A two-minute clip from a recent meeting of Michigan’s board of regents was a Rosetta Stone for understanding why college sports leaders can’t seem to fix the problems that everyone sees so clearly.
Domenico Grasso, Michigan’s president, addressed the departure of men’s basketball coach Dusty May, whose decision to coach the Dallas Mavericks blindsided a lot of people in Ann Arbor. At Michigan and elsewhere, losing one of college basketball’s brightest minds was viewed as another canary in the increasingly toxic coal mine of college sports.
“Coach May told me that among his reasons for leaving were uncertainties and pressures involving the transfer portal and NIL support for student-athletes,” Grasso said. “He and I agreed that the future of college sports is headed in the wrong direction.”
In the next breath, Grasso voiced Michigan’s objections to the Protect College Sports Act, a bill that is intended to address those very problems. While acknowledging that college sports are in “dire need of clarity and equitable reform,” Grasso echoed the stance of the Big Ten and the SEC, which do not support the legislation.
“We want what’s best for the Big Ten and for Michigan,” Grasso said. “We are not going to sacrifice the competitive advantage that we have built for more than a century.”
Dusty May leaving for pros is familiar for Michigan fans
Austin Meek
By now, it should be obvious that “equitable reform” and “competitive advantage” don’t fit neatly in the same box. In trying to have it both ways, leaders in college sports sound a lot like St. Augustine: God, grant me chastity, but just not yet.
In college sports, the optimal amount of money to spend on a roster is whatever your school and its donors can afford. Any school that pays less lacks the want-to and resources to fully support student-athletes; any school that pays more is contributing to out-of-control spending. Schools with competitive advantages want to preserve those advantages, while the schools at a disadvantage want to rein in the big spenders.
None of this is meant as an endorsement of the Protect College Sports Act, a bipartisan bill that recently advanced out of the Senate Commerce Committee. The Big Ten and SEC aren’t wrong to feel targeted by provisions that could curb future conference realignment and open the door for the pooling of media rights. And any attempt to cap what college athletes can be paid, absent a collective bargaining agreement, is fair game for criticism.
The point is that everyone’s definition of “equitable reform” is a solution that enshrines all of the privileges schools believe they are entitled to. If Michigan is doing what’s best for Michigan, Texas Tech is doing what’s best for Texas Tech and LSU is doing what’s best for LSU, no one is actually fixing anything.
Under May, Michigan’s men’s basketball program was a paradigm for success in the modern era. May built one of the most dominant teams in Big Ten history by outmaneuvering his peers in the transfer portal. Three of Michigan’s transfers — Morez Johnson Jr., Yaxel Lendeborg and Aday Mara — were selected in the first 12 picks of last week’s NBA Draft. A fourth, point guard Elliot Cadeau, was the Final Four’s most outstanding player.
May did what all good coaches do: He maximized Michigan’s competitive advantages within the system that’s in place. It’s a gross oversimplification to say the Wolverines won because they spent money in the transfer portal. Lots of other programs spent money, too. It was the combination of everything — the coaching, the chemistry, the players’ buy-in and the financial resources — that carried Michigan to the top.
May said repeatedly that he wouldn’t stop to savor Michigan’s accomplishments until the season ended. It never seemed like he got the chance. He was already scanning his phone for messages from recruits on the walk back to the team hotel after the national championship game. Three weeks later, he was so deep in roster-building mode that he said the accomplishment of winning a national championship hadn’t sunk in.
“Your roster is the priority,” May said. “If we don’t do the work necessary now, then you don’t have a chance to compete again. It’s been difficult … for me, no, it doesn’t feel any different at all.”
In one sense, May is a bellwether. If the most successful portal-builder in the sport thinks college basketball is headed to a bad place, what hope does anyone else have? In another sense, he’s an outlier. It’s not as if he left Michigan to coach in the G League. He won a national championship and left for the NBA, which is not a new development in college sports. If Michigan had been pretty good instead of historically good, we might not be having this conversation.
The Mavericks can offer more money and a better quality of life, but they can’t offer the same competitive advantages May had at Michigan. There’s a good chance he’ll succeed anyway because he’s an excellent basketball coach, though his success will depend in large part on the people around him. For better or worse, he’ll be operating in a much more structured environment than the one he had at Michigan.
College sports could replicate parts of that structure, but it would require people in charge to do what’s best for college sports as a whole, not just their own conference or institution. Most people don’t want to do that. Unless that changes, coaches will keep leaving, fans will keep grumbling, and college sports will remain stuck in the status quo.
It’s no wonder nothing gets fixed.
