Dusty May's Depressing Recent Comments Show Where College Basketball Is Truly Broken

The following are recent sentences spoken by the coach who won themen's college basketball national championship just two weeks ago:

"I'd heard where you climb the ladder and you say, 'Is this really it?' And it was worse. It was less than 'it.'"

"It doesn't feel any different. ... There's been a couple of times where it comes up and I've been like, 'Oh, s---, that's us. He's talking about us.'"

"It's almost impossible to even enjoy it."

Michigan boss Dusty May gave the first two of those quotes to CBS Sports's Matt Norlander in an excellent piece published Thursday afternoon, and the last to 247Sports's The Assist With Kyle Tuckeron Monday. Taken together at face value, they paint a picture of a coach drawing vanishingly little enjoyment out of one of the most dominant national title runs in the history of the sport.

To Tucker: "There is no time. There's just not-if you want to be good next year. If you're okay just taking a big step back, then you can go on the circuit and the tour and the golf outings and the speaking engagements. But if you want to win again now, it's a very important time."

Public post-achievement malaise is nothing new in sports, but it's rare to see the emotion aired out quite like this (It's worth noting that May told Norlander he enjoyed his team's victory parade in Ann Arbor). On the surface, the source of May's misery looks simple: the Wolverines' 69–63 win over UConn tipped off at 8:50 p.m. ET on April 6, and the transfer portal opened a little over three hours later. May, the national champion, had to become May, the recruiter in record time.

Nothing happens in a vacuum, however. The transfer portal exists because, before the 2010s, the NCAA placed stifling restrictions on player movement. That, and the fact that college athletes could not earn compensation for their play, only became cultural issues of note because a great deal of people care about college basketball.

In this way, college basketball-like May-is a victim of its own success. In 1966, UTEP (then Texas Western) played Kentucky in the national championship in College Park, Md. The night before the famous title game-then played on a Saturday-Miners coach Don Haskins drank beer in his room with University of Maryland students, who he hoped to keep from waking up his team. Can you imagine a coach employing that strategy today? In `66, coverage of college basketball was scant, Haskins was making little money, and his barrier-breaking players were making none.

Is that era a time to be romanticized? Absolutely not-that `66 game is so famous because Texas Western's all-Black starting lineup was unheard of at the time. What's important for our purposes, however, is that Haskins and his contemporaries could be coaches first and foremost. "College basketball coach" was a job where the reality of the gig matched up with the description. Sure, May is a college basketball coach… but he's also a television actor… and a CEO… and all manner of other occupations.

This is the creep of affluence. The more the money rolls in, the more complex the system becomes, the more divorced it becomes from the joy of play, the more miserable it becomes for its participants. It begins to resemble very lucrative and not-at-all fun American enterprises like Silicon Valley and Wall Street. And that's how May ends up peddling quotes that could pass for Morrissey lyrics.

What's the solution? Norlander suggested moving the opening of the portal back 24 hours such that the national champions can actually celebrate, which seems like a solid band-aid fix.

From a wider view, though, something must change about college basketball's endless perfectionism, which means something must change about society's endless perfectionism. It's the kind of ethical shift that will take decades, but may give the 2076 version of May reason to look back fondly on his achievement for at least a few days before his next recruiting trip to the Moon.

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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Dusty May's Depressing Recent Comments Show Where College Basketball Is Truly Broken.

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This story was originally published April 16, 2026 at 9:03 PM.