INDIANAPOLIS — Two hours after the confetti finished falling from the sky in Lucas Oil Stadium, Dusty May and his Michigan coaching staff left the locker room for their customary walk back to the team hotel.
May rarely rides the bus after games, instead choosing to get some exercise, and he wasn’t breaking the habit on the night he won a national championship. May pulled out his phone for the first time in two days to find 1,001 unread text messages and started scrolling as his assistants sang “Let’s Go Get ‘Em,” the rap song that blared from the Tennessee locker room before the Elite Eight and got the attention of the Wolverines, who went on to pound the Vols by 33.
“We’re a petty crew,” assistant Justin Joyner said.
May, head down, nearly missed the exit and kept scrolling as he entered the skywalk, beginning the 15-minute walk back to the Downtown Marriott. Kyle Church, his longtime assistant and general manager, told him to put his phone away. But May was trying to find any messages that required an immediate response. Like, say, from recruits.
“Someday,” May said, “this will pay off.”
Monday night’s 69-63 win over UConn was just his first championship. It seems May and Michigan could be destined for more as easily and quickly as he built a juggernaut, winning a title in his second season at a program that went 8-24 the year before he arrived.
Church has been with May for the last 13 seasons, from Louisiana Tech to Florida to Florida Atlantic and now at Michigan.
“There were 70,000 people there tonight,” Church told his boss, “and 60,000 of them were Michigan fans.”
When May got his first head coaching job at FAU in 2018, it was unimaginable that he’d be cutting down nets eight years later. He took FAU sight unseen, only to find out the program didn’t have a practice gym. His tiny office backed up to a janitor’s closet, and half the time it sounded like a construction zone. When grinding sounds could be heard on the other side of the wall, May would blurt out, “Dental chair.” The Owls lifted weights in an area so small it looked like a closet, and May had goals installed on the second level of Baldwin Arena in what was once a yoga studio so that his players could get up some extra shots.
They’d play in front of crowds so small that Church says his wife would have an entire section to herself. Average attendance? “Three-hundred-twelve.”
“Those were the fudged numbers,” May said.
Somehow, May took a program that had been to one NCAA Tournament and never won a tourney game to the Final Four in 2023. What happened next was almost more surprising. May didn’t bolt FAU and somehow convinced his entire team to return.
On Sunday, the day before May would play in his first national championship game, he was asked if all this had hit yet.
No, he said. It probably wouldn’t until Michigan’s next roster was set and transfer portal season had ended.
“He’s so process-oriented,” Church said.
May arrived at the team’s hotel meeting room at 12:56 a.m. as Saturday night turned to Sunday morning, fresh off a debriefing from assistant Mike Boynton Jr. on the walk back from a 91-73 win over Arizona, and laughed to himself at the performance he’d just witnessed. The Wildcats arrived at the Final Four with just two losses by a combined seven points. In the 30 seasons of data at KenPom.com, Michigan rates as the second-best team ever and Arizona is fourth. Michigan ran the Wildcats off the floor, and it wasn’t even as close as the score.
“Special group,” May said, as he opened his laptop to get to work. “Their love and connection.”
Then, it was on to UConn.
“Goose, how do we score on these dudes?” he asked assistant Akeem Miskdeen.
May focused the next hour-plus on an offensive plan, discussing different actions that could work against the Huskies between inside jokes amongst his staff and a brief break at 2:03 a.m. to watch the Michigan-Arizona “SportsCenter” highlights.
By the time he left the room at 2:34 a.m. to “take a nap,” he had barely said a word about the defensive plan. That’s probably because the Wolverines were built to guard just about any team, but their system happened to be perfect for their next opponent.
Last August at a coaches clinic at Alabama, May told the story of how he ended up with an elite defense in his first year at Michigan. It dated back to his time at Louisiana Tech, when head coach Mike White put him in charge of the defense and May decided he would try something he’d watched Bob Knight experiment with as a student manager during Knight’s final years at Indiana: switching, in which defenders trade their coverage assignments instead of chasing their initial marks around screens.
Louisiana Tech made a big leap on the defensive end and won a WAC title. Once White and May got to Florida, they ended up abandoning the switching in their second year and played a more traditional defense, finishing fifth in adjusted defense that season.
When May returned to the mid-major ranks as a head coach, he went back to the switching, but upon getting the Michigan gig he decided it made sense to go back to a more traditional look. He’d hired Boynton and Joyner to run the defense. Boynton had coached three top-20 defensive teams at Oklahoma State. Joyner was coming from Saint Mary’s, annually one of the best defensive teams in the country. Neither had switched at their previous schools.
But two weeks in, Boynton and Joyner came to May and told him they thought it made sense to guard just like he had at FAU, partly because Michigan had the athletic bigs and positional size to make it work. The Wolverines finished 12th in adjusted defensive efficiency in Year 1 and felt empowered to go even bigger this season, starting a frontline that included 6-foot-9 Yaxel Lendeborg, a power forward at UAB, at small forward, and then Morez Johnson, a 6-9 center formerly at Illinois, at power forward next to 7-foot-3 center Aday Mara. Johnson and Lendeborg, like Danny Wolf before them, can guard all five positions.
Dan Hurley’s offensive system, a series of intricate sets with multiple off-ball screens to get his shooters open, is a big reason why UConn won back-to-back titles and were one win away from winning three in four years. The Huskies keep moving off the ball, keep screening, and finally in the final seconds of the shot clock, a shooter will break free and all that work turns into an open 3-pointer or a slip to the basket when two defenders run to a shooter. The best way to take that away is by switching.
