The Historic Turnaround That Took Michigan From Disaster to the Title Game

Dusty May led Michigan to the national championship game in his second season, two years after the team lost 24 of 32 games. INDIANAPOLIS -- When Dusty May took over as Michigan's basketball coach in 2024, he was stepping into an abject disaster. The team had just lost 24 of 32 games and fired its former coach the moment the season ended. Now, a little more than two years into the job, May has the Wolverines in the national championship as the odds-on favorites to cut down the nets. Michigan's pummeling of fellow No. 1 seed Arizona on Saturday night, 91-73, proved one thing beyond a doubt. May has pulled off the fastest rescue in the history of college basketball. Michigan is the first team in the history of the NCAA tournament to go from losing 75% of its games to reaching the championship game two years later, according to Stats Perform. That's not simply a reversal of fortune: It's like buying the winning lottery ticket with your very last dollar. "We're here to win," May said at the outset of the tournament. "We're not here to rebuild. We're not here to see how long this can take." May was speaking from experience: Turnarounds are his specialty. May, 49, got his start as a head coach at Florida Atlantic University -- a school with such shoddy basketball resources that he tried to avoid showing prospective recruits the locker room, or its lukewarm showers. When he took over in 2018, FAU had never notched a single NCAA tournament win. By 2023, May was no longer content just winning a game or two at March Madness. He took the Owls to the Final Four -- and within a buzzer-beater of reaching the national championship game. That's when May also learned the unfortunate consequences of turning an also-ran into a Final Four team. FAU's rivals soon circled May's program and picked over his roster. "We were in the middle of this changing landscape, and we were on the other end of it," May said. "We had all these outside influences coming to grab our players." At Michigan, May found himself on the other side of the equation. By this season, his second in Ann Arbor, he had assembled the nation's No. 2-ranked transfer class. The 7-foot-3 center Aday Mara, from UCLA, nearly doubled his scoring with the Wolverines. And Yaxel Lendeborg went from mid-major University of Alabama at Birmingham to Michigan's leading scorer and a first-team All-American. "We knew the full landscape," May said. It didn't hurt that May had been uniquely trained to spot undervalued talent -- a skill that took on new importance in the wide-open world of the transfer portal. May, who earned his start as a student manager under Bobby Knight at Indiana, spent years as an assistant coach, hopping around college basketball's backwaters -- from Ypsilanti, Mich. to Ruston, La. He spent 13 years in assistant coaching roles before he got his first crack at the top job, often working at schools with inferior resources. That only taught May to scout, scheme and sweat even harder. "His superpower is finding people who will play well together," said center Vladislav Goldin, who followed May from FAU to Michigan before signing with the Miami Heat last summer Now, May's mid-major know-how is boosted by a power-conference payroll: Wolverines general manager Kyle Church puts the team's total outlay for its roster at roughly $10 million. Michigan pairs the nation's top defense with a potent offense that's cracked triple digits in nine games, more than any other team in Division I. Their 36 wins are the most in the program's 109-year history. A 37th would mean their first national championship since 1989. "I think everyone in here," May said, "appreciates upward mobility."