INDIANAPOLIS — He had greeted every well wisher with a firm handshake and a gleam in his eye. He had answered a parade of questions with his usual dispassion, breaking down the game as if he were discussing a Sunday morning golf round with his buddies. His tone, his language, his aspect and his demeanor were entirely of a piece with how he had comported himself all night, all season, and all his life.
Finally, Dusty May stopped catering to everyone else and indulged in a little self-satisfaction. “One Shining Moment,” the iconic anthem of the NCAA Tournament, was being shown on the giant screens hanging overhead in Lucas Oil Stadium. Normally when this moment comes, the championship team gathers on the platform, but since no one had corralled everyone together, May was left to bask by himself. He stood on the court, arms crossed, a backwards baseball cap atop his short-cropped hair. He raised his fist a couple times and at one point extended his left index finger, but otherwise May watched with a reserved bearing and gratified smile. Everyone understood he owned the moment. He didn’t need to say it.
It was ironic that as his greatest triumph was being coronated, May was standing alone, because although he is relatively young (49 years old) and his career is just getting started (this is his seventh season as a head coach), May has displayed the wisdom of a sage and the touch of a maestro. This Indiana native who got his start as a student manager for Bob Knight’s teams, who bounced around six different staffs before taking the helm at FAU in 2018 and leading that mid-major school to the 2023 Final Four, who came to Ann Arbor two years ago to resurrect a once-proud program, returned to his native state, and on Monday night led the Michigan Wolverines to a national championship by virtue of a 69-63 win over UConn. May’s intellect, emotional consistency and uncanny ability to gather parts and quickly mesh them into a finely-tuned machine suggests that it won’t be long before he is once again standing astride the sport he cherishes. The sport of college basketball might say that it’s getting Dusty in here.
The 2026 NCAA championship game was hardly a thing of beauty. Dan Hurley’s pugnacious Huskies forced the Wolverines into a Big East-style slug fest. The combined 34.1 field goal percentage between the teams was the second-worst ever for an NCAA championship game. Michigan offset its 2-for-15 performance from three-point range (0 for 8 in the first half) by knocking down 25 of its 28 free throws. The Wolverines outscored the Huskies 36-22 in the paint and overcame a limited effort from their badly hobbled All-American forward Yaxel Lendeborg, who sustained ankle and knee injuries during Saturday’s semifinal win over Arizona and finished with 13 points and 2 rebounds in 36 grimacing minutes.
Though Michigan was in control throughout the night, leading for all but six minutes and throughout the entire second half, the Huskies made one last push in the end, closing to within 67-63 with 37 seconds to play. After Michigan senior guard Roddy Gayle missed a pair of throws, UConn had a chance to cut it to one when senior forward Alex Karaban pulled up for one of his patented three-point daggers. This time, alas, Karaban’s launch came up short. Michigan freshman guard Trey McKenney corralled the rebound, and the Wolverines salted away their second national championship (first since 1989) and ended the Big Ten’s 26-year drought without a title in men’s basketball.
“All year we’ve been just finding ways to win,” said junior point guard Elliott Cadeau, who was named the Final Four’s Most Outstanding Player after going for 19 points, 3 rebounds and 2 assists. “We made two threes the whole game. We weren’t making shots. We had a couple assists (seven), not as many as we usually do, but we’ve constantly just been finding ways to win all year, no matter how everybody is playing.”
The win capped off a remarkable stretch for May, who alighted in Ann Arbor in the spring of 2024 after the school fired a member of its hallowed Fab Five, Juwan Howard, following a disastrous eight-win season. During a time when so many coaches struggle after turning over their rosters en masse, May has now assembled new parts superbly for two straight seasons. Last year, he brought in seven transfers and led Michigan to a second-place finish in the Big Ten and a spot in the Sweet Sixteen, where it lost to Auburn. A year ago, May signed four players out of the transfer portal, all of whom became full-time starters. Besides the freshman McKenney, the only player in Michigan’s rotation who didn’t start his college career elsewhere was sophomore guard L.J. Cason, who suffered a torn ACL in his right knee in late February and was thus unavailable for the postseason.
