7'1 Hunter Dickinson opened his boxed breakfast Tuesday morning in the NCAA Tournament bubble and just about lost his appetite. The bacon looked soft, the eggs looked lumpy and the home fries looked undercooked.
"Impeccable breakfast from the NCAA," Dickinson wrote on Instragram while sharing a picture of his meal.
Dickinson's post went viral, and Juwan Howard called a team meeting Tuesday night at Michigan's hotel in Indianapolis to tell his players to "buy in and embrace the suck."
"So from now on," Dickinson said Wednesday morning, "you won't hear me complain about the food or anything like that."
Besides, the Big Ten Rookie of the Year is craving something more. Something lasting. Something that will place his team and perhaps his name in March Madness lore. Dickinson wants to raise a banner, and he wouldn't mind raising his NBA profile in the process. Just like Howard did by averaging 29 points in his final NCAA Tournament at Michigan before going fifth overall in the draft.
Which was the other part of the coach's message to his team on Tuesday night.
"As a team with players who have aspirations to play beyond just college, the NCAA Tournament can set you up for life," Dickinson said. "So this is a big opportunity for a lot of players on our team to make their name. As long as we play together and share the game, everybody will be able to get the amount of recognition that they want."
Dickinson isn't poised to turn pro next season. Not for now, anyway. Franz Wagner is the Michigan player with the most to gain in the next few weeks. But Dickinson is the team's leading scorer, and his spotlight will be even brighter with senior captain and fellow NBA hopeful Isaiah Livers injured and likely out for the tournament. A larger burden is a larger opportunity.
"A lot of people have been in my ear talking about how since Isaiah’s down, you really need to step up, really try to put the team on your back. I don’t really buy into that," Dickinson said. "It’s going to be a team effort, and I just want to do my part in helping the team win."
The loss of Livers has soured the pundits on Michigan's chances. A top-five team for much of the year is now being picked as the first No. 1 seed to go home. Of course, many of those same pundits left Michigan out of the top 25 to start the season. So if the Wolverines aren't the popular choice publicly, that's fine, because "we’re the popular choice in this room," Dickinson said.
"We’re not focusing on what the media has to say because we don’t really care," he went on. "If we cared what the media said at the beginning of the season, we would’ve been in sixth place in the Big Ten and not ranked in the top five."
Instead, they focused on themselves, won their conference and wound up here, hungry to, uhm, bring home the bacon.
"This is what every college player looks forward to, the NCAA Tournament," Howard said Wednesday. "I know Hunter, his mouth is watering for this opportunity right now."