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Michigan has a chance to join the 1989 Wolverines as champions, and surpass the more famous Fab Five originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
INDIANAPOLIS – Whatever piece of Michigan gear he might be wearing at the moment, it is hard to miss Terry Mills when he walks into a room. He stands 6-10 and has the shoulders of a long-time NBA power forward, and the gentle smile of someone whose elbow-throwing days are long past.
Mills has been the analyst on the Wolverines radio network for more than a decade. And when he’s around, there is a particular piece of attire Wolverines senior Will Tschetter always notices.
“We see that ring on his finger,” Tschetter told The Sporting News. “I’ve been seeing that thing for five years. Just to be able to see that and what that means to him, and those other guys who’ve come back for alumni events and things like that – we know how much that means to them and how much it means to the program. We just want to get another one for all those guys who came before us.”
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Michigan, which will face UConn at Lucas Oil Stadium Monday night for the 2026 NCAA Championship, which would be the second in school history. Whenever Michigan basketball history becomes a topic of discussion, however, inevitably it surrounds the quintet known for three decades as the Fab Five.
The five in question are not Mills, Glen Rice, Loy Vaught, Rumeal Robinson and Mike Griffin.
Which is interesting, because those guys and reserves Sean Higgins, Mark Hughes and Demetrius Calip, were the players who claimed UM’s only NCAA Championship, in 1989.
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Rice set the all-time March Madness scoring record with 184 points over six games, an average of 30.7 per game. Higgins hit the clinching shot in a harrowing semifinal battle against the Illinois Flyin’ Illini team. Mills blocked three shots in the final victory against Seton Hall, and Robinson hit the winning free throws after being granted a soft call on a drive with 3 seconds left in overtime.
The Fab Five comprises Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King and Ray Jackson, who ranked as college basketball’s No. 1 recruiting class in 1991 and became a sensation when coach Steve Fisher chose to start them all more than halfway through their first seasons and UM wound up winning 25 games.
The Fab Five did some amazing things: reaching the NCAA title game as freshmen and then again as sophomores, winning 41 of their 50 starts as a group. Their claim to NCAA Tournament history, though, is as one of four teams that lost the final in consecutive seasons. Butler (2010, 2011), Houston (1983, 1984) and Ohio State (1961, 1962) are the others.
They had tremendous cultural significance, for their sense of style (baggy basketball shorts) and their taste in music (a love for Public Enemy and Dr. Dre). Their influence went far beyond the customary college basketball universe, including Saturday, when the Fab Five were the announcers on an “altcast” for the Michigan-Illinois game and they were presented on the Lucas Oil videoboard and drew a loud ovation.
The history this Michigan team wants to replicate, though, is that of the 1989 team. They won the championship trophy and (as we’ve explained) rings.
“Of course we know about them. It’s a great legacy; they have a national championship,” reserve guard Howard Eisley Jr told SN. “We’re trying to chase that. We talk about them, and we definitely give them their flowers.”
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The 1989 Wolverines sent six players to the NBA, four of them as first-round draft picks. They had tremendous size and physicality in the frontcourt, and Rice became the consummate college scorer during March. They were so resilient they managed to adapt to a completely new head coach on the eve of the NCAA Tournament and still won the six games necessary to claim the title.
Coach Bill Frieder accepted an offer to take over as Arizona State head coach just before the opening game against Xavier. He thought he might continue in charge of the Wolverines through March Madness, but athletic director Bo Schembechler famously declared: “A Michigan man will coach Michigan.” Steve Fisher took over and won his first six games as a Division I head coach. The last of those delivered the championship.
This Michigan team has been more dominant than either of the other two, losing just three times and winning a school-record 36 games, including an overwhelming 19-1 in the Big Ten Conference. They are the No. 4 team in offensive efficiency and No. 1 on defense according to KenPom.com.
“I don’t think like as a group we really talk about the past teams that much,” point guard Elliot Cadeau told SN. “We try to just focus on our season right now. I feel like maybe we would talk about it after the season. But we have so much respect for both of those teams, and we look up to them, and we’re just trying to do something that they did.”
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