Sorry, UConn, but Michigan has a Big Ten championship drought to end

INDIANAPOLIS — Michigan is the NIL-era superteam brought together and delivered to Lucas Oil Stadium for one reason and one reason only:

To finally end the Big Ten’s national championship drought, which dates all the way back to Michigan State’s successful run in 2000.

Nice and simple — that’s what this is all about.

In my mind, anyway. My mind, and seemingly no one else’s.

“It’s not really on our list of concerns,” guard Nimari Burnett said Sunday, a little over 24 hours before the biggest game of ’em all against blue-blood UConn.

I might be the only one keeping count, but UConn alone has won it all five times since the Big Ten last did.

“As far as us winning one for the Big Ten, we want to win one for each other first,” coach Dusty May said. “And those that have supported us and put us in position to be here, all those that have poured into everyone in our locker room. And we want to win one for the University of Michigan and our fan base.”

And what about good ol’ conference pride? Or doesn’t it exist anymore in the Wild West of college sports?

“The better we do as a league, it helps financially as TV contracts are renegotiated and things like that,” May said. “So we have to do well for us and the Big Ten if we want to continue to be on the cutting edge and hopefully be in the premier basketball league in the country.”

Well, that’s not very chill-inducing or romantic. It seems conference pride has gone out the window along with player loyalty, coach loyalty, any sort of academic continuity and, well, I’ll stop there. I didn’t come here to rant. It’s championship-game time, and Michigan — which clearly has the best collection of players, and likely spent in the very low eight figures to pull them together — is the perfect team for this moment.

“We took four guys out of the portal,” May said. “If you listen to the college basketball gospel, we took 17 of them and that’s all we have.”

On paper, the 36-3 Wolverines are a motley crew. Top player Yaxel Lendeborg took a wayward path to Michigan, first to junior-college in Arizona, then to UAB for a couple of years, along the way. Aday Mara, a 7-3 Spaniard, came from UCLA, and point guard Elliot Cadeau from North Carolina. Power forward Morez Johnson Jr. started out at Illinois. Burnett arrived last season, May’s first, after playing at both Texas Tech and Alabama. Roddy Gayle Jr. also is a second-year Wolverine after two seasons at Ohio State.

But it’s all working, there’s no doubt about that. The Wolverines profess to being unusually close — frankly, as most successful teams do — but there’s a real vibe around them that says it’s true, and that’s impressive given how little time they’ve spent together.

And though they feel no responsibility for getting the monkey off the Big Ten’s back, they are well aware of the significance of 1989, the last time a Wolverines team won the title. The reference might cause some belated twitching in fans of Illinois, which lost to that team in the Final Four. Glen Rice might still be putting buckets on the Flying Illini.

Thirty-seven years is a long time at a school that has been the national runner-up four times — in 1992, 1993, 2013 and 2018 — since then.

“We definitely know when it was, how long it’s been,” Cadeau said. “We also know when the last time was they were in the championship and lost. We’re definitely keeping it as a chip on our shoulder.”

UConn (34-5), which has won two of the last three titles, has more experience playing together. It is fitting, though, that the Huskies’ best player, big man Tarris Reed Jr., transferred in before last season from — where else? — Michigan. And who could blame him? May had brought 7-footer Vlad Goldin with him from Florida Atlantic, and Goldin was a no-doubt starter. And then May had signed Yale 7-footer Danny Wolf, another no-doubter. No more room for Reed — thanks and good luck.

One more win for Reed would have to be extremely gratifying. But there’s a superteam in his way — repping a conference whose drought is about to end.