Did Dusty May Telegraph His NBA Move With His Comments After the National Championship?

The basketball world has always had a special place in its heart for coaches who appear to have pulled themselves up from the muck—the Phil Jacksons, Nick Nurses and Gregg Popoviches who put in years of service at small colleges and bush-league arenas before ascending to the top of their profession by intelligence and luck.

Into this lineage has stepped Dusty May, a former Indiana video coach who built an impossible winner at Florida Atlantic before taking home the national championship at Michigan in 2026. May, however, showed his hand in a way not all of his forebears could—exhibiting a self-awareness on the way up about the price of greatness in the modern college game.

That candor, which seemed a mere breath of fresh air in April, now reads differently. According to a Monday morning report from ESPN, May is off to coach the Mavericks after two phenomenal years with the Wolverines; he’ll leave as Michigan’s all-time leader in winning percentage, breaking a 95-year-old record.

Looking back at May’s post-national championship comments, it’s hard not to see a coach telegraphing his eventual exit. Here’s a look back at three quotes that now seem telling in hindsight.

“I’d heard where you climb the ladder and you say, ‘Is this really it?’ And it was worse. It was less than ‘it.’”

May gave that quote to Matt Norlander of CBS in a piece published April 16, which detailed the coach’s profound identity crisis as college basketball’s roster-management cycle forced him back to work almost immediately after the Wolverines topped UConn 69–63 on April 6.

That is not really a problem in the NBA, the land of union labor and an ironclad calendar. Knicks coach and newly crowned NBA champion Mike Brown—who, like May, started life as a video coach—is probably still celebrating right now even as he prepares for the draft this week and free agency shortly thereafter. Dallas is the biggest winner of this transaction, but May’s work-life balance isn’t far behind.

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“It’s almost impossible to even enjoy it.”

To 247Sports’s The Assist with Kyle Tucker on April 13, presumably right around when May spoke to Norlander. Note the almost—May told Norlander he did sincerely enjoy Michigan’s championship celebration. Again, though, the reality looms of having to court players in the transfer portal as the Wolverines’ judge, jury and executioner—even in the age of the college general manager.

With the Mavericks, May is just another cog in what has quickly become one of basketball’s most cerebral machines. From a brainpower perspective, you can’t do much better than an org chart of president Masai Ujiri and general manager Mike Schmitz—both for winning and for delegation of tasks.

It doesn’t “feel like we’re national champions.”

To Jordan Mendoza of USA Today on May 19—more than a month after the final buzzer sounded in Indianapolis!

The fact that May felt compelled to hammer home this point in interviews is circumstantial evidence that the thought continued to linger. That the NBA, with both its prestige and bevy of intriguing potential openings, intrigued not in the future but at present. Now, May’s itch appears scratched, with the coach better—and college basketball worse—for it.

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