Dusty May might be the master of college basketball’s new landscape after engineering Michigan’s rapid rise
By Kyle Feldscher, CNN
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Ahead of the Sweet 16 last weekend, a graphic went viral on X that showed the schools at which each team’s starting lineup began their college career.
A casual fan of college ball would have had a hard time recognizing which lineup belonged to the University of Michigan.
Head coach Dusty May has engineered a remarkable turnaround for the Wolverines. In just two years, bouncing back from the moribund final year of Juwan Howard’s tenure – an 8-24 record, a last-place finish in the Big Ten – to become arguably one of the favorites to cut down the nets on Monday in the national title game. That success has largely come through the transfer portal – of the starters in U-M’s Elite Eight game against Tennessee, zero began their career at Michigan.
This weekend, May focuses on bringing a national title to Ann Arbor. After that, it’s a matter of ensuring the rapid success he’s found at Michigan turns into a lasting run and an identity as a program. It’s work that’s been underway since the moment he arrived in Washtenaw County, Michigan.
“I want to give our team last year a lot of credit for the way those guys played and a couple of them left, a couple of them stayed, a couple of them went to the NBA,” May said on Thursday.
“But those guys – when you move up, there’s a lot of questions when you go from low-major (college basketball) to high-major, whatever. There are a lot of questions. When you’re recruiting, you’re recruiting against that every day. When you haven’t had a guy drafted in the first round, you’re recruiting against that every day. There’s certain things you’re always recruiting against. Last year’s team gave us an identity that ‘this is the way we’re going to play.’”
The process of building an identity in his first season at the helm at U-M has paid dividends in year two.
Michigan has looked like one of the best teams in college basketball – maybe even one of the best college basketball teams in recent memory – since the start of the season when it was blowing away teams by 30 or more points. Since then, May’s team has gone 35-3, winning the Big Ten regular season title comfortably and then cruising into the Final Four where a matchup against Arizona awaits on Saturday night.
Winning in year one helped set year two up for success. A run to the Final Four could make it a lot easier than it was to get the pieces in place originally.
“Recruiting wasn’t near as difficult last year as it was the first year, and hopefully each year as recruiting becomes more niche, and we have an identity and a brand, that people choose us,” May said on Thursday.
Forging a new path
Recruiting also gets easier when the wins start stacking up.
In just two years at Michigan, May has set a new school record for being the fastest coach in program history to rack up 50 wins. He’s 62-13 over his first two seasons in Ann Arbor, coming on the back of five winning seasons at FAU.
May came to the Wolverines after running the program at Florida Atlantic University, taking that program to the Final Four in 2023 and coming up one buzzer-beater shy of playing for a national title.
That run to the tournament’s final weekend is helping May and his staff prepare the Wolverines for this week in Indianapolis. But it’s the lessons he learned the next season, when FAU brought back all of its key players from that Final Four run, that have shaped his philosophy at Michigan.
“We brought back our entire team after the Final Four run at FAU, and it was the hardest coaching job, the most difficult year of my life as an assistant, as a video coordinator, as a head coach. That was the most difficult year for a number of reasons,” he said Thursday. “So, that year it would have been much healthier for the group if we didn’t retain everyone. … we had these guys that were Power Five starters that weren’t able to play in games.”
He added, “When you talk about retention, retention is not always good. It’s retaining the right guys and making sure they still have the same agenda and objectives, which is to win and to do it together.”
It’s an almost sacrilegious take, especially in college sports where roster continuity has traditionally been one of the keys to the championship kingdom. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a culture at Michigan, though – and the tone was set by the players who did return after the 2024-25 season.
“The guys that we retained earned the trust of our new guys immediately because they wanted to win. There was no hidden agendas. They were all about the team,” May told reporters. “They taught all of our unwritten rules, they expressed how much Michigan meant to them and what this place can do for all of us after we’re done playing.”
But, as May has made clear, that time of tradition in college basketball has passed. He’s quickly becoming one of the masters of the new landscape.
Ruffling feathers
To hear May speak is to realize that the old way of doing things in college basketball is dead – or at least on life support.
“We talk about the transfer portal and all this other stuff. I think more than ever we used to choose players, and we used to convince them to come play for us – whether it’s because we were showering them with attention, showing them more love, or we’d simply been recruiting them longer,” May said, describing the recruiting process that played out for decades before Name, Image and Likeness deals and the loosening of transfer portal rules changed the landscape of college sports.
“In our opinion we always thought those were pretty shallow reasons to choose a university because a coach came to more 6 a.m. workouts, things like that.”
“Now the players – and each coach may have a different opinion, but the players are choosing us. When we make contact with the player, the first thing they do is slide into the DMs and message all of our players that we’ve coached in the past and they do more homework and intel on us than we do on them.”
Embracing that changed dynamic hasn’t just revolutionized Michigan’s place in the college basketball world, it’s ruffled feathers along the way.
Some of May’s relationships with his fellow Big Ten coaches seem a little frosty, if post-game handshakes are any indication, and there’s frequent speculation that May is one of the unnamed villains in the complaints other coaches make about programs who take an aggressive approach to transfer portal targets.
Whether that’s true or not seems to be beside the point at this stage of college basketball. May will have to stay aggressive in the transfer portal as many of his best players – Yaxel Lendeborg, Aday Mara, Elliot Cadeau among them – are upper classmen who are either out of eligibility or could be looking at the NBA after this season.
May’s perspective now is that kind of situation is much easier than it would have been five or 10 years ago.
“Recruiting has changed so much, and I’m going to echo Coach (Rick) Barnes from Tennessee last week, it’s not that bad,” May said. “We used to recruit guys for three years and spend 80, 100, 200 man-hours away from our families begging these 15-to-18 year olds to come play at our university, and then they decide to go another direction, and you just think of all the time and resources you’ve wasted.
“Recruiting has been streamlined and it’s much more efficient than it’s ever been.”
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