Though his team ultimately lost, no player gained more notoriety during last weekend’s national championship than Michigan backup point guard Spike Albrecht, who showed off his game both on the court and online.
Albrecht’s flirtatious tweet to Kate Upton after the game further fueled his status as a cult hero, and his coach thinks the 20-year-old freshman may have a chance with the two-time Sports Illustrated cover model.
“I think he’s still got a shot there,” Michigan head coach John Beilein said on Ann Arbor’s WTKA-AM on Thursday. “He’s got a shot. The young man has a lot of bravado to tweet the way he did. I think it was inspired by [fellow Wolverines guard] Nik Stauskas a little bit, he edged him on a little bit, his roommate. It’s all good. It’s fun. When it comes down to we want our kids to have great educations, we want them to win basketball games, we want them to enjoy themselves in the process. I think they’ve enjoyed themselves.”
Even if he can’t score a date with a supermodel, at least the newfound popularity gained Spike a few new Twitter followers — a few thousand, that is.
“The report is he got 20,000 new followers during the first half?” Beilein said. “The little son of a gun’s got more followers than I do. In one half. It’s an incredible story of what happened here.”
