STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — For the better part of 20 minutes Tuesday, the Michigan basketball season tipped toward irrelevancy with more than a month remaining.
The maddeningly inconsistent Wolverines had traveled to a largely vacant Bryce Jordan Center for a late-night matchup with one of the lesser teams in the Big Ten and mustered the concentration levels of students the night before spring break.
Never mind that coach Juwan Howard’s team was stuck at .500 in league play and desperate for wins of any kind amid a brutal stretch of the schedule. Never mind that a team ranked in the top five of most preseason polls was inching closer to missing the NCAA tournament altogether.