Michigan Basketball: Wolverines get assist from Spartans in Big Ten race
Michigan State is on a bit of a roll and helped Michigan basketball’s Big Ten hopes with an upset of Illinois.
After Michigan basketball beat Ohio State on Sunday, the race for the Big Ten championship was basically down to two teams: The Wolverines and Illinois.
Michigan is set to play Illinois next week and while that’s still going to be a very important game, the Wolverines took a step closer to winning the league title thanks to a stumble by the Fighting Illini against Michigan State on Tuesday night.
Since Michigan isn’t going to play 20 games, the league title is going to be decided by winning percentage. And basically, as long as U-M has fewer losses than Illinois or any other Big Ten team, it will wind up with a better winning percentage.
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Illinois had just three losses before last night’s game against MSU. So if Illinois had won out, including a win over Michigan, the Wolverines, assuming they lost to Illinois, would need to win all of their other games in order to secure the title.
But now that Illinois dropped to four losses, the magic number for Michigan basketball to clinch the Big Ten championship is down to three.
Michigan has five games left. If the Wolverines win three of those games, even if one of those wins isn’t over Illinois, they will be the Big Ten champs. They would finish with only three losses and every other team has at least four.
But, if Michigan is able to beat Illinois, it would only need one other win to capture the Big Ten regular-season championship.
Essentially, going into last night, the magic number between Michigan wins and Illinois losses was four and now that’s down to three.
That’s why the magic number gets reduced to one if U-M beats Illinois. So quite literally, if Michigan wins one of its next two games, then beats the Illini, it’s Big Ten champs.
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There’s still work to do, but it would be the first outright Big Ten title since 2014 and a major achievement for Juwan Howard and all the players if it comes to fruition.