Dusty May is one win away from a national championship in his second season at Michigan, and he spent Sunday in Indianapolis defending the way he built the team. Michigan played UConn for the title game on Monday, but before that, May pushed back hard on criticism that his roster was assembled the wrong way.
“Look, I know this is going to set off a Twitter firestorm, but I think we all are better in certain situations than others,” May said. “We took four guys out of the portal. If you listen to the college basketball gospel, we took 17 of them, and that’s all we have.”
May’s point was that Michigan’s success did not come from a wholesale overhaul. He said the program added four players through the transfer portal, even as online critics argued he had bought the team, failed to develop it and may have tampered to get it there. The comments came with the stakes at their highest: a national championship game on Monday and a chance to finish a rapid rebuild in just two seasons.
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He also addressed the broader charge directly. May said, “I feel like he was tampered with, first of all,” referring to Justin Joyner, whom he said was hired to be Oregon State’s head coach. He added, “He was under contract at Michigan.”
The back-and-forth landed in a postseason where roster construction has become part of the sport’s public argument. May pointed to the Oklahoma City Thunder as an example of how a team can be built. “I wasn’t judging them because Shai Alexander was drafted by the Clippers or because (the Thunder) signed Isaiah Hartenstein as a free agent,” he said. “I thought, ‘Wow, those guys played beautiful basketball, that’s a great team, that’s a real model for young players to watch.'”
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The timing made the exchange sharper. A few hours after May’s Sunday comments, the open North Carolina job became official, adding another layer to a day already packed with coaching noise around one of the sport’s biggest stages. May also said he prefers Ann Arbor to Chapel Hill as his basketball home.
The criticism around Michigan has mostly come from fans of other teams on social media, and it has followed the Wolverines deep into March. That chatter now sits beside a more concrete reality: May has Michigan playing for a title, and the debate over how he built the roster will matter less if the team finishes the job.
For now, the larger truth is simple. May has turned a second-season project into a championship shot, and he did not spend Sunday pretending the outside noise was going away.