Michigan basketball — Where was the sense of urgency in loss to Iowa?

Michigan had a chance to all but stamp its NCAA Tournament ticket with a home win against Iowa. Instead, the Wolverines looked as though they’d rather be somewhere else in an 82-71 loss. 

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Most of them, anyway. Not fifth-year senior Eli Brooks, who played with the sense of urgency you’d expect of a team trying to escape the tourney bubble. He scored 17 points and got aggressive offensively when it was clear nobody else was on his game. 

Michigan sophomore center Hunter Dickinson played well in the second half, but he had some head-scratching turnovers, too. He and Brooks weren’t enough against an Iowa team clicking on all cylinders. And while the Hawkeyes were outstanding, it helped them that U-M decided to take a half off defensively.

‘Something that hadn’t been happening to us — it had happened earlier in the year but hadn’t been happened to us recently — is we didn’t guard the ball,” Michigan associate head coach Phil Martelli said. “We never got our feet, and our feet did not allow our chest to be in front of the ball. And I thought that they played terrific offense, which we knew [they would]. They’re the leading scoring team in the Big Ten, fourth in the country.

“We never walled the ball off, and we were always playing on the side. We wanted to use zone, and when you get blitzed early, sometimes you’re like, ‘I can’t afford to give up a three, and now something will happen.’ But we stayed with it. It was part of the plan. It wasn’t a desperation move. And there were two different kinds of zones we used that managed to crawl back. But we never really got contact; there was never really game pressure.”

And it’s hard to fathom why, given how much was on the line. 

On Tuesday, the Wolverines brought it from the jump. They had a look in their eyes and were dialed in, Martelli noted. He knew before the game they weren’t going to be denied. 

Against the Hawkeyes, it was just the opposite. The Michigan players didn’t communicate defensively, allowing blow-bys and wide-open looks. Iowa made its first four triples, Jordan Bohannon went off when given too much space. 

Brooks responded to help keep Michigan close enough to make somewhat of a run in the second half. Dickinson, too, stepped up a bit, but nobody else. 

“At this point in the year, it’s well-established that Eli is a leader. But at this point in the year, you need some followers to step up, right?” Martelli said. “You can follow for a long time, but when somebody turns around and says ‘I need you’ — and it could be on the bus going to Ohio State, it could be as in, ‘Hey, did you look at your film on your iPad?’

“We still have a really nice group of people in that room. I’m not sure that we have a hell-raiser in the room.”

They’re also making some of the same mistakes they made early in the year. There were way too many shooters open on a team that makes its living killing defenses behind the arc.

“Sometimes you can have a miscommunication — where I say blue, you say red,” Martelli added. “That’s a miscommunication. And then you could have missed communications. We missed communications a number of times in the first half.

That shouldn’t be happening at this point of the year, but it is. If it happens again Sunday at Ohio State, Michigan will be perilously close to missing the NCAA Tournament with a talented but inconsistent team. 

It will be the same if they come out the way they did to start the Iowa game, too.

“We have to have emotional commitment to the game. And, calling it the way it is, we didn’t have emotional commitment to start the game,” Martelli said. “I’ll write the excuses for you and then they can repeat them if they want — Senior Night. That’s emotional. Late game … that’s emotional. All those kinds of things. But we didn’t have it.

And it really makes no sense as to why.