Chris Webber said last week he was giving up his final two years of eligibility and heading to the NBA, ending a Michigan run that had carried the Wolverines to the national title game in back-to-back seasons. Two days after Michigan lost to North Carolina for the second consecutive season, Webber was in Los Angeles for the John R. Wooden Awards presentation and said he still had not settled on what came next.
He said he still needed to talk through his future with coach Steve Fisher. He also left no doubt about what the college game had taken from him. “I hope one day I have an asterisk that says, ‘He won a national championship,’” Webber said, adding that leaving was hard because he was not walking away as a college champion.
The weight of the decision was obvious in the numbers. Webber led Michigan in nearly every major statistical category, and the team had won 56 of its last 71 games with him. Even so, the Wolverines had not been able to turn that run into a Big Ten title or championship rings, and the title-game loss to North Carolina hardened into something more than a close defeat when Webber’s illegal timeout call guaranteed the Tar Heels the national championship.
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The move also marked the break point for the Fab Five era. Four of the five players remained after Webber left, but Juwan Howard was the only one still on the roster who had shown the ability to control a game the way Webber did night after night. Webber said the group would not be duplicated. “There will never be another Fab Five,” he said.
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For Michigan, his departure closed the door on a team that had come within reach of the top and fallen short twice in the same way. For Webber, it was the point where the college story stopped and the professional one began, with the championship burden following him out of Ann Arbor and into the next phase of his career.
