Dusty May Addresses Future at Michigan as Name Gets Linked to North Carolina Job

Michigan basketball head coach Dusty May and the Wolverines are currently in the midst of an historic season for the program, with a goal of winning a national championship and cutting down the nets in Indianapolis in early April.

Overall, May, in two seasons at the helm in Ann Arbor, has led Michigan to a Big Ten Tournament title, a conference regular season title and two Sweet 16 appearances so far in his tenure. So far, May has compiled a 60-13 record as the Wolverines’ head coach after taking over a program that finished with an 8-24 record the season before he was hired.

Some other big time programs have not been able to emulate the success that May has in Ann Arbor, which includes North Carolina as the Tar Heels fired Hubert Davis after five seasons with the school as head coach.

Naturally, when a school with the basketball background of a program like North Carolina has a job opening, it will be expected they will swing for the fences and shoot for the biggest names, regardless of where coaches may be currently.

May’s name has been floated around by several media outlets as a coach the Tar Heels would target to replace Davis in Chapel Hill, including by CBS Sports’ Matt Norlander.

Arizona’s Tommy Lloyd, Iowa State’s T.J. Otzelberger, Florida’s Todd Golden and Alabama’s Nate Oats are other names identified by Norlander that the Tar Heels are expected to at least take a swing on, along with Chicago Bulls head coach Billy Donovan.

Before the UNC job officially became open, May spoke with Zach Gelb, a national sports talk show host, about the inevitable speculation about his name being floated around once other jobs open up in the cycle and how he is currently feeling at Michigan.

May’s response

“I’m incredibly happy at Michigan,” said May. “We love Ann Arbor. This place has been great to us, it’s made us feel like home.”

May was asked about if Michigan was his dream job, with May responding by saying his dream job was to be coaching high level high school basketball without ever imagining he would be a coach at a school like Michigan.

“My dream job was probably a really good high school in southern Indiana,” May said. “I told someone the other day, if you told me I was going to be the third assistant at the University of Michigan at this stage of my career, I probably would have thought I hit the lottery. You talk about dream jobs, it probably would have been Bloomington South or Bloomington North. Bloomington North (the coach there) is an old buddy of mine from travel ball, then Bloomington South is legendary coach J.R. Holmes, whose son is John Holmes who’s at Miami (OH) now. So I don’t want to put any heat on those athletic directors, but those two jobs were probably my two dream jobs.”

May said he felt like he could have success as a head coach at the Division I level in college basketball based on what the staff he was on did at Louisiana Tech, where he was an associate head coach before going to Florida to be an assistant, then taking over Florida Atlantic’s program in the 2018-19 season to land his first head coaching job in Division I.

“While being at Florida, I felt like I was prepared as you can possibly be to be a Division I coach,” May said. “You’re never fully prepared, just like being a parent. But I do feel like we’d had the requisite success, I put in the time and effort to learn every piece of the profession. But that still guarantees nothing. I think I had maybe one interview when I was an assistant coach at Florida. And so, fortunately there was a relationship with the AD at FAU and the stars were aligned right even to get that job.

“They’re incredibly difficult to get—there’s only 360 of them in all of college basketball. So, (I’m) very very fortunate.”