Michigan wins 2026 NCAA title: How Dusty May built a championship team through the transfer portal

INDIANAPOLIS — It took Dusty May just two years as a high-major coach to crack the code on how to win it all by building through the portal.

Nobody’s done it better than him. May is only 49, and if he opts to remain in college for the next decade-plus, there’s a fair chance that his first national title run will not double as his last. 

The Michigan Wolverines ended the Big Ten’s 26-year national title drought in men’s basketball with a 69-63 win over Connecticut on Monday night. It was a bumpy 40 minutes and not a pretty watch; the teams combined to shoot 34.1%, tied for the second lowest in a title matchup ever.

They don’t care about the cosmetics in Ann Arbor. A blue banner will go up next fall. This team’s 37-3 record will stand tall and age beautifully. After a generational scoring push in the tournament (Michigan averaged 90.2 points, the first team to do that as a national champion since the 1989-90 UNLV Runnin’ Rebels), this squad should be remembered as one of the best teams of its era. The Wolverines’ +39.70 efficiency margin at KenPom ranks No. 2 in that database’s history (behind only title-less 1998-99 Duke). This was maybe the best Big Ten team of the past 40 years when factoring in the rhythmic dominance, the generational efficiency and the aggregate 713-point margin of victory across 40 games, which is the best ever for a Big Ten team.

It happened because May worked the portal to near-perfection — and did so despite no shortage of detractors, rumormongers and jealous skeptics.

“It’s nonsense,” Michigan assistant Mike Boynton told CBS Sports. “I wish people would just write the truth. People are fairly envious of Dusty, and it’s because we’re doing this. The truth of the matter is most of the people who are frustrated or angry or talking shit online are Michigan State fans, Ohio State fans, because Dusty came in and instead of trying his hardest to keep every player on an 8-24 team, he allowed the guys who wanted to leave to leave, and so then, what do you do? Who do you recruit to play at Michigan in April, six high school kids? No. So we went out and tried to be competitive (in the portal) and we were.” 

The pace at which high-stakes college sports evolves ensures no trends are guaranteed to stick around, but May’s keen eye combined with a junkie-like approach to running his program and a plentiful NIL capital wound up leading to a one-of-a-kind portal class. Michigan made history Monday night when it started five players who didn’t begin their careers at the school; that had never happened in a national title game.

Additionally, the team’s four leading scorers (Yaxel Lendeborg, Morez Johnson Jr., Aday Mara, Elliot Cadeau) all played at a different school the year before. 

That had never happened in the past 80 years of the NCAAs.

Michigan’s Portal Five

PlayerPosSizePrevious school247Sports transfer ratingAday MaraC7-3, 240UCLA95Yaxel LendeborgPF6-9, 230UAB99Morez Johnson Jr.PF6-9, 255Illinois96Elliot CadeauPG6-1, 180North Carolina94Nimari Burnett (2023)SG6-4Alabama87

The more success Michigan had — this team was 25-1 by Feb. 17 and pacing toward an all-time season — it seemed to prompt more accusations of dirty pool. Were the gripes real or just sour grapes? With a national title secured, Boynton wanted to clear the air and defend May amid the postgame celebration.

“People just trying to find a reason to bring down what’s a pretty remarkable dude, because there’s really nothing else to get him on,” Boynton said. “He’s pretty open, he talks to everybody, he works his ass off. He’s been successful. And so the only thing is this, when the hate don’t work, they start telling lies.” 

One popular but unfounded claim was an allegation of serious tampering with one of the most prominent players in the sport.

“People making up just complete bullshit lies about the guys we were trying to supposedly tamper with, like (Purdue guard) Braden Smith,” Boynton said. “The narrative was we were trying to recruit Braden Smith at the Big Ten Tournament last year. I’ll say this: If we could recruit Braden Smith and he went into the portal, we would, but we couldn’t recruit Braden Smith because you cannot get juniors into school at Michigan. And people just ran with it. They still run with it. It’s irresponsible. It’s sad, but because it’s a high enough profile name that it would draw attention, people are just lazy and go with it.” 

These Wolverines did not need Braden Smith. In fact, May’s instinct to go even bigger than last year was the clincher to creating one of the most dominant teams of the past 20 years. Year 1’s portal hits with big men Vlad Goldin and Danny Wolf — two 7-footers who played together and jolted Michigan to a 27-win season in 2024-25 — made Michigan the easy leader last spring to land the 7-foot-3 Mara and 6-10 Johnson, two very different bigs. 

“We had a very, very good sell,” May told CBS Sports. “The most impressive part was after we had Aday and Morez, Yaxel still decided to join, and then neither one of those guys wavered. I think a lot of times, one of those two guys just wouldn’t be able to do it. They wouldn’t trust that it could work with all three.”

May convinced three players who played center at their previous schools to join forces. What happened was unprecedented: Michigan just became the first team to ever win a national championship with three player 6-9 or taller as its three leading scorers, a wowing statistic. At a time when positionless basketball continues to be a trend at the NBA level, and even among plenty of college teams, May went all-in on size. 

“They came with some blind faith,” May said. “That’s been the most rewarding part, probably, trying to figure out what pieces of the puzzle fit best together.” 

