CHICAGO — The 2024 men’s college basketball coaching carousel had the potential to reshape the sport for a generation.
Kentucky opened after John Calipari’s departure for Arkansas. So, too, did Louisville, its biggest rival, down in the dumps after the miserable Kenny Payne era. Big football brands Michigan and Ohio State (also rivals) entered the market a few weeks apart, and a handful of other plum jobs popped open.
The prize of 2024, at least before Calipari suddenly became available, was Dusty May, the rising superstar with plenty of cache after taking FAU on a miracle run to the Final Four. The question was not if May would get a high-major job that cycle, but which one he’d take. If you were in the market for a coach, you were in the market for May. He held all the cards, and he knew it.
The four jobs that seemed most likely: Ohio State, Vanderbilt, Louisville and Michigan, a somewhat surprise entry to the carousel after pulling the plug on program legend Juwan Howard after a disastrous 8–24 campaign.
At one point, Ohio State seemed positioned as the leader; it helped it had gotten a head start in its pursuit after firing Chris Holtmann in mid-February. But in doing so, the Buckeyes had given top assistant Jake Diebler a chance to prove himself, and Ohio State showed enough life under its interim coach that the Buckeyes decided to give him a shot at the full-time gig. That opened the door for their biggest rival, competing with Vanderbilt and Louisville in the May sweepstakes.
“What I told him is that he would have what we have here today, the support from our fans, the support from me, to make sure he’d have the things he needs to drive success,” Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel says. “I think it just all came together in terms of him seeing that our vision is for success: in basketball, football, all our sports. And he’s led it that way.”
In the end, May says his choice came down to a lot more than simply basketball. In February, he said Michigan was “in [worse] position to win a championship than anywhere else, of all the schools we talked to in that moment.” But the decision was more complex than that. His wife, Anna, was “a big fan of Ann Arbor” and “everything that goes with the University of Michigan.”
“It ultimately came down to, where would we want our sons to go to college and feel like they’re going to grow and develop and be better because they’re in that environment?” May said in February. “And Michigan was the place that we felt best about. And when you feel that way about your kids, then obviously you surely think that you have the belief and confidence that you can acquire and recruit elite people on your basketball team. It was really that simple.”
The decision has shaped the power dynamics around the sport today, albeit much more quickly than even May expected, and set the stage for Michigan to build a monster. The latest evidence of that burgeoning beast came Sunday, when the Wolverines thoroughly dispatched Tennessee, 95–62, to lock up a Final Four berth. In two years, Michigan has gone from eight wins to 35 and counting, one of the most impressive rebuilds in the sport’s history, all engineered by a coach who seems poised to be one of the dominant faces of the next generation in college basketball.
May says he knew he made the right choice from the moment he landed in Ann Arbor for the first time, job in hand. He had spent the last decade in Florida, first as an assistant for Mike White at Florida and then as the head coach at FAU, but he and Anna were Midwest people at heart. Ann Arbor was a natural fit.
“We had been away from the Midwest for 15 or 16 years and, to be honest, we missed the people,” May says. “The people make every place, we’ve loved it everywhere we’ve lived, but we did feel like it was almost like a full-circle moment.”
And he was right that it would be an easy sell to bring elite people to Ann Arbor. Among the first converts: his son Charlie, who had spent the first two years of college as a walk-on at UCF. Charlie had always liked the idea of Michigan the most among his dad’s options, but tried not to weigh in. And even after Dusty May took the job in Ann Arbor, Charlie wasn’t fully sold on leaving UCF. That is, until he made the trip up for his dad’s introductory news conference. One night having dinner with an old high school friend in Ann Arbor was enough to sway him.
“I went to dinner with him and walked around town and I was like, ‘Man, I gotta come here,’ ” Charlie May says. “I was like, I gotta do whatever I can to go to Michigan.”
It was that type of reaction that Dusty May was banking on when he took the job, not just from those in his bloodline but from top talent from across the country. May didn’t just import his FAU roster to Ann Arbor. He largely started fresh outside of big man Vlad Goldin with players he wasn’t familiar with, going into the portal for key pieces and keeping two rotation cogs (Nimari Burnett and Will Tschetter). Burnett wasn’t sure what to do after Howard was fired, but had a preexisting relationship with FAU star Johnell Davis who raved about May. Burnett decided to give him a chance, and two years later he got to cut down nets in Chicago where he grew up.
“The culture of his teams, the culture of this program, it clicked immediately with his energy, his care about us off the court,” Burnett says.
A successful first year that included a Big Ten tournament title and Sweet 16 trip only added further wings to what May was building. The development of Yale transfer Danny Wolf into an NBA player and the success of playing two bigs in Wolf and Goldin made Michigan’s sell to prospective recruits even more potent. The three frontcourt players it added last spring—Yaxel Lendeborg, Aday Mara and Morez Johnson Jr.—are all future NBA players, maybe first-round picks at that.
“It’s what I was looking for, you know, playing with bigs, the way [May] was playing with both of them,” Mara says. “It was pretty attractive to me once I entered the portal. I would say it was an easy decision to go to [to Michigan].”
But perhaps May’s most impressive coaching job yet has come in the four months since the Wolverines pulverized the competition at Players Era in Las Vegas, capped off with a 40-point drubbing of Gonzaga. It was going to be almost impossible for the Wolverines to maintain the standard of that week, let alone continue to grow, especially with all the added expectation and pressure that comes with being a clearly great team. Keeping his team’s focus on building habits for March and April was more important than any X’s and O’s adjustment or game plan, and May expertly kept his team’s eyes on the grand prize.
“It’s difficult not to make it about you because the people you’re talking to are making it about you,” May said. “If you’re not mature and you’re not connected as a group and you’re not willing to be held accountable by the staff and each other, then it’s not going to work. Once it creeps in it’s almost impossible to weed it out. So our guys never let it in. Trust me, they all had different fires that were ignited by our people and they stayed the course and stayed about each other. And that’s ultimately why we’re here … We weren’t a superteam, but these guys became super teammates.”
And all that is why May was such an obvious star when Manuel won out for his services two springs ago. There are no sure things in coaching searches, but May’s track record at FAU made him as close to one as you can get. That May is headed back to the Final Four should come as no surprise to anyone who has closely followed his journey as a coach; the only potential surprise is that it happened in Year 2.
But as janitors cleaned confetti off the floor at the United Center and Wolverine coaches began thinking about a matchup Saturday night against Arizona, another potentially transformational coaching carousel spins away. The biggest prize at the moment is North Carolina, a job many would consider the best in the sport. And it’s possible Kansas, which has as good a case to top North Carolina as any, could open with a Bill Self retirement before all is said and done. The Tar Heels and any other top-tier jobs figure to shoot their shot with May, wooing him with near-unlimited resources.
But after winning out in the May sweepstakes two years ago, Manuel and the Wolverines have no plans of letting their superstar head coach walk away.
“Listen man, every AD in America would want to have a coach that other people want,” Manuel says. “We’ll deal with it, we’ll work through it. I want Dusty to finish his career here at Michigan, and I’ll work to make sure he’s happy and we have what we need, he has what he needs to succeed. That’s it. Period. Look around you, what better job in America is there than this?”
More March Madness From Sports Illustrated
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Dusty May Turned Michigan Into a Juggernaut Faster Than Anyone Expected.
