Nearly a month ago, the longest-tenured holdover from the John Beilein era at Michigan basketball was telling stories about the new coach in Ann Arbor, the one who guided the Wolverines to a Big Ten championship and a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament during his first complete season while earning four Coach of the Year honors along the way.
Eli Brooks, now a graduate student, originally committed to U-M in the summer of 2016, when Juwan Howard was an assistant coach for the Miami Heat. As a guard on Beilein’s team that won the Big Ten tournament and reached the national title game in 2018, Brooks had seen the program at one of its highest moments in recent memory.