The transfer portal and NIL has drastically changed recruiting in college basketball, and Michigan's Dusty May has taken full advantage of the new rules. With a revamped roster, he's got his team in the Final Four, searching for the school's first NCAA title since 1989.
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — Dusty May was a student manager at Indiana and graduated in 2000. He spent five years in college administrative roles and got his first coaching job at Eastern Michigan in 2005.
He's been out recruiting talent ever since. And no one knows better than May that the transfer portal and NIL has changed everything the past few years.
And no one has taken advantage of the new rules better than May. He took over a Michigan team last year that had won eight games in 2023 under Juwan Howard. May won 27 a year ago, and has a school-record 35 wins already this year as he prepares for an NCAA Final Four semifinal matchup against Arizona on Saturday night.
He built a great team overnight from practically nothing last year, then basically had to do it again this year.
And it's worked.
"There are always a lot of questions, and when you're recruiting, you're recruiting against that every day,'' May said Thursday when he met with the media at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. "When you haven't had a guy drafted in the first round, you're recruiting against that every day. There's certain things you're always recruiting against. Last year's team gave us an identity that this is the way we're going to play.
"I think when you turned on the TV, our guys, the way they shared the ball, the way they cared for each other, how connected they were as a group on the court, showed that the guys we're recruiting now, and you look at the way Vlad (Golden) and Danny (Wolf) as two 7-footers play, if you're a big guy that wants to play a certain way, then seeing what those guys did made us a very attractive option for them.''
Michigan's best players this year were somewhere else a year ago. All-American forwards Yaxel Lendeborg was at UAB and Morez Johnson Jr. was at Illinois, center Aday Mara was at UCLA, Elliot Cadeau was at North Carolina and Nimari Burnett is at his third stop, after a year at Texas Tech and then Alabama.
What's changed, May said, is that the players seek out the schools more than the other way around these days. And that's made roster construction easier.
"Recruiting wasn't near as difficult last year as it was the first year, and hopefully each year recruiting becomes more niche and we have an identity and a brand that people choose us,'' May said. "We talk about the transfer portal and all this other stuff. I think more than ever we used to choose players and we used to convince them to come play for us, whether it's because we were showering them with attention, showing them more love, or we'd simply been recruiting them longer. In our opinion we always thought those were pretty shallow reasons to choose a university because a coach came to more 6 a.m. workouts, things like that.
"Now the players, the players are choosing us. When we make contact with the player, the first thing they do is slide into the DMs and messages of all of our players that we've coached in the past and they do more homework and intel on us than we do on them.
"So I know that's spinning in a number of different directions, but recruiting has changed so much, and I'm going to echo coach (Rick) Barnes from Tennessee last week. It's not that bad. We used to recruit guys for three years and spend 80, 100, 200 man-hours away from our families begging these 15-to-18 year olds to come play at our university and then they decide to go another direction, and you just think of all the time and resources you've wasted. Recruiting has been streamlined and it's much more efficient than it's ever been.''
May lost players to the NBA and transfer portal after last year, and Burnett was the primary holdover. L.J. Cason and Roddy Gayle Jr. were back too, and Trey McKinney joined the team as a freshman. Will Tschetter is the only guy on the roster who's played at Michigan for four years.
Melding everyone together was critical. And it's worked. May has learned a lot about that since taking Florida Atlantic on a stunning run to the Final Four in 2023.
"Well, I have a whole different perspective on the retention piece and I'll be as quick as I can with this answer,'' May said. "If you're retaining the right guys, yes. You have to retain the right guys, and I think that's a big part of our success.
The guys that we retained earned the trust of our new guys immediately because they wanted to win. There were no hidden agendas. They were all about the team. They taught all of our unwritten rules, they expressed how much Michigan meant to them and what this place can do for all of us after we're done playing, so there is my stance on retention.
"(In the 2023-24 season), we brought back our entire team after the Final Four run at FAU, and it was the hardest coaching job, the most difficult year of my life as an assistant, as a video coordinator, as a head coach. That was the most difficult year for a number of reasons. So that year it would have been much healthier for the group if we didn't retain everyone. Because when you look at college basketball, Tre Carroll was an All-Big East player (at Xavier) that didn't get to play (at FAU). Brandon Lorient was a big-time player at West Virginia that didn't get to play. Nick Boyd (Wisconsin) was hurt.
"We had these guys that became Power Five starters, and they weren't able to play in games. It was difficult on everyone, so that was a nice segue into this high-major Power Five stuff because we had all of the high-major problems in a minor scale, but they were all there, so we were forced to deal with that stuff before. When you talk about retention, retention is not always good. It's retaining the right guys and making sure they still have the same agenda and objectives, which is to win and to do it together.''
Michigan has certainly done plenty of winning. The Wolverines won the Big Ten regular season crown by four games, losing only to Wisconsin and winning a league-record 19 conference games. They were unbeaten on the road in league play, the first team to do that in the Big Ten since the undefeated Indiana Hoosiers in 1976, a mere 50 years ago.
They lost to Duke on Feb. 21 in a high-profile neutral site game and fell to Purdue 80-72 in the Big Ten Tournament title game. That's been it.
Michigan is two games away from winning the school's first NCAA title since 1989. The Wolverines have come close many other times, losing in the title game in 1992 and 1993 in the Fab Five days, and losing to Louisville for the national title in 2013.
They are also carrying the flag for the Big Ten, which hasn't won an NCAA title since Michigan State won in 2000. Illinois is here too — they'll play Connecticut in the other semifinal — and they are the 18th and 19th Big Ten teams to reach a Final Four since then.
None of the others have won. Can Michigan do it? Well, their rebuilt roster certainly looks like a team that can win it all.