INDIANAPOLIS – It doesn't matter what sport it is. When you come to the University of Michigan, the expectation is to win Big Ten Championships and National Championships. As an athletic department, it has won 40 NCAA Championships in 12 sports, and that doesn't even include the 12 football championships that the program boasts.
It's one of the most prestigious universities in both athletics and academics in this country. And we saw that on full display as the Wolverines took down UConn to win the NCAA Basketball Championship 69-63 inside Lucas Oil Stadium in front of a sea of maize and blue.
"We want to win," Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel said. "And I have people leading each program who want to win. I have student-athletes in each program who want to win. They don't come here to participate, they come here to win."
"When we win championships at Michigan, whether it's in the Big Ten or national championships," Manuel added. "We celebrate those who have worked so hard to make that happen."
Manuel is a Michigan man. He played football under Bo Schembechler in the 1980's and has three degrees from the University. 12 years ago, he was the athletic director when UConn won the national championship. Two years ago, he stood on the field at NRG Stadium in Houston as the Wolverines won the College Football Playoff National Championship.
Now, he cuts down the nets again.
"Bo would be proud," Manuel said. "He'd be proud of Dusty, he'd be proud of the coaching staff, the student athletes. And lastly, I think he'd be proud of me. I'm in this position, part of who I am and how I lead is because I played football, and because of my dad, and my mom, and my assistant coaches at Michigan. He would be very proud of that."
And his winter championship season isn't over yet. On Thursday, Manuel will be in Las Vegas to watch the Michigan men's hockey team play in the Frozen Four.
Saturday night saw an orange-filled crowd at Lucas Oil, with Illinois fans being the dominant population of the four fanbases. On Monday, there was no question that it was Michigan.
With a passionate alumni base that spreads its wings across the world, and a fanbase of non-alumni that can match any in the country as well, the Wolverines made them proud.
"It's a global brand," assistant coach Mike Boynton told Basket Under Review. "In every sense of the word. And they obviously showed up tonight and gave everybody a big boost."
"Our fans did a great job of being able to relieve some of that pressure, some of that nervousness," Roddy Gayle said. "Just giving us some realy energy and allwing us to feed off that."
"It felt like (winning) was a reward for them (the fanbase)," Nimari Burnett said. "For their dedication, just them supporting us all over the country. I talked about it before, but away games felt like home games because of the fanbase that came out to support us."
Dusty May may have cemented his case as the best coach in college basketball over the weekend. 13 years ago, he met Kyle Church working on staff at Louisiana Tech under head coach Mike White.
Church hasn't left May's side since. From Ruston to Gainesville to Boca to Ann Arbor, Church has been a vital part of May's coaching success. With the dual-title of assistant coach and general manager, he'll be incredibly busy trying to get Michigan back to the mountaintop with a transfer portal haul over the next couple weeks, but for now, he can just reflect on the moment.
"It's absolutely incredible," Church told Basket Under Review. "It's just so cool to see all these families and all these parents and all these people who mean so much to the program so happy. That means more. And to see the players just work so hard for this and sacrifice so much for a moment like this."
May was incredibly intentional in putting together his Wolverine staff two years ago when he got the job. He brought in a few of his confidants that helped build FAU up, like Church, Drew Williamson, and a reunion with Akeem Miskadeen, but also went outside of his orbit to add key assets like Boynton and Justin Joyner.
That group has also made its case to be the best in the sport. And for the players who see it every single day, they'll swear on it.
"They're not just here to coach basketball," Will Tschetter said. "They're here to develop relationships with us and look after us as human beings. I think they really took pride in developing us as young men which makes it easy on the basketall floor when they're trying to coach you to have that level of trust. I don't feel like any staff that I've heard of or been a part of or seen really has that level of give-and-take. It's like 'that's my dawg,' but also 'I'm gonna get hard on you and I'm gonna coach you'."
Final Four Most Outstanding Player Elliot Cadeau has faced criticism and scrutiny at every step of his career thus far. When May recruited him out of the transfer portal, he believed in him, and helped change his trajectory.
"I’m just proud to see his development," Gayle said. "Especially from last year, and the disrespect he was receiving online about things he wasn’t capable of doing. To be in this moment and be able to step up in such a big way, we needed that from him."
He made Michigan's first outside shot of the entire game in the middle of the second half to extend the Wolverines' lead and force a Husky timeout. That wasn't always part of his game that could be relied on, but May made it so.
When asked what helped his confidence grow, Cadeau's answer was simple.
"Just Dusty," he said. "Just letting me do it in practice and trusting me to bring itto the game. I think he's the best coach I ever played for. He's just so smart, he knows a lot about basketball, and he had a plan with this really talented roster. He built a plan for us and he executed it."
That's exactly how May's son, Charlie, a walk-on for the Wolverines, sees it. While he's not swarmed the same way that other Michigan players were in the locker room, he answered plenty of questions about what makes his dad such a great coach.
And his answer stayed the same.
"His ability to be a players coach and just connect with the players, connect with the people," Charlie said. "He's just the same guy every day. I think a lot of people sense that he's very truthful, very honest."
The iconic Spanish flag tied around his back like Superman’s cape, Aday Mara will readily admit that he didn’t come to America three years ago with winning a national championship at the top of his mind. Can you blame him? The 7 foot 3 Zaragoza native arrived on UCLA’s campus with many expecting him to be one-and-done into the NBA, and his motivation for coming to college aligned with that.
