Where Dusty May Now Ranks

Jay Bilas has been watching Dusty May climb for years, and he thinks the Michigan head coach already belonged in the conversation with the best coaches in college basketball before this season even tipped off. A national title run only sharpened the point.

Rich walks Bilas through what made the Wolverines so tough to solve. Outside of Yaxel Lendeborg, the transfers Michigan brought in weren't other programs' alpha Naismith candidates. They were talented pieces who found a higher gear inside a collective. The holdover players who hadn't been playing major roles bought in too. Somebody had to stitch that patchwork into a champion, and May was the tailor.

Bilas knows the backstory better than most. May grew up in Indiana, served as a manager for Bob Knight at IU, and was wandering the Final Four twenty years ago trying to land any job that would have him. Now North Carolina reportedly chased him, and he's one of the hottest names in the sport.

At Florida Atlantic, May rode his bike to work. People probably assumed he was an assistant librarian, not the head basketball coach, and then he took that program to a Final Four. Plenty of coaches in his spot would have cashed the ticket immediately and jumped to a blue blood. May stayed another year. And his players stayed with him. Vlad Goldin, Elijah Martin, the whole core, didn't transfer until May himself left for Michigan. Bilas thinks that loyalty says something about the players. He thinks it says more about the coach.

The conversation turns philosophical when Bilas connects May to UCLA women's national champion Cori Close, who is booked on the show later. Both coaches, in his read, are proving the same thing in parallel. You can hold players accountable. You can demand high standards. You can absolutely chase championships. You do not have to be demeaning to do it.

Bilas is careful not to pick a fight with the old school. If coaches want to yell at players, he says, nobody's stopping them. Do what works for you. But the idea that the only path to a hard program is a coach with a raised voice and a short fuse? That's outdated. May and Close are running the counterexample in real time.

The thread running through the whole answer is that toughness and warmth aren't opposites. May's Michigan team got stitched together because players trusted the guy doing the stitching. His former FAU players stuck around because that trust traveled. And now a guy who was begging for a job two decades ago is coaching in April with a championship resume.

Rich wraps the segment on the praise. The ranking question almost answers itself at this point. Dusty May isn't a rising name anymore. He's arrived, and he did it without the script most people thought you had to follow.