MICHIGAN BASKETBALL COACH JOHN BEILEIN: "WHINER-IN-CHIEF"

(originally published on 11-27-14)

Things have been tough for Michigan fans lately. Have you noticed? They seem to think the world has turned against them, and they are grasping at straws.

A common charge made by the UM faithful is that Mark Dantonio and Tom Izzo are big complainers. Whenever Michigan State loses a football game or a basketball game, the comments from Dantonio and Izzo are regularly mis-construed as "complaints" by those who are focused on the color blue. Those same comments don't seem like complaints in Spartan Country, they seem more like honest explanations, but that doesn't stop the claims from surfacing on a regular basis.

But what about Michigan Basketball Coach John Beilein? As soon as his team loses his first game of the season, he goes on a tirade against ESPN, blaming the four-letter-network for delaying the start of his team's game against Villanova. We didn't hear any such bickering from the Villanova coach, but then again, they were the winners, and the Wolverines were the losers.

The tip-time was held-up by about 10-15 minutes, while another televised game was finishing up. According to Beilein, those 900 seconds represent the academic breaking-point for his studious young players. Beilein claims that arriving home on an overnight plane trip at 4:22 a.m. is completely different from arriving home at 4:07 a.m. He seems to think the earlier arrival time would facilitate attendance at a 9am class, but those 10-15 minutes make academic progress infeasible for Spike Albrecht.

Did we mention that Michigan lost the game to Villanova? And that the Villanova coach had no such complaint?

Hmmmm. It almost seems like Beilein is being a whiner, getting his dander up to complain about anything that came to mind......but only after losing the game. Maybe if Johnny B. was so outraged about the delay (that affected both teams equally) he could have held his team back and refused to play the game. That way, his student-athletes would have arrived home about three hours earlier than scheduled. Or maybe he just shouldn't take his team on road-trips or allow his games to be televised. Or something.

Turns out that John Beilein had other complaints about the game and the event as a whole, including:

• The third game official didn't have his shirt tucked all the way in during part of the second half.
• The popcorn being sold at the venue was too salty.
• There was a traffic jam earlier in the day going back and forth to pre-game practice.
• Somebody at the scorer's table had a bad case of flatulence.
• The television announcers mistakenly called his team "Michigan STATE".*

So it looks like the great John Beilein may actually be a WHINER after all. We should all remember this the next time some chUMps want to call Izzo or Dantonio "complainers".

*Ha ha, that's a joke, that never happens in real life.

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