I remember a few “good riddance” posts but I don’t recall a bunch of people saying that. He was a huge loss and I pin that squarely on Brad’s shoulders. He mismanaged, and quite frankly, f@&$%* up that whole situation and it started early on in that season.
You never saw one practice to see effort or issues, he couldn't stay on the floor because he generally had two fouls by the 10 minute mark, he started midway through the season and per our insiders, a deal was in place to return, the document was signed, but his father(and Morez) for a better offer and left.
To add on to that, we have no clue what he agreed to versus what Michigan magically came up with. We thought we were one of the top programs from an NIL standpoint and as two off-seasons have gone by, we clearly aren't.
If you want to say that we mismanaged the additions/subtractions that did occur.....I suppose that can be of question. Not sure anyone thought Drej was going to bust (which is an extremely strong term), don't think anyone knew that Tomi was going to regress, etc. Those are both players that we absolutely needed to come through and they haven't. Tomi's shooting has been extremely unpredictable. Nobody foresaw that. We were a LOT better last year when he came back from being ill. We got steamrolled a couple of times when he was out. He and Boswell were the only players that played even remotely well when we played Kentucky. Everyone else(including Morez) were bad.
All that said, Morez plays next to absolute proven studs. Would he be this good without Mara there? Would he be this good without Yaxal there? Those are two NBA players. Those are two phenomenal players that all take pressure off of each other. They can be aggressive and not worry about fouls because there's depth. Michigan has a ton of NIL money to make that happen + Cadeau.
He wanted to shoot threes and with all due respect to our front line players, he would have been the ONLY big on our roster and he'd have to carry a much bigger load. Could he have done it? We have no clue. When Mirk goes off, the comments around here were Morez who? Now that he's hitting a bit of a wall and our bigs got really taught a lesson, there are comments and hot takes, especially yours, that are baseless. There are WAY too many unknowns to assign blame and come to any sort of conclusions. There are too many moving parts with the portal/NIL with players that have their own agendas.
Sorry for the long post, but that type of hot take when we still have two regular season games, the Big Ten Tournament and the NCAA Tournament ahead. If Tomi gets hot and goes on an offensive heater.....it'll be amazing how different the takes will be.
