Dusty May Named Michigan Men's Basketball Head Coach
During the middle of the Michigan Hockey game, news broke that Michigan Men's Basketball has a new head coach. That would be Florida Atlantic University coach Dusty May:
ESPN Sources: Florida Atlantic’s Dusty May has agreed on a deal to become the next coach at the University of Michigan. Andy Miller — May’s representative with Klutch Sports — is completing details with school officials on a long-term contract tonight. pic.twitter.com/oEVAzbbDuW
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) March 24, 2024
May, 47, has been the head coach at Florida Atlantic since the 2018-19 season. He inherited a historically awful program and immediately delivered them to decency, putting together four seasons that were mostly treading water before authoring a campaign for the ages last season. His FAU Owls went 18-2 to win Conference USA, both the regular season and tournament crown, before going on a Cinderella run to the Final Four. FAU came up just short in the national semifinals at the hands of the San Diego State Aztecs, but it was the sort of campaign that put May on national radars as a rising coach, with FAU's final record being 35-4. May's Owls returned most players from last season for 2023-24 and went 25-9 overall, 14-4 to finish 2nd in the American Athletic Conference, a new conference that they joined (in addition to playing a difficult non-conference schedule).
May has connections to the Midwest and the state of Michigan. He was born in Peoria, Illinois, and attended high school in Greene, Indiana. May was a student manager under Bob Knight while attending Indiana University, from which he graduated in 2000. He worked video coaching jobs at Indiana and USC before getting his first assistant coaching job at Eastern Michigan for the 2005-06 season. From there he was an assistant at Murray State, UAB, Louisiana Tech, and Florida, before taking the FAU job.
May was under consideration for both the Ohio State and the Louisville jobs, the other top openings this cycle. OSU decided to promote their interim coach, while Michigan reportedly beat out Louisville for May's services. It is reported that May has signed a five-year contract, as most coaches at Michigan do. We will have more on May in the coming days.
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Nice work, Warde. This is a good pickup and a good restart for the origram.l
If it doesn’t go well we can all blame it on Craig Ross and his Billy Mays fascination. Looking forward to an upward trajectory.
This is an A+ hire. For those who are critical or even meh on this hire, given the REALISTIC options, who would have been a better choice? Coach K wasn’t going to come out of retirement, Hubie Davis was not going to leave UNC and Hurley wasn’t going to leave UConn. Of the pool of possible coaches, this is probably he best possible scenario. There were a handful of other decent choices, but even Brian’s “searchbits” posts made clear that the pool did not have any true slam dunks. That’s the current state of college BBall. For all of the crap we give warde because of his handling of the harbaugh issues last season (and if we are being honest, none of us has the full story, so it’s impossible to know if warde was just a wimp or if he somehow worked behind the scenes to avert what could have been a season destroying punishment), he fired Juwan within 48 hours of the season ending and went out and wrapped up the top replacement candidate within a day of that candidate becoming available. He also got Ismael’s named president of the CFB playoff selection committee, despite his school being fresh off a high profile (nonsensical) scandal.
March 24th, 2024 at 12:15 PM ^
FAU is down the road from us here in Florida. It's kind of a "sleeper" university, given that even with 30,000 students in six Boca Raton - Fort Lauderdale area campuses, no one knows much about it. But it's not bad --- as you might appreciate, it has a heavily Latino student presence, and one of its principal course offerings is in international business; if you want to reach fluency in Spanish (largely by talking with other students) and learn international business, FAU would be a good bet.
Dusty is very popular on the campus --- he after all put FAU on the map --- for BB anyway. Admission standards are middlin': half of those admitted had an ACT 21-26, or an SAT of 1080-1250, and a GPA of 3.55 to 4.25 (from the FAU Website). And FAU admits 80% of those who apply. My point here being that if any of Dusty's players want to follow him to AA, they might face an Admissions Office hurdle.
Anyway, one good feature of FAU admissions is the grandparent out-of-state tuition waiver. If an out-of-state student's grandparents are year-round Florida residents, that student qualifies for in-state tuition.
Dusty appears to be the best available candidate, and Warde did well by landing him. Go Blue!
March 24th, 2024 at 12:26 PM ^
Rapid, smart hire. Good job Warde
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