While coaches will treasure any really good player they can keep for three or four years, navigating the treacherous waters of the portal is going to become mandatory for any coach who’s looking to elevate to the top of the sport. May has taken ground on the highest perch after building out one of the more impressive rosters in recent history. He blended the returnees (Roddy Gayle, Nimari Burnett, Will Tschetter) with a promising local high school prospect (Trey McKenney, who hit the back-breaking 3 with 1:56 to go that made it 65-56) and prioritized the transfers above all. 

Along the way, he handled a national title run despite losing backup point guard LJ Cason to an injury more than a month ago. Stocking the deepest roster in college basketball made Monday a possibility. Making sure the players actually liked each other and had personalities that could handle sharing the glory — from the preseason until April — was paramount.

“Dusty doesn’t like guys who don’t want to work hard, who have bad body language, who don’t care about winning,” Boynton said. “And there’s a lot of guys that are just chasing the most money.”

And so what we have here is a portal masterclass. It’s so much harder to pull off than you might realize. There were dozens of teams that had more than $10 million to spend in 2025. Only a few of them maximized that privilege. 

“Your adaptability has to be elite,” Michigan assistant Justin Joyner (who is the next coach at Oregon State) told CBS Sports. “I think a lot of people looked at our roster and how we built it and thought, How the hell is it gonna work? … I’ve never seen a head coach in the trenches as much as he is with his players, whether it’s on the court, whether it’s in the film room, he is 100% in it with his guys.”

May took the Michigan job after the bottom fell out in the Juwan Howard era, an 8-24 season easily ranking among the worst in more than 100 years of Michigan basketball. In two seasons’ time, he pulled off maybe the fastest greatest turnaround the sport’s ever seen. Michigan’s no underdog, but it’s still outrageous how quickly this happened; the Wolverines are the first team since Michigan State (of all teams) in 1979 to win a title two years after tallying 10 or fewer wins. 

May’s 64 victories are tied for the most in a coach’s first two seasons at a school with John Calipari’s start at Kentucky from 2009-11. 

May and his staff had success in Year 1, but the Big Ten’s physicality was relentless. To win big, they’d have to get big and have guys who could match muscle with anyone. They needed a guy that was physical, tough, and gave confidence. That was Johnson. He was still blossoming but opted to leave Illinois for a spot he thought would boost his pro potential all the more. He had the size, athleticism and switching ability, but more than that was a team-altering competitor. 

“I think that’s one of the reasons these guys wanted to play for us, is because we were gonna allow them to expand their games,” Joyner said. 

The four transfers (Lendeborg, Cadeau, Mara, Johnson) had specific, different traits that drew May and his staff in, and though they had competition for everyone except Lendeborg — ironic, as he was the No. 1 player in the transfer portal — they had the edge on landing the others not just because of a budget north of $10 million, but because they sold them the hardest on why they could find pathways to redemption. 

“Our staff likes finding value in guys that maybe other people find flaws in,” Boynton said. “Most of those guys were obviously, as young kids, really highly heralded. So there was always something there.” 

May told me “it started with Elliot. We felt like he was the best pass-first point guard in the country, and we felt like he gave us a foundational piece because everyone wants to play with the pass-first point.

Cadeau had a spotty reputation coming out of North Carolina, but he trusted the people who knew him, including UNC assistant Sean May, who was once coached years ago by Dusty. Mara weirdly wasn’t used enough, or even properly, at UCLA. 

“He was obviously misutilized at UCLA,” Joyner said. “We felt like we knew his strengths. I’ll start defensively. We knew he was an elite level rim protector, so we felt like we could build our defense around him as an anchor, whether it’s our ball screen coverage, whether it’s our off ball coverage, whether it’s our ability to be aggressive on the ball and switch, whether it’s ability to press in front of the ball to the rim, we felt like him around the rim defensively was going to anchor our defense.” 

Mara went from what looked like a long-term project to a first-round pick in five months’ time. In Michigan’s win over Arizona, a stunning 91-73 laugher on Saturday, Mara was catching passes off the glass that looked like terrible shots from Cadeau.

“As great as he is, he’s a forever learner, and he’s not afraid to make mistakes,” assistant Akeem Miskdeen said. “He’s like trial by fire. He’s not afraid to try something different, whether it be off-the-backboard passes, whether it be, ‘Let’s go shoot at the football field.’ He’s unorthodox in his thinking, and that’s what makes him really special.” 

Back in November, at the Players Era Championship in Las Vegas, this Michigan team put on the best three-game showing in a regular-season multi-game event ever. U-M tore through San Diego State, Auburn and Gonzaga by a combined 110 points. After the Gonzaga annihilation, Lendeborg dropped a quote that was as cocky as it was prophetic: “Today was about putting the world on notice that we’re the best team in the nation.”

That was said on Nov. 26, and 131 days later, Lendeborg’s declaration came true because Dusty May’s masterful use of the portal made Michigan a juggernaut and probably set the template for how champions have to be built moving forward. Be it Michigan again or someone else who hits it right in the weeks to come, chances seem better than not that next year’s best team will look a lot like these trendsetters in Maize and Blue.