Dusty May’s stunning NBA departure leaves Michigan facing its biggest test yet

The past 26 months had to have felt like something of a dream for diehard Michigan men’s basketball fans. It also must have been a treat for maize and blue fanatics with more of a taste for the gridiron who were looking for a healthy distraction from the ... stuff ... plaguing the Wolverine football program since it won the 2023 national championship.

The dreaming and the treat tasting came to a brutally abrupt and unexpected halt Monday morning.

Wolverine head coach Dusty May sent shockwaves through the basketball world by becoming the first college head coach in seven years to leave for the NBA (the first since another Michigan front man, John Beilien, stunningly left to coach the Cleveland Cavaliers), and the first in history to bolt for the professional ranks for the first time in the season immediately following a national championship run.

If you’re keeping track at home, the timeline of May’s meteoric rise to coaching prominence now looks like this:

2018 -- Lands his first head coaching job at the age of 41.

2023 -- Takes Florida Atlantic, a program with zero prior NCAA Tournament victories, to the Final Four.

2024 -- Spurns Louisville, Vanderbilt and other power conference programs to accept the head coaching job at Michigan.

April, 2026 -- Leads the Wolverines to the second national championship in program history in his second season on the job.

June, 2026 -- Accepts the job of leading Cooper Flagg and the Dallas Mavericks into its next era.

To put this a simpler way, the man who was the architect of one of the more dominant national title runs in recent college basketball history and who is now being tasked with moulding what appears to be the next great NBA superstar is someone who the sports world did not know existed during COVID.

While May’s whirlwind rise to the top is the clear headline grabber of this story, the ripple effects have already produced a handful of almost equally compelling plotlines. Chief among them at the college level: What the hell happens now to a Michigan program that had appeared poised to remain one of the most powerful in the game during this new era of the sport?

For the first two and-a-half months of the offseason, the only interesting conversation surrounding the Wolverines was the potential for May to follow in the footsteps of Danny Hurley and cut down the nets in back-to-back years. Even with three players from last year’s championship squad poised to hear their names called during the first round of this week’s NBA Draft, May had assembled what certainly appeared to be a preseason top five squad.

Elliot Cadeau and Trey McKenney were both returning, giving Michigan one of the most formidable backcourts in the country. That core would join forces with an exciting transfer portal class headlined by J.P. Estrella (Tennessee), Moustapha Thiam (Cincinnati) and Jalen Reed (LSU). May was also bringing in a loaded freshman class highlighted by five-star guard Brandon McCoy Jr.

Now, with NCAA rules stipulating that players have 15 days following a coaching change to decide whether or not to enter the transfer portal, the first task for those now in charge of Michigan basketball will be convincing all of those pieces to remain parts of the puzzle in Ann Arbor.

The man at the forefront of that effort would seem to be Mike Boynton Jr., the former Oklahoma State head coach who will now reportedly step in and assume the title of interim head coach (and potentially be named full-time head coach not long after) at UM.

After being fired at OSU following a disastrous 12-20 season in 2023-24, Boynton was immediately hired as part of May’s first staff at Michigan. For the past two years he has held the title of “defensive coordinator” for Wolverine teams that finished 12th in the nation in adjusted defensive efficiency in 2024-25 and first in that same category a year ago.

The torch passing, whether permanent or temporary, to Boynton feels like the safest and most logical move given the fact that Michigan players have already been on campus participating in summer workouts for multiple weeks now. Still, reassuring Wolverine fans of the program’s stability would likely be an easier task for Boynton if the past decade for the athletic program had been just a bit less tumultuous.

It’s rare for any program to experience a jerk as extreme as winning a national championship and then having the head coach of that team leave for the professional ranks just months later. Imagine going through that twice in three years with the two major spotlight programs in college athletics.

Then there’s also that fact that promoting from within didn’t exactly go swimmingly the last time Warde Manuel found himself in this unenviable position.

The timing here is vicious, on multiple levels, but if Boynton can convince the players he’s already gotten to know over the last couple of months to stick around for nine more, there’s no reason why Wolverine basketball can’t continue to hold its place among the sport’s elite. The momentum is still there, the brand is still there, and most importantly in this day and age, the money is still there.

Boynton can earn the trust of business leaders and donors by taking an apparent top five roster and producing top five results in 2025-26. And if he doesn’t? Well, Manuel has the power and the funds to go out there and land one of the biggest names in the sport who can hopefully come in and use the inherent advantages that are in place in Ann Arbor in the same way that May did for 24 months.

The timing stinks and the recent history is jarring, but if Michigan can successfully navigate the first year post-Mayday Monday, it still has absolutely everything necessary to be one of college basketball’s NIL era superpowers.