“When I left Spain, I didn't know that March Madness and college basketball was this big,” Mara said. "My first year, I was coming here to improve my game, to improve my English, to learn how to live here maybe to prepare for the NBA."
The Bruins missed the NCAA Tournament in his first season, but as part of the college basketball universe, he started to understand its scale. Charter jets, big crowds, and constant media attention, along with the spectacle of March Madness gave him a new goal
“As soon as I realized how big this was,” he continued. "How much history is in college basketball, I changed my mind, and I was like 'I want to play in that game'."
When Mara carries around the flag of his homeland, he now does it as a national champion.
With growing European interest in the American college game, Mara’s performance on the sport’s biggest stage can turbocharge the growth as well.
At this year’s Final Four, he navigated bilingual press conferences and media scrums, with Spanish-language reporters asking him questions in his native tongue, along with the many English-first reporters.
I don’t think he’ll be the last to bring foreign media into the Final Four.
And he's fully swept up in March Madness fever now.
"I was (emotional because I was) just thinking about all the people that came to the game," Mara said. "I saw the price of the tickets, that was crazy. But also, I saw people were going to the bars two days ago, so just by knowing all those people were behind us and cheering for us."
It certainly wasn't Yaxel Lendeborg's best game as a Michigan Wolverine. He didn't look as compromised by the knee injury as he had in the second half against Arizona, but Michigan decided against featuring him as heavily in the offense as it typically does, especially in the first half.
He still ended up finishing with 13 points, but grabbed just two rebounds and one assist. The First Team All-American didn't make the NCAA All-Tournament team despite his team winning the national championship. That says a lot about both Lendeborg's ability to know when it's his moment, and the team's ability to pick him up when it's not.
"We're extremely proud to be part of Yaxel's journey," May said. "Even though the individual accolades in his performance increased, he stayed more committed to the team."
He certainly should have his name in the rafters at the Crisler Center.
"I don't determine that," May said. "But I don't know how he couldn't. He's an All-American on the national champions."
Basket Under Review will have much more on this shortly, but this was Joyner's final game with the Wolverines. He leaves to take over as the head coach at Oregon State now, but with some hardware.
He told Basket Under Review that the win wasn't pretty, but he knows nobody will remember that. He's not even going to do a film session postgame.
"We'll never remember the box score," Joyner said. "We'll remember the W though."
The Huskies made it hard on Michigan. Harder than it had been in any of the Wolverines' previous five NCAA Tournament games, or any of the 12 that UConn won en route to back-to-back national championships in 2023 and 2024. But if there's one thing that Michigan showed all year, it's that it can win in any way.
They certainly had their win conditions. Playing with their pace and shooting the three with any sort of efficiency were key in that, but that wasn't the case on Monday. A 65 possession game that resulted in Michigan's worst three-point percentage of the season? Not their game. But their win.
"It shows that we're built to win," Boynton told Basket Under Review. "And when you're built to win, you have to figure it out no matter how the game is played. Because the other team has some say in how the game is played. We tried to speed them using our press a little bit more than we have in most games, but they're a good team, they're a champion, and they wouldn't go away. And so we had to stick in there for 40 minutes and get it done late."
In a grind of a game, it was the fast-paced Wolverines showing their muscle and grit in order to come out on top.
"We found ways to win games all year," Tschetter said. "It's a culmination of the whole season coming into one game."
And Tschetter credits Morez Johnson Jr. as the one who brought that out of the team.
When asked about where the grittiness comes from, Tschetter had a simple answer.
"Morez Johnson," he said. "I'm so serious."
He continued.
"That dude sets the tone in practice every day," Tschetter said. "We have a thing where we have to run down-and-backs if we lose a four-minute game in practice, and we were talking about it at shootaround today. We got through the last practice without Morez having to remind Coach May that the maize team has to run another 22. He was always the guy to make sure that after us maize guys lost, we were getting on the line."
As previously mentioned, Manuel is extremely familiar with UConn's championship standard, in addition to Michigan's. He wasn't surprised at all to see the Huskies make it a game, and he still has a ton of kind words to say about his time in Storrs.
"It's a special place to me because of the people and how they treated me and my family," Manuel said. "UConn is an unbelievably dominant basketball school. (They call it) the Capital of (the) Basketball (world), and it certainly is. They deserve that title. We won a title when I was there in '14 with Kevin Ollie. Working with Jim Calhoun and Geno, I haven't had the opportunity to work with Coach Hurley, but what an unbelievable coach. UConn always has a special place in my heart."
He said that he told former Michigan big man Tarris Reed's parents that he's proud of the way that he's developed into a leader and star for the Huskies.
At halftime of the game, the NCAA honored the last undefeated team in Division I Men's Basketball. It's been 50 years since the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers went 32-0 and took home the national championship.
Michigan took three defeats this season: A loss at home to Wisconsin in January, a tough neutral loss to Duke in February, and the Big Ten Championship Game against Purdue. But many of the wins were dominant, and the tournament run cements a legacy that will be remembered for the next 50 years and beyond.
Perhaps in 2076, these Wolverines will be honored at the Final Four.
"I think we're the best team in history," Gayle said.
He might've only been talking about Michigan's history – I'm not quite sure, but regardless, there's a pretty good case.