It didn’t take long for Mike Smith to build a bond with Eli Brooks, even with the abnormal offseason.
Smith, a graduate transfer who spent four years at Columbia, preferred to use an analogy to describe the instant connection he formed with Brooks when he first arrived at Michigan.
“When you walk in the first day of class and you don't know anybody and you look at that one person and he looks at you and you can tell that's going to be your friend in that class, that's how Eli has been,” Smith said Friday. “That's what our relationship is like.