2 years after Michigan made a painful coaching change, Dusty May capped an incredible turnaround with a title

INDIANAPOLIS — A mere 755 days ago, Michigan basketball finished a miserable, degrading eight-win season and did the only thing it could have done.

Five years into a tenure that finally healed the university’s sometimes complicated relationship with the Fab Five, it had no choice but to fire Juwan Howard.

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The energy around the program was gone. The roster was threadbare. The impending coaching search was uncertain, as most of them are. Michigan has been a good program for a long time, with a lone national championship banner nearly four decades old, but it was nobody’s idea of a blue blood. There was no guarantee Michigan could land a slam-dunk coaching star.

“I love Juwan Howard,” Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel said. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I thought it was necessary. And the program is where it is today.”

Down in Florida, Dusty May was the most desired coaching prospect on the market. Though the journey had been winding, six years at Florida Atlantic — and the stunning Final Four appearance in 2023 — had put May in a position for the first time in his career to pick the next move. He had always just taken jobs, most of them sight unseen, and then told his wife Anna that it was time to pick up and move.

“She used to get angry with me because I’d just call her and say, ‘Hey, what do you think? Do you mind if I take this job?’” he said. “Even at FAU, I went to see it and before I’d seen anything I already signed the contract. That’s how impulsive I am.”

But this time was different for the Mays. Louisville wanted him badly. Vanderbilt was pitching a big investment into basketball. And then there was Michigan, a school more associated with the championships it lost in 1992 and 1993 with one of the most famous teams in the history of the sport than the title it won in 1989.

“At the end of the day, we left it up to him,” said his son, senior walk-on Charlie May. “I remember him saying, ‘I feel like I can win a national championship at University of Michigan.’”

At 11:19 p.m. on Monday night, it happened. With a 69-63 victory over UConn in the NCAA championship game at Lucas Oil Stadium, May completed one of the great two-year turnarounds in college basketball history, ended the Big Ten’s 25-year national championship drought, fulfilled a destiny the Fab Five could never quite reach and established an elite-level program that seems poised to contend for years to come.

In just his second season leading the program, head coach Dusty May led Michigan to its first NCAA title in 37 years. (Photo by Jamie Schwaberow/NCAA Photos via Getty Images)Jamie Schwaberow via Getty Images

Much like Curt Cignetti, who flipped Indiana’s football program from worst in the Big Ten to national champion in the same two-year window, May has shown once again that long rebuilds are for suckers in this era of college athletics.

For decades, fixing a program required patience and luck. Now, it’s a game of investment and competence. But even Michigan didn’t realize when it won the sweepstakes for May how big of a jackpot it had hit.

“It’s insane that the school that hasn’t won a national championship in 37 years, and we were blessed to get it done in Year 2,” Charlie May said. “This is a dream of his, and to see him accomplish his goals and reach the mountaintop is crazy. I’m super proud of him, super happy for him, and it’s special.”

It’s even more remarkable when you think back to 2024 and the spot both Michigan and May were in before they decided on each other.

For the school, it was a traumatic end to the Howard experience, which peaked in his second season with an Elite Eight bid. At Michigan, however, Howard was more than just a basketball coach. He was an important link to an era of Michigan basketball that deserved to be celebrated and reunited after it was estranged for so long over the NCAA sanctions that forced the school to erase a huge part of its history.

But even Howard could not survive on nostalgia alone. After an incident in 2022 when he struck a Wisconsin assistant, resulting in a five-game suspension, his tenure fell apart to the point where it was unsustainable.

It would have been reasonable for May to look at that situation — football school, broken program, following someone with Howard’s gigantic presence — and wonder whether Michigan had as much upside as a true basketball school like Louisville, or even Vanderbilt in an SEC that was sitting atop college athletics.

And really for the first time in his career, May had a choice. The former Indiana student manager had done a lot of moving from Eastern Michigan to Murray State to Alabama-Birmingham to Louisiana Tech to Florida as an assistant. Florida Atlantic had been a bad job, but he took it anyway. It was a chance to be a head coach.

“Even at FAU early on, we were so happy,” his wife, Anna May, told Yahoo Sports. “Dusty felt like he had surpassed any dream he ever had. He was a Division I head coach and we felt at that point he had made it.”

Four years in, however, his record was 66-56. Nobody was trying to pry him out of Boca Raton. The idea he’d have a chance to coach at a place like Michigan two years later seemed ridiculous, never mind having other choices that seemed almost as good.

“Things can change on a dime,” Anna said.

Then the 2023 Final Four happened — one of the great mid-major tournament runs in college basketball history. May could have taken a big payday right away. Instead, he waited. Florida Atlantic didn’t achieve quite as much the next year, but the job market was better. It might be the only opportunity he’d ever have to pick a place that could get him to the very top of the profession.

The Mays recalled their time when he was a 29-year-old in his first full-time assistant job at Eastern Michigan, a school that exists in the shadow of Ann Arbor. The combination of lifestyle and opportunity pulled them back.

“We thought it was a great time to get back to the Midwest,” Dusty May said. “We were empty nesters and just wanted something different and felt like Michigan was a place, ultimately, with the changing landscape, that we could retain really good players. I felt like it was the type of place I’d love to coach at.”

With the resources to acquire players that could help turn the program around quickly, Manuel expected May to be competitive right away. By the end of last season, when Michigan reached the Sweet 16, it seemed clear they had both made the right decision.

This year was another level. All the way back to November, Michigan flashed a level of dominance nobody in the country could match, beating quality teams like Gonzaga by 40 points. And then, in the final game of the season, when the opponent and a knee injury to Yaxel Lendeborg required Michigan to dig deep, its toughness and togetherness carried the Wolverines to the finish line.

Nobody could have imagined it would happen this fast.

“I’m surprised he had it in two years, but what I saw in him is how he talked about building a team and putting people in the right place and connecting with people, and you can see it in the way this team plays for each other,” Manuel said. “He has shown all of that in the last two years.”

For some corners of college sports fandom, May and Michigan’s roster have become the avatar for what’s wrong with the current system. Rather than going out and recruiting a new Fab Five and cultivating it from the ground up, May got four of Michigan’s five starters out of the transfer portal.  But you could also look at it the other way: If you have an opportunity to improve your team quickly, why would you choose to go through the growing pains that come with a traditional rebuild?

“I’ve just seen how hard he’s worked for the 22 years I’ve been alive,” Charlie May said. “It’s definitely special. We bounced around a lot. We all sacrificed as a family. He sacrificed, my mom sacrificed a ton. I’m just very grateful for this experience.”

It took May nearly two decades to build up his career to the point where he could call his own shot about where he was going to coach. Finally, with Michigan’s resources, there was no need to be patient anymore.

And two years after one of the low points in the history of Michigan basketball, a painful decision followed by an inspired marriage produced one of the great college seasons of all time.

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