INDIANAPOLIS \u2014 For weeks, Michigan\u2019s accomplishments have been accompanied by criticism.<\/p>\n
This team was bought, a group of mercenaries coming together for one year. The Wolverines, their detractors have said, are everything wrong with college basketball in the transfer portal and name, imagine and likeness era.<\/p>\n
What has not been said is how difficult it is to build a team like this on the fly, and have so much success<\/a>. If it was so easy, everyone would do it. Kentucky had the highest payroll in the sport, at a reported $20 million, and failed to advance past the first weekend of March Madness. Big-spending programs like Kansas State, Indiana and Auburn showed this year that money doesn\u2019t buy victories.<\/p>\n Michigan exited Monday night\u2019s national championship game with 37 wins in 40 games including this 69-63 win over UConn<\/a>. The Wolverines won their five previous NCAA Tournament games by an average of 21.6 points. They have looked like one of the most dominant teams this century, and their KenPom rating <\/a>is the second highest of all-time, behind only 1998-99 Duke. The database\u2019s history goes back to 1997.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"INDIANAPOLIS \u2014 For weeks, Michigan\u2019s accomplishments have been accompanied by criticism. This team was bought, a group of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":705922,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3723],"tags":[7,217,7456,84489,1043,231,772,1544,16004,66,198,196],"class_list":{"0":"post-705921","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-basketball","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-college-basketball","10":"tag-march-madness","11":"tag-march-madness-2026","12":"tag-michigan-wolverines","13":"tag-ncaa","14":"tag-ncaa-basketball","15":"tag-ncaab","16":"tag-nil-rules","17":"tag-sports","18":"tag-sports-columnists","19":"tag-sports-plus"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116371205866302994","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/705921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=705921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/705921\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/705922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=705921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=705921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=705921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}