s not fair that Diabate and Williams, both of whom have NBA aspirations after being highly regarded high school recruits, now have a character stain on their resumes.
Getting control over his emotions has been an ongoing issue since he took the helm of this team in 2019. Sometimes that works in his favor. Remember the teary-eyed intro presser that won us all over?
And it’s obvious Howard’s personality does very well on the recruiting trail. The immediate results speak for themselves (No. 14 class in 2020, No. 3 class in 2021, projected No. 7 class in 2022). But Howard, much like his buddy and colleague Jim Harbaugh, was unable to foresee the domino effect of his actions until it was too late. With Harbaugh, his ego-fueled flirtation with the NFL led his award-winning assistant coach to take a parallel job across the country due to the disrespect of being left with an uncertain future. With Howard, his decision to put his hands on the face of an opposing coach let his guys know that it was ok to throw some hands of their own.
Michigan is actually lucky this was a noon tip on a Sunday in Madison. The scene could have gotten much more ugly, and potentially dangerous if the fans had more time to pre-game lubricate. But player safety was not something Howard was considering. When the emotions turned on, the brain turned off.
Are basketball coaches not given enough opportunities to let out their frustration and aggression in a way that doesn’t get themselves and their players suspended? Run around pointing and screaming on the sidelines. Berate the officials. Give a spicy post-game presser if you don’t mind being fined. Do pretty much anything except punch a guy in the face. Too much to ask, I guess. While Howard’s physical toughness is unquestionable, the mental side leaves some to be desired.
Juwan Howard is a good man. He deserves an opportunity to grow and come back from this embarrassing mistake. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested to see what Phil Martelli and the rest of the staff can do with this squad in his absence. That interest is only peaked further after a comfortable win over a pretty good Rutgers team on Wednesday in a total team effort. While Michigan still has realistic postseason aspirations, the fact that they are a bubble team after entering the season with the second-best odds to win the national championship is a massive disappointment. Some of that I would pin directly on Howard.
It took far too long for Michigan to start riding the horse that is Hunter Dickinson. After a season-opening win over Buffalo, Michigan had a stretch of six games where they went 3-3, with Dickinson attempting only 8 shots per game. That is a gross underutilization of your most dominant and efficient weapon (.565/.356/.808 slash line). And while Dickinson does have a habit of picking up dumb fouls, Howard tends to overreact to foul trouble, which is one of my pet peeves across all levels of basketball.
Why are coaches so terrified of a player fouling out? You get five fouls. And if you don’t use them, you lose them (shout out to Steve Carell). Sit a guy when he needs a breather or when the game flow calls for it, not when he is in foul trouble. Ever see a player pick up a couple of early fouls and sit for the rest of the half, only to finish the game with three personals and only 24 minutes played? Think of how many unnecessary minutes that player missed due to fear of a hypothetical foul out. If you can’t trust your players to adjust their physicality and play within the context of their foul situation then that is a coaching failure.
And even if a guy does foul out, so what? They played their maximum total minutes possible for that given game, which is ideal. No wasted minutes on the bench. It reminds me of coaches being hesitant to go for 2 in football due to fear or expectation of failure. Risk aversion is a strange yet fascinating phenomenon in the world of high-level athletics.
Enough of my foul rant. The most pressing issue heading into the Rutgers game was the lack of production from Caleb Houstan. The highest-ranked Michigan recruit in decades has actually played more minutes than Dickinson this season, they are just on the opposite spectrum of efficiency. The .387/.344/.746 slash makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit, and when you pair that with a higher turnover total than assists on the season it just didn’t justify the nearly 32 minutes he plays each night. But lo and behold, Houstan had his coming out party in Michigan’s first game sans Howard, with 21 points and five triples. If Martelli can unlock something in Houstan and make performances like these semi-regular it drastically raises this team’s ceiling. Michigan is top-10 good with Houstan playing like the 5-star he is.
Kenpom still kinda likes Michigan (#31) despite their gross record, giving them a healthy bump due to a No. 5 adjusted strength of schedule rating. If they sneak into the tournament, this could be the most talented 11-seed in the history of college basketball. I just hope I’m not Googling “NIT times and schedule” a month from now.
Stafford is super
Chalk another one up for player empowerment. Because good God, did things get great for Matthew Stafford in a hurry once he asked out of town.
As a noted Stafford honk, I was asked plenty if I was rooting for the Rams this season. No, I was not. I do not have “Team B’s”. I have an allegiance to my city, and my city alone. Everyone else can kick rocks. It comes from my heart, not my brain. I will not adopt another team or city and take the easy way out. It’s just not how I’m wired. Thanks dad. Digging my heels in and leaning into the misery will make me stronger in the end. The “end” being when I’m dead and the Lions have the same number of playoff wins as they do today.
The optimal scenario was Stafford having a long term case of asymptomatic COVID that ran from Sep-Jan and playing with his kids through a hazmat suit, with the Rams going 2-15 and sending the No. 1 overall pick in the 2022 draft to Detroit. What was I realistically hoping for? That Stafford would play well but the Rams would get an unlucky bounce here and a bad call there en route to an 8-9 win season, sending the Lions a pick somewhere in the teens.
Instead the Lions will receive pick No. 32 from L.A. in this coming draft. Because there are 32 teams in the NFL. And the best one had Matthew Stafford as their quarterback. And the (almost) worst one had Jared Goff.
I feel like he’s waiving at my pain.
Yes, it does give me some feelings of vindication that Stafford proved his haters wrong in record time. It wasn’t hard for me to see Matthew Stafford was always a Super Bowl-caliber talent, leader, and competitor. But far too many refused to believe that narrative and could not separate the QB from the hand he was dealt. Now the few haters left are on national debate shows and arguing about his place in the pantheon of historical greatness, not SOL-ers calling 97.1 from mom’s basement in Redford.
The fascinating part about Stafford’s Super Bowl run is that he didn’t even have a great season relative to his own career resume. The gold standard is the injury-shortened 2019 campaign where he played a half-season of MVP-caliber football, where simply an average second-half likely would have earned him an elusive Pro Bowl nod. Outside of that, depending on your preferred QB metric menu items, 2021 could be argued anywhere from 2nd to, I don’t know, 4th…5th best season of his career? Dude absolutely shredded Arizona and Tompa in the playoffs though, which put all three of the playoff performances he had in Detroit in the rearview.
Then, despite being in an absolute pressure cooker with his legacy on the line, delivered one of his signature 4th quarter comebacks with the whole world watching, complete with no-look passes and some NSFW gems for the mic’d up reel.
Outside of knowing I was right about Stafford all along, the feelings I’m left with are a cocktail of jealousy, embarrassment, and frustration. Jealousy that Stafford filed for divorce from Detroit and is much happier now that he is out of his toxic relationship. Embarrassment that, as if the Lions weren’t enough of a national punching bag, Stafford is proof that Detroit is a place where failure is the only option. Frustration that, for 12 years and across multiple regimes, the Lions had a quarterback good enough to win a Super Bowl, yet couldn’t win a playoff game.
This would be a lot easier if the Rams were my “Team B”.
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