{"id":858655,"date":"2026-04-07T10:10:22","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T10:10:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/858655\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T10:10:22","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T10:10:22","slug":"michigans-dusty-may-is-the-curt-cignetti-in-basketball-and-now-theyre-both-national-champions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/858655\/","title":{"rendered":"Michigan’s Dusty May is the Curt Cignetti in basketball, and now they’re both national champions"},"content":{"rendered":"

INDIANAPOLIS \u2014\u00a0The confetti had already fallen from the sky inside Lucas Oil Stadium as Michigan celebrated its new national championship on the podium after defeating UConn. Head coach Dusty May<\/a> placed the Michigan placard into the champion\u2019s spot on the large bracket, while DJ Khaled\u2019s \u201cAll I Do Is Win\u201d blared from the speakers. <\/p>\n

A Michigan<\/a> fan, still reveling in his program\u2019s renewed success, hung a banner over the top row of the tunnel leading back to the locker room, waiting for the Wolverines to arrive. The banner, which featured a Michigan football helmet, displayed the famous Michigan motto coined by former football coach Bo Schembechler: \u201cThose who stay will be champions.\u201d <\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a new mantra for the Michigan basketball program: Those who come will be champions. <\/p>\n

May, who arrived in Michigan in 2024 after leading Florida Atlantic to the Final Four, is like basketball\u2019s Curt Cignetti, Indiana\u2019s star coach who guided the Hoosiers to this year\u2019s college football championship. Both achieved success in their second year. Why? Because they evaluate talent remarkably well, leveraging the transfer portal to maximize the potential of incoming players and build dominant teams.<\/p>\n

Throughout the week, the talking point was that Michigan is what\u2019s wrong with college basketball because its starting five players began their careers at different programs. Elliot Cadeau<\/a> (North Carolina), Nimari Burnett<\/a> (Texas Tech and Alabama), Yaxel Lendebord<\/a> (Arizona Western and UAB) and Aday Mara<\/a> (UCLA) were all newcomers this season under May.<\/p>\n

Some will tell you that the spirit of college athletics are dead, that the mantra Schembechler uttered in 1969 no longer applies to Michigan or college athletics in general. Those people would be right, but the hate May and the Wolverines have received as a result of how this year\u2019s team was assembled? Nonsense. <\/p>\n

Michigan played by the rules and did what literally everyone else does, just better. If you\u2019re going to exist in college sports in 2026 and beyond, you need to pay players and you need to take them out of the portal. Those stubborn enough to do things the old-fashioned way will perish, falling far short of what this remarkable Michigan team just did.<\/p>\n

Michigan was a powerhouse this year. It played like a team all the way to the very end, beating up on opponents and overwhelming even the toughest teams \u2014 the latest being UConn<\/a> \u2014 on the way to victory. What it did to an elite Arizona team Saturday night? A massacre. <\/p>\n

The irony of all this? It\u2019s not even like Michigan spent the most. Of the Final Four teams that made it to Indianapolis, Michigan spent the least. Less than Arizona, UConn and Illinois.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s one of the better teams that I\u2019ve played,\u201d UConn coach Dan Hurley<\/a> said after the game. \u201cCertainly since I\u2019ve been a college basketball coach.\u201d <\/p>\n

Who were Michigan\u2019s top players? Lendeborg, for sure. And of all the players Michigan recruited from the portal, he was by far the most impressive. Instead of going into the NBA Draft, he chose to stay at Michigan, where he developed into a more complete player and now projects to the League better than he did last year. He also started the game injured, admitted at halftime, he wasn\u2019t feeling well, and was playing passively, yet he still scored 13 points against the Huskies.<\/p>\n

The other three transfers weren\u2019t as sought after. Cadeau, who scored 19 points on Monday night, was a former top-rated recruit who didn\u2019t succeed at North Carolina and was looking for a new opportunity. Mara, a 7-foot-3 dominant big man, was a bench player at UCLA before making a significant impact with the Wolverines. Johnson Jr. also came off the bench at Illinois last season. <\/p>\n

