Michigan hires Florida Atlantic coach May with five-year deal
The lure of Michigan became apparent to Dusty May not in the last few days, but almost 20 years ago when he was just starting his coaching career.
He was an assistant at Eastern Michigan then and quickly realized Michigan’s logo — the famed block M — was something that people took enormous pride in being associated with. And when Michigan offered him a chance to wear it, he couldn’t say no.
May was announced as the new coach at Michigan on Sunday, agreeing to a five-year contract worth almost $19 million, the school said. He leaves Florida Atlantic after six seasons, highlighted by a Final Four run a year ago and more wins in the last two years than almost anyone nationally.
“This place allowed me to be extremely selective, to take the job that was the perfect fit,” May told The Associated Press. “I would never feel any remorse if I was at FAU forever. I almost wanted these other jobs to go away, to get filled, so I wouldn’t have a decision to make.”
The deal with Michigan was done Saturday night, one day after FAU lost to Northwestern in the NCAA tournament. May brought players at his now-former school in for a series of team and individual meetings on Sunday morning, saying afterward those talks were “extremely tough.”
The 47-year-old May replaces Juwan Howard, a former Michigan star who was fired after five seasons with the Wolverines. Howard went 82-67 with two NCAA tournament appearances, but the Wolverines went 8-24 this season — the school’s worst record since 1960-61.
Other Michigan notes
The Michigan women’s basketball team had a hard time getting home after its overtime loss to Kansas in the first round of the NCAA tournament. The team played in Los Angeles on Saturday and was supposed to take a charter flight back to Michigan that evening along with the school’s band and cheerleaders.
That didn’t go according to plan.
A team spokeswoman says the players had to sit outside for nearly 3 hours waiting for a second pilot. After more delays, the team was told the pilot was over his allotted flight time for the day, so the plane couldn’t take off. Michigan had to stay another night and finally departed Sunday morning.
Around the tournaments
Perfect brackets on the ESPN Tournament Challenge site fell hard after second-seeded Ohio State’s exit Sunday in the second round action of the women’s NCAA tournament.
Seventh- seeded Duke rallied from 16 points down to defeat the Buckeyes, 7563, causing 1,283 perfect brackets to drop to 154.
Just .05% were perfect on CBS’ site by Saturday night, but there was no update by early Sunday afternoon. CBS does not release totals.
• JuJu Watkins phenomenal freshman season at Southern California and UCLA’s duo of Charisma Osborne and Kiki Rice has helped raised the stature of women’s basketball in Los Angeles.
However, fans who would like to be at both team’s games on Monday will not get that opportunity. UCLA’s contest against Creighton tips off at 5:30 p.m. PDT, while USC and Kansas is the final game of the night tipping off 90 minutes later. Instead of staggering the days for the two Los Angeles sites on the opening weekend, the women’s NCAA tournament selection committee scheduled both to be played on Saturday and Monday.