With his understated intensity and aw-shucks midwestern disposition, May insists he has not found any kind of secret sauce for the transfer portal era. But this championship stands as a testament to his knack fomenting chemistry on the fly. “I’ve been coaching 25 years, and there’s never been anything that resembled this as far as guys having this much talent and giving up everything for the team like this group,” May said amidst a sea maize-and-blue confetti. “It just shows when you have a staff, a team, a support staff, everyone pulling in the same direction, rowing in the same direction all the time, you just figure out different solutions.”
The win was hard-earned, and in Lendeborg’s case, quite painful. Ever since Saturday night’s game ended, Lendeborg, who transferred last year from UAB, was virtually inseparable from the team’s trainer, Chris Williams. An MRI in his knee showed no structural damage, but it was badly sprained. Lendeborg had no restrictions as he went through practice on Monday morning, but he was tentative throughout the game against UConn, especially when he tried to plant his left leg to explode towards the rim in what has become his signature move.
Yet, May trusted Lendeborg enough that he played him for 36 minutes, more than any other Wolverine. As the game progressed in the second half, Lendeborg attacked the rim more aggressively. He finished with 13 points and 2 rebounds, but he was far from the All-American who had shined for Michigan all winter. “I was very tentative this game. I felt like I was pretty much holding our team down,” Lendeborg said. “It took a lot to get on the court, honestly, and to stay on there. I was dealing with a lot of mental issues today. These guys all leaned in on me and helped me out, helped me dig myself out of the hole and just continue to keep fighting.”
His teammates marveled at his ability to power through. “That was resilience,” Gayle said. “He was playing on one leg almost. It just speaks to his character. Nothing was stopping him from being able to give his all tonight.”
UConn’s loss ended Hurley’s bid to win a third NCAA championship in four years, but the Huskies showed tremendous grit during the NCAA Tournament, most notably while erasing a 19-point first-half deficit against Duke in the East Regional final. The Wolverines gave them every opportunity to steal a win Monday night, but their imposing front line of 7-foot-3 junior center Aday Mara (8 points, 4 rebounds) and 6-foot-9 sophomore forward Morez Johnson Jr. (12 points, 10 rebounds) proved to be too much. The Huskies also did themselves no favors by shooting 9 of 33 from three. Freshman guard Braylon Mullins, the hero of the Duke win, shot 3 of 10 from three (4 of 17 overall) in what was almost certainly his last college game before he heads for the NBA Draft.
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“It’s one of the better teams that I’ve played, certainly since I’ve been a college basketball coach,” Hurley said of the Wolverines. “They’re just so hard to score against at the rim. I could talk about the threes that we missed, and I thought we had a lot of good threes that we missed. But they made it so tough on us around the rim. They’re just so tall.”
Monday’s win, and the two years that preceded it, validated the decision of Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel to bring May to Ann Arbor after firing Howard. “He’s a connector,” Manuel said on the court after the game. “He connects with people, and he connects others with each other in a way that helps them produce success collectively. The first thing he looks at in a player is, does he pass the ball? It’s not about who’s the best player on the court, it’s about who’s the best person to play with others.”
May doesn’t wear his emotions the way so many of his counterparts do, most notably Hurley, but he still makes his points with his persistent intensity, his attention to detail, and his folksy way of communicating. “He’s a nerd, man,” Gayle said. “He loves basketball. He watches basketball twenty-four, seven. He just finds different ways to be successful.”
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When it was over, May continued to seek out connections by thanking last year’s Michigan team, his players and staff at FAU, and everyone else who had helped him along in his career. He talked about how he would remind his players after a bad practice that their goal was to hang a “center banner” in Crisler Center next to the lone championship banner that has been hanging there since 1989. The win came a lot harder than it did on Saturday, when the Wolverines ran an extremely talented Arizona team off the court 91-73, but in many ways it was a more fitting coda to his second season in Ann Arbor. The win wouldn’t have happened if the team didn’t figure out a way to get it done together.
In the end, that will be how the 2026 champs will be remembered. “When you bring a group this talented together and they decide from the beginning that they’re going to do it this way and they never waver and they never change, that’s probably the most uncommon thing in athletics now,” May said. “It’s a tribute to their character but also those in their circles around them, their coaches, their parents, their mentors. They allowed these guys to give themselves up for the group, and it’s never guaranteed, but for these guys to cut down the nets after all they’ve sacrificed is pretty special.”
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