On a night where they shot a season-worst 2-of-15 from three, where their injured star looked like a shell of himself, where they lost the rebounding battle and played a style and pace for more conducive to their opponent’s strengths, on a night where seemingly everything that needed to happen in order for Michigan to be once again deprived of its long-awaited second national championship … none of it mattered.
To quote Ellis Pine, “you can’t stop what’s coming,” and Dusty May’s Wolverines have seemed like they’ve been coming for the top of the college basketball mountain since November.
That statement is a far cry from the days of the not-so-distant past when no level of success felt like a certainty for the maize and blue.
A little over 24 months ago, Michigan was at a crossroads. “Breaking point” might be a more accurate descriptor.
The Wolverines had just gone 8-24 overall and 3-17 in the Big Ten, good for the worst season in the modern history of the program. Ann Arbor legend Juwan Howard was shown the door after five up-and-down seasons, and weeks later, Michigan beat out the likes of Louisville and Vanderbilt to hire May away from Florida Atlantic.
Three Michigan players — Nimari Burnett, Will Tschetter and walk-on Harrison Hochberg — experienced every moment of the 8-win season and still chose to stick with the program through the transition. On Monday night, 741 days after May was hired, all three climbed the ladder inside Lucas Oil Stadium to cut down a piece of the national championship net.
Of course loyalty, while an attractive subplot and an easy storyline to latch onto, might not be the central theme of the 2025-26 Michigan Wolverines. Not the team that just became the first in the history of college basketball to win a national championship with five starters who all transferred into the program.
So what is the central theme?
Well … big matters.
Think Big.
May’s potential to be one of the primary faces of the next wave of great college basketball coaches wasn’t exactly a secret in 2024. A year earlier he had taken Florida Atlantic all the way to the Final Four, and then proved it wasn’t a fluke by winning 25 games and earning an 8-seed in the NCAA Tournament a year later.
In just six seasons as a Division-I head coach, May had already earned the reputation for pairing a remarkable basketball mind with an incredible knack for identifying talent. That combination made him the perfect hire for a power conference program looking for a quick turnaround after falling on hard times.
Two such programs — Michigan and Louisville, both coming off of 8-24 seasons — came calling. Ultimately, UM athletic director Warde Manuel won the battle by selling May on the notion that we have more resources, more institutional support, and a better overall living arrangement for his family in Ann Arbor than anywhere else that might come calling.
“Louisville is an unbelievable basketball school. But this was the right fit for me, my family, and it just felt right,” May said at the time.
An agreement was made, and both sides got to work.
Spend Big.
NIL and the transfer portal have both opened the door for instant turnarounds to be more of a thing in college basketball than ever before.
A decade ago, a coach brought in to take command of a Big Ten program that had just gone 3-17 in league play would have merely been expected to show an aptitude for the job and some tangible signs of progress in year one. Now, if you’ve got the bankroll, anything is possible, and it’s possible right away.
May convinced Burnett and Tschetter to stick around, he brought big man Vlad Goldin with him from FAU, and he signed Tre Donaldson (Auburn), Danny Wolf (Yale), Roddy Gayle (Ohio State) and Sam Walters (Alabama) from the transfer portal to form the nucleus of a team that seemed on paper like they should have been able to compete right out of the gate. They did. Michigan won 27 games, captured the Big Ten Tournament title, and advanced to the Sweet 16 before falling to eventual semifinalist Auburn.
With the bar raised, May used Michigan’s deep pockets to go to work again. While Gayle, Tschetter and Burnett all returned, each of UM’s five leading scorers in 2025-26 was a newcomer.
UAB’s Yaxel Lendeborg was the highest-ranked transfer in the country according to most who rank that sort of thing. When Donaldson bolted for Miami, May simply replaced him with North Carolina floor general Elliot Cadeau. Everyone knew Morez Johnson was destined for a breakout sophomore season, and May made sure it happened at Michigan and not conference rival Illinois. And then there was Aday Mara, a 7-foot-2 center who had played sparingly over two seasons at UCLA before emerging as a star for the Wolverines this season.
Identifying talent is still a skill that can pay off big in this brave, new world.
Play Big.
A healthy chunk of May’s imports have fit a similar description: Big, long, athletic, versatile and active. He seeks out monsters who can control the paint on both ends of the court, and is especially fond of players who can effectively guard multiple positions.
The results speak pretty loudly.
Michigan will end this season ranked No. 1 in the country in adjusted defensive efficiency. They rank first in the country in effective field foal percentage defense, second in the country in two-point percentage defense, and third in the country in block percentage. Offensively, they were fourth in the country in overall efficiency and fifth in the country in two-percentage.
In each of Michigan’s last four games of the NCAA Tournament, the Wolverines held their opponents — Alabama, Tennessee, Arizona and UConn — to their worst field goal shooting performance of the season.
Win Big.
Michigan’s 2025-26 squad won’t just be remembered for its gaudy 37-3 final record, it’ll be remembered for the way in which it won a hefty chunk of those 37 games.
In simpler terms, it’ll be remembered for just how severely it kicked the shit out of teams all season long.
In its capturing of the Players Era Festival championship during Thanksgiving week, the Wolverines became the first team in the history of the AP poll to beat three straight ranked opponents all by 30 points or more. The last of those was a 101-61 championship game slaughtering of a Gonzaga team that, up until that point, had looked every bit as dominant as May’s team had.
When the dust finally cleared on Monday night, Michigan had won 29 of its 37 games by double figures. It won an astounding 11 games by 30 points or more, and its seven wins by 40 points or more are the most by any team in the history of the Big Ten.
Talk Big.
From the jump, confidence was never lacking with this group. Nor should it have been.
Lendeborg, the eventual First Team All-American and Big Ten Player of the Year, was the first to raise eyebrows with a public declaration.
“I feel like we’re the best team in college basketball,” Lendeborg said after the Players Era Festival triumph in November. “We might be the best Michigan team ever. We’re going to try to go for that.”
Instead of shying away from their star’s bravado, the rest of the Wolverines leaned into it.
“We say it before every game when we step onto the court,” Morez Johnson said in February of Lendeborg’s initial proclamation. “Everybody truly believes that.”
Yaxel laughed last on Monday night, telling a national TV audience:
“We’re the best team in college basketball, and we want to go down as one of the greatest ever.”
Finish Big … finally
Despite the Big Ten’s perennial status as one of the two or three best conferences in college basketball, the league has been burdened for the past two and-a-half-decades with the stigma of having won zero national championships since Michigan State cut down the nets in 2000.
From 2001-2025, Big Ten teams played in eight national championships and astoundingly lost them all. Michigan accounted for 25 percent of that total, falling to Louisville for the title in 2013 and getting blown out by Villanova on the first Monday in April five years later.
No trend was too tall for this team. Neither was any opponent.
In the end, Michigan was simply too big to fail.
