INDIANAPOLIS — Twenty years ago, well before he’d piece together a roster to produce the best basketball team in Michigan history, Dusty May didn’t know a ton about the school.
He was living a stone’s throw from Ann Arbor at the time, working as a low-level assistant coach at Eastern Michigan. But all he really knew was that the Wolverines had won a national championship in 1989 — of course the Indiana kid was a fan of the game.
By the time May was offered an opportunity to become the head coach of that same school in 2024, he knew a lot more. He thought Michigan could be the right place at the right time to take advantage of the changing college landscape, a school that could attract and retain top-tier talent. May thought Michigan could be a place that would be hard to leave.
Those who stay will be champions, as legendary football coach Bo Schembechler once said.
And that’s undoubtedly true for the trio of Wolverines who bathed in maize and blue confetti after winning a national championship here on Monday night, just two years removed from a bleak eight-win campaign in Juwan Howard’s final season. Think about this: Nimari Burnett started at guard in the title game after enduring 24 losses — a Michigan program record — in 2023-24.
But it’s time to update Bo’s famous saying. In the NIL and transfer portal era, those who come to Michigan will be champions, too. They got to cut the nets down, too.
May’s Michigan team became the first to win a national championship with five starters who had all transferred over the course of their college careers. Four of them transferred in ahead of this current season, with Yaxel Lendeborg coming from UAB, Elliot Cadeau from North Carolina, Aday Mara from UCLA and Morez Johnson Jr. from Illinois.
That they could mesh, meld, and then mold themselves into a championship-caliber team in one season is a testament to the players themselves. It’s also a credit to the coaching staff, which wasn’t always so sure that this experiment was going to work. The talent was never in question; spacing and communication needed to improve if the Wolverines wanted to play with three bigs out on the floor at once.
And so, they figured out their spacing, and they learned to how to stay connected on-court, with Cadeau serving as “the pass-first quarterback on the floor at all times,” as May put it. Yes, the same Cadeau who admitted on Monday night that he’d been pretty down on himself after leaving UNC after a turnover-filled sophomore season. The same Cadeau that May now calls “a savant” and “brilliant.” The same Cadeau who was named the Final Four’s most outstanding player.
Sometimes, a fresh start is all a player needs. The right coach, the right system. A staff that pieced together players who had been overlooked or underutilized elsewhere.
“When the Oklahoma City Thunder won the championship last year … I wasn’t judging them because Shai (Gilgeous-) Alexander was drafted by the Clippers or because they signed Isaiah Hartenstein as a free agent,” May said. “I thought, wow, those guys played beautiful basketball, that’s a great team, that’s a real model for young players to watch, a group that obviously cared about each other, that played the game the right way, that represented their organization, their city, their families, their last names.”
That’s how May views this Michigan roster, and the 37-3 record speaks volumes, too. These Wolverines just won the program’s second national championship, and first since 1989. The Fab Five came close but never cut down the nets. John Beilein took two teams to the national championship game but never won one, either.
Beilein made sure he was there at Lucas Oil Stadium on Monday night. He sat right in the front row, flanked by his son, Mark, and surrounded by Michigan fans who kept telling him it was he who got the ball rolling. Beilein would wave his hand, pooh-poohing the praise to keep the focus on May’s team and the title it was about to secure.
But the fans were right. Beilein inherited a mess when he took over the Michigan program in 2007. The school wasn’t investing in the resources or facilities like it needed to if it wanted to be nationally relevant in the sport, and barely anyone bothered to attend games. In his second season, he took the Wolverines to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in more than a decade. He’d eventually make it all the way to the title game — twice — but come up just short against Louisville (in 2013) and fall to the buzzsaw that was Villanova (in 2018).
Moments after the buzzer sounded and the score went final — Michigan beating UConn, 69-63 — Beilein said he wasn’t sure what he was feeling. He kept thinking about all the years of hard work he’d put into building the program and how much it meant to be surrounded by tens of thousands of Michigan supporters who lived for and loved that basketball program.
“I’m really so happy to be a small part of the journey,” Beilein said. He complimented the way May’s team played and the way the players shared the ball. He hoped that was a trademark of Beilein’s best teams, too. (It was.)
“It’s as good a team as I’ve seen in a long time,” Beilein said. “A long time.”
It was a team that proved it could win in very different ways. Like, say, a Big East brawl with UConn. Or a track meet against other elite athletes. It could win along the perimeter or by dominating the paint and making life difficult for opponents around the rim. It was a complete team with very few weaknesses. Huskies coach Dan Hurley said after the game that the Wolverines were “clearly the best team in the country this year.”
It’s not always the case that the nation’s best team actually wins the six games required to capture an NCAA Tournament title. A tough matchup or a fluke shot can derail what could have been. It is hard to survive and advance, over and over again.
But Michigan was the rightful champion, and it was also a uniquely modern champion. Most of its players had chosen to come to Ann Arbor, and the others had chosen to stay. And they all became champions.
