In the aftermath of Wednesday's shocking loss to Oklahoma, head coach Dusty May said that Michigan needed to develop more of a, quote, killer mindset.

When you're 8 and 3, and in most metrics, potentially elite basketball team, but you saw double digit leads evaporated in all three of your losses, yeah, that's a logical next step, a logical desired point of growth.

Now, by no means can a person or a team create a mindset from one occurrence or one contest,

but Sunday marked a good first step for a few reasons. Most notably, of course, the result,

Wolverines never trailed. They limited a team that shoots a ton of threes.

45% of their attempts coming in were from downtown to just 8 of 38 from deep.

And Michigan offensively shot 63% from the floor with a mark that was north of 70% for a pretty good chunk of this game.

But also, Michigan was able to accomplish this with the holiday break awaiting on the back end.

It was a point of discussion for Dusty May, mainly because, as he told me on the pregame show along the radio network,

he tried to exploit this type of a game when coaching in a mid-major.

These games are terrifying for the high majors, and I speak from experience every year that I was a mid-major, assistant or head coach. We try to

schedule every high major we could before and after Christmas because we thought their concentration,

their focus, their intensity might not be up to the standards, and they might be looking

towards something else, Big Ten play or whatever else. So we know it's going to be a

challenge. It's a real test of our maturity. They're probably too good of a team to be

playing this time of year if you don't have a mature group. Well we gamble that we

have a mature group. They're they're gonna test us. They shoot the ball well. They're

capable of coming in here and hit 23s. They're going to spread us out and drive us.

So it's a lot of what we need to improve. But also, we need to go into Christmas break,

feeling good about the way we performed. Now, that strategy did work for Dusty at times while he was

at FAU. Look back at his first season with the Owls. After the holiday break in the 2018, 2019 season,

the Owls won in overtime in Champaign over Illinois.

...