“It takes great discipline,” Boynton said of slowing the Huskies.
And the Wolverines had it. UConn, much like Arizona two nights earlier, could not find any comfort inside the 3-point line and shot a season-worst 12 of 35 from 2-point range. The Huskies made nine 3s, but they needed 33 attempts to get there.
“I thought for the most part we did a really good job of being disciplined and getting those guys off the line, not giving them great looks, so they were never really in a great rhythm,” Boynton said.
Coming out of a timeout with less than eight minutes to play on Monday night, May called a high pick-and-roll for Elliot Cadeau with Mara rolling to the basket. Cadeau came to the Wolverines last summer low on confidence after a disappointing sophomore year at North Carolina. May was enamored with Cadeau’s passing and believed he was a much better 3-point shooter than his UNC numbers showed. But the first few weeks of practice, Cadeau would come off a ball screen wide open and wouldn’t shoot it.
“For us to be good,” May told him, “you need to take those shots.”
May showed him film of the difference in his mechanics on makes and misses. He took him to breakfast to talk about his vision for how he could play for Michigan. Cadeau turned into a good shooter this year, and in the Sweet 16 when he missed his first four 3-point attempts, the message never changed. May and the coaches told him to keep shooting, and he made three of his final four.
“These guys are humans,” Michigan assistant Drew Williamson said. “They want to do well, but they have a level of insecurity. If things aren’t going great, can I really do this? Dusty believes in them. He understands what every single person needs when they need it.”
Dusty May was the first coach to defeat Dan Hurley in a Final Four game. (Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
At the Final Four, May trusted Cadeau to throw passes off the backboard to get around Arizona’s behemoth center Motiejus Krivas. And when his number was called in crunch time on Monday night, Cadeau got a little too brave, tossing an underhanded alley oop from the 3-point line over the head of Mara. Instead of chastising his point guard, May calmly pointed to where he thought the ball should have gone, to Nimari Burnett at the top of the key.
“When we turn the ball over or miss a shot, we never look over to the sideline and see one of the coaches throwing a fit,” Cadeau said. “They’re just all calm because they understand that we understand the mistakes that we made. There’s really no reason to react crazily.”
“We’re fortunate because we are learning that you don’t have to be a d— to be successful,” Boynton said, “You don’t have to demean your players. You can find joy in the work, and then it makes the joy and the success of that work much more impactful.”
Much has been written about Michigan’s all-transfer starting five, including four players who just arrived in Ann Arbor last summer. But May was intentional in the type of players he recruits — guys who like to pass who do not have high usage ratings — and although it seems like it might be hard to develop chemistry quickly on a microwaved roster, the Wolverines made it look easy.
Boynton has an inkling why. May told the parents of one of his first visiting recruits at Michigan about the quality of people he believed he’s always had in his program. “Assholes don’t like us,” he said. “So we usually don’t get them.”
“We want the best players but sometimes you gotta have some guard rails,” Boynton said. “Like is it gonna destroy what we’re building culturally? And if it is, he’s a hard pass without any second thoughts.”
Sandy Garrett stood on the baseline on Monday night and watched her son celebrate a championship about 90 minutes from where he grew up. Dusty loved basketball from the time he started playing biddy ball. His parents divorced early, and his dad bought a house with coal under the property, which led to the May boys inheriting some money. Garrett put a majority of it in college funds but allowed them to spend the rest on paving a basketball court.
“They’d stay out there playing until midnight, 1, 2 o’clock in the morning on the weekends,” Garrett said. “It was obvious that it was his thing.”
May tried to emulate Knight when he first coached the under-16 Bloomington Red grassroots team as a student at Indiana. It was amazing how everything seemed to come full circle on Monday night. He had coached future North Carolina national champ Sean May for that Bloomington Red program and called his former player last spring when he was recruiting Cadeau, because Sean May had coached him at UNC.
“He gave me all the intel and everything on the background,” Dusty May said, “and I just said, ‘Let me ask you one question: Would 17-, 18-year-old Sean May, who was a McDonald’s All-American, NBA player, would he want to play with Elliot Cadeau?’ And he said an expletive, yeah, absolutely.”
That’s all he needed to hear.
And just down the road from Lucas Oil at Butler was where May used to go to watch Brad Stevens, who May decided had the kind of demeanor he wanted to bring to the sideline. It was a little ironic that he was coaching against maybe the closest thing to Knight in the modern game in Hurley on Monday night. Those two are as good as it gets right now in college basketball, and it wouldn’t be shocking to see them face off on a championship night again in the next few years.
Hurley admittedly struggled with his success a year ago, and finding a little humility helped him get back to the Final Four.
Anna May, Dusty’s wife, said she had a laugh on the eve of the championship game because she doesn’t believe her husband has changed at all.
“We still don’t have a housekeeper or house cleaner,” Anna May said. “My son still does our yard work. We’re still the same people.”
Years ago as May climbed the coaching ladder, Garrett worried about her son being there enough for his three boys.
“He said, ‘Mom, how many people do you know that gets up every morning and gets to go to work and loves what they do?” Garrett said. “And I said, ‘Well, not very many.’ He said, ‘You got it.’
“I was a little worried, but I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d see him win a national championship.”
Back in the skywalk, Williamson jumped on the escalator and was immediately ribbed by May and the staff: “What are you doing, Drew?! April habits.”
May opened the doors and crossed the street to a sea of Michigan fans waiting to congratulate him, take selfies and dote on their new king.
Finally, May made his way back to the meeting room that had turned into a party room, was handed a glass of bourbon and kept his phone in his pocket.
The portal was officially open, but it could wait a few hours.
