Dusty May, the Latter-Day Coach K

College hoops experienced another ground-shifting moment this season with the Wolverines’ two comfortable defeats of Michigan State, the defending Big Ten champions whom Michigan would dethrone by an unfathomable four-game margin. In 1984 Krzyzewski had lashed out in anger and frustration; Michigan coach Dusty May made his statement with a studied cool. And May’s response didn’t seem as dramatic in part because it played out in two parts.

In the hour before the teams’ first meeting, in East Lansing, May lounged courtside while invective from the Spartans’ student section washed over him. What kept him there, outwardly unperturbed? Big Man 101: When you get position, you seal it. “There’s no way I’m ducking and running from this smoke now,” he explained, sounding hip and old-school at the same time.

Then, pouncing on a routine question at a press conference the next week, May raised an eyebrow at the cheap-shot antics of Spartans point guard Jeremy Fears. The reaction of Michigan State coach Tom Izzo — regarded as the dean of Big Ten coaches by press and peers alike — was by turns temporizing, indignant and, ultimately, defensive.

Defensive is a posture any Michigan opponent this season assumed at its own risk. The Wolverines’ dominance began in November at the Players Era Festival in Las Vegas, with wins of 40, 30 and 40 points over three remarkable days. And what happened in Vegas did not stay in Vegas. It spread, not just to East Lansing, but to West Lafayette and Champaign and Columbus and Iowa City, as the Wolverines ran up a 10-0 road record in the conference that, as this NCAA tournament proved, was college basketball’s toughest. For a quarter-century other Big Ten coaches had tried and failed to win a national title. It took May two years to bury the bitterness of the 8-24 season that created the vacancy he would fill, and bring Michigan to its perch atop both its conference and the sport. 

That Dusty May shares traits with Mike Krzyzewski is only part of the story. Yes, both are branches off the Bob Knight tree, raised in Midwestern, working-class circumstances. Yes, both believe team-building begins by building trust and relationships. (The players’ job is to love one another, May said during the Wolverines’ tournament run, invoking a book — one of many he consumes — that helped forge his philosophy. The coaches’ job is to love them in return.) Yes, both carved out essential roles for their wives in their respective basketball lives, perhaps the feature most at-odds with their mentor. Yes, neither was content to “wait his turn” after arriving in the dominant league of their respective eras. Yes, Krzyzewski liked to say that, and even titled one of his books, “a season is a lifetime” — a reality that, given the churn of the transfer portal, May fully and non-judgmentally accepts, even leverages. And yes, both coaches practiced a kind of radical transparency with the public and the press, borne of an earnest desire to explain how and why their teams did what they did.

But to slot May into some schematic of what has come before, to pigeonhole him as a sort of Latter Day K, misses how, at 49, he’s the exemplar of the modern college coach. 

The game isn’t nearly as tribal as it once was, and May, who grew up in the pale of Knight, in Greene County, Ind., shows how. Despite being ticketed for a spot as a student manager at Indiana, May adored Michigan’s Fab Five and their vibe. That affection is of a piece with how he speaks of the game and its players. He calls himself “a ball coach” and is forever on the hunt for “guys who love to hoop.” (The Michigan staff likes to lead a prospect into an empty gym with a rack of basketballs, to see how instinctively he has the urge to get shots up.) If a player of his decides to transfer, May wishes him the best—he wants volunteers, not hostages. If they want to be handsomely paid, he calls a booster, not the morality police. With the bonds that tie players to a school looser now, May proposes a new covenant between hoopers and ball coaches—to play the game as cooperatively, honorably and effectively as possible, with your primary allegiance to your brothers in the locker room. If we soon see a stampede to Ann Arbor of the like-minded, Michigan is sure to enjoy a sustained run of success. 

A Final Four is rife with glare and scrutiny, and the exposure to which the Michigan coach was subjected last week revealed even more about the May Way. He’s an analytics guru, to be sure, but something of a mad scientist too. It emerged that, before leaving Ann Arbor, May had arranged for his guys to shoot outdoors at a hoop in Michigan’s Big House, to get a better feel for the hinky depth perception of a football stadium like Lucas Oil in Indy. The basketball world got to know a guy named Doug Lemov, a coach of teachers, whom May has worked with to become a more effective instructor during practices. Out of respect for the huge frontline of the Wolverines’ semifinal opponent, Arizona, May and his staff cooked up a twist on the usual lobs that point guard Elliot Cadeau threw to 7’3” center Aday Mara. Cadeau now tossed up what looked like errant shots off the weak side of the backboard, which Mara would grab as a kind of weaponized rebound and convert into a basket. (Posterity will record Cadeau, the Final Four’s Most Outstanding Player, as having shot five-for-17 in that semifinal, when at least three of those “misses” were in fact passes. Dusty has even the stats guys scrambling to keep up.) Meanwhile a trailer for the just-dropped Paramount Plus docuseries Made for March features May, in a timeout huddle earlier this season, reserving a rare instance of vein-popping profanity for what he regards as a crime against the game: a lapse in commitment to the group. That clip will unlock approving attention from recruits—the kind of recruit May would want, anyway — as much as any NIL deal.

It’s worth examining May not only by the lights of Krzyzewski, but another coach, this one from May’s natal precincts in southern Indiana. UCLA’s John Wooden, who didn’t win his first NCAA title until 15 seasons into his time in Westwood, credited his steady improvement as a coach to all that failure. The old English teacher loved a poem by Billy Collins, the one that includes the line “experience holds its graduation at the grave.” Through books and podcasts and hours-long discussions with other coaches, in late-night couch sessions spent watching games from mid-major leagues to the NBA to the most remote corners of the FIBA universe, all punctuated by group texts among his assistants, May feeds his inner lifelong learner. 

But one further comparison with Krzyzewski lurks. As the new guy in the ACC, eager to build his program, Coach K tried to oblige every media outlet and Rotary Club. Then came back-to-back titles in 1991 and ’92, and the requests proliferated without the coach developing any commensurate ability to say No. In 1995 the program hit bottom after he was sidelined by a cascade of complications from a chronic back injury, mental as well as physical. Only a formal leave, and eventually a new, remote office accessible only by thumbprint ID, gave him the space in which he could again put his players, and his own well-being, first.

That’s what May and Michigan will have to monitor. Not whether some blueblood swoops in to spirit him away; Michigan — home to Cazzie and Rudy T., the Fab Five, the shamefully underappreciated John Beilein — is a blueblood. Like Krzyzewski, May could find that only the pros, in the guise of USA Basketball if not the NBA, are capable of enticing him with the challenge of being a different kind of ball coach.

May will need to reserve enough privacy for himself, his family, and his players so they can nurture those sacred relationships, and the coach doesn’t wind up, as Krzyzewski did, physically and mentally compromised.

At the same time May will keep looking to find and mold young men who love the game enough to honor it. In a world where propositions lurk around every corner, only he can slide across the table to a recruit an offer you can’t refuse: the promise of playing throwback, team-first basketball with every modern advantage.

The kind of ball that leaves confetti in your hair on a Monday night in April.