To me, there's a difference between a season's results and a season's ramifications.

Results are somewhat siloed, constrained to that season, and at 8 and 24 and last place in the

Big Ten, yeah, the simplest description of last season's results are bleak.

Ramifications, those are more wide-reaching and can spread into the future years, maybe. The primary

ramification of last year was what Athletic Director Ward Manuel said last week on conquering

heroes, something he termed his toughest career decision to move on from Joanne Howard as the head

coach of the program. It is never fun or easy to see someone, in this case several people lose a job, even though

the ramifications of that move, first hiring Dusty May and in turn, Dusty May and his staff's

roster overhaul, all of that has earned rave reviews over the last two and a half months.

Now, from a player's standpoint, any positive previous year results could be irrelevant to a program's

long-term ramifications when a coaching change takes place because the portal opens for those

players.

It's a completely new style, setup, roster discussion, all of that.

Anymore, a coaching change seems to guarantee

that there will be significant change, especially with the roster. So in the middle of last

season, kind of understanding where things were trending with Michigan struggling in league play,

there were certainly a few individual positives to highlight, not nearly enough, obviously, but a few.

Yet we did not know in January and February in March if those positives would get an opportunity

to highlight themselves, to show themselves in a new season here with Michigan.

We recently learned that one of those positive results would indeed have

potential positive ramifications on the future for Michigan men's basketball, and that was

when Namari Burnett announced his return to the program. For Namari, last season's biggest

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