All of these players came to Michigan and thrived, not only individually but together. Everything UConn, an incredibly tough team, tried to do on the hardwood Monday evening was contested. Michigan played tough, relentlessly frustrating the Huskies until the end. Some will say the game was officiated poorly because of the foul discrepancy, but that discrepancy existed because the Huskies didn\u2019t have an answer for Michigan inside. <\/p>\n

So save the \u201cMichigan is what\u2019s wrong with college sports\u201d takes. It\u2019s frankly not true. <\/p>\n

\u201cLook, I know this is going to set off a Twitter firestorm, but I think we all are better in certain situations than others,\u201d May said before the game. \u201cThere\u2019s an environment that\u2019s right for me. There\u2019s an environment that\u2019s right for you. Sometimes you don\u2019t choose the right environment from the beginning or sometimes as people we change and we need something different, for a number of reasons. The way we choose to look at it, we\u2019re going to bring in really, really good guys that are high achievers, that want to do it the way we want to do it.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd when the Oklahoma City Thunder won the championship last year \u2014 and I\u2019m friends with Coach (Mark) Daigneault and a lot of people in that organization \u2014 I wasn\u2019t judging them because Shai Alexander<\/a> was drafted by the Clippers or because they signed Isaiah Hartenstein<\/a> as a free agent. I thought, \u2018wow, those guys played beautiful basketball, that\u2019s a great team, that\u2019s a real model for young players to watch, a group that obviously cared about each other, that played the game the right way, that represented their organization, their city, their families, their last name.\u2019 <\/p>\n

\u201cWhatever the rules are, we\u2019re going to go at it, but our job is to put a competitive roster\/team on the floor that represents Michigan the way we think they deserve to be represented.\u201d<\/p>\n

At some point, college athletics may reach a stage where players are collectively bargained and transfers become less frequent. The future of college football and basketball stays uncertain. But during this transitional period, we\u2019ve seen that the coaches who evaluate talent effectively and allocate their funds wisely are the ones who will succeed. Michigan exemplified this, and now the Wolverines have ended the Big Ten\u2019s basketball national title drought that has lasted since 2000. <\/p>\n

May did exactly what Cignetti did at Indiana<\/a>. Both were elite evaluators. Both are champions. <\/p>\n

Ironically enough, in an alternate universe, Indiana could have actually had both Cignetti and May, an Indiana grad who got his start as a college staffer in 1996 as a Hoosiers student manager. It would have been unfair had the Hoosiers wound up with both. Ohio State, when it hired Jake Diebler<\/a>, also had May as a finalist. There are a lot of people asking \u201cwhat if?\u201d tonight. <\/p>\n

Cignetti\u2019s secret sauce was identifying the right players in the portal, bringing them to Bloomington, and turning them into one of the best-coached teams in the country. Indiana went from one of the worst programs in college football to a national champion in only two years under his guidance. <\/p>\n

Here\u2019s an excerpt from a column I wrote about Cignetti<\/a> days before the Hoosiers beat Miami to claim college football\u2019s biggest prize:<\/p>\n

The secret sauce? It isn\u2019t just identifying good players. The tape tells the story, and everyone knows Cignetti has an eye for talent that may be unmatched by any of his peers. The real magic was identifying those like-minded players \u2014 the ones who would gel \u2014 within the culture he wanted to create in just a matter of days. It\u2019s one thing to win in the portal. It\u2019s another to avoid missing on personalities while assembling the roster. And again, you have to get to know players quickly. The portal pales in comparison to the time coaches can devote to relationships during the traditional recruiting process.<\/p>\n

The same goes for May. <\/p>\n

All of it. <\/p>\n

The result? Those who came to Michigan are champions. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"INDIANAPOLIS \u2014\u00a0The confetti had already fallen from the sky inside Lucas Oil Stadium as Michigan celebrated its new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":858656,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[117094,7,49,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-858655","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-dusty-may","9":"tag-football","10":"tag-ncaa","11":"tag-ncaa-football"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116362885594156392","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=858655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858655\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/858656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=858655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=858655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=858655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}