If Michigan wins NCAA title with a transfer-heavy roster, it has nothing to apologize for

INDIANAPOLIS — If Michigan wins the national title here Monday night, the grumble campaign among rival fan bases and even some Big Ten coaches that has been building all season will reach full tilt.

College athletics has long been a place for sour grapes to flourish like a Malbec vine in the Argentina soil, but the reaction to how Dusty May constructed this team — raiding the transfer portal for four starters, all of whom commanded significant dollars — has taken on a life of its own as the Wolverines rolled through the NCAA tournament and into Monday night’s national championship game against UConn in just his second season.

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“If you listen to the college basketball gospel, we took 17 [transfers] and that’s all we have and we should have a bunch of fifth-year seniors in Year 2,” May said.

So it’s safe to say May has heard the notion that somehow Michigan isn’t doing this the “right” way or that somehow he “bought” a championship team or that UConn winning a title would somehow signal greater purity because more of its key players have been with the program since they began their college careers.

But not only does such nonsense fly in the face of reality — these are all professional athletes now, at every program in the power conferences — it fails to properly credit May for choosing the right transfers and putting them in a system that takes advantage of their skills.

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If it was so easy, everyone would do it — and from Kentucky’s $22 million disappointment this season to the hundreds of portal mistakes across the country, it’s very clear everyone cannot.

Just as important, however, is what it has done for the four transfers in Michigan’s starting lineup. Everyone who criticizes the current environment in college sports — including the president of the United States — gets fixated on the money athletes make. They don’t talk enough about what it means for a player who was not thriving in their previous environment to become the best version of themselves.

“We all came here for a change of scenery, and we’re just taking full advantage of it,” said Michigan point guard Elliot Cadeau, a former five-star recruit who spent his first two years at North Carolina. “Everyone is pretty much playing a bigger role than they did last year, or a different role, and we’re just having confidence in ourselves.”

It’s one thing for the pearl-clutchers to act as if May did something different than any of his peers to build this team, including those who chose to pay big money to freshmen or European pros rather than transfers. It’s entirely another to rewrite history.

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Yes, Michigan has been the best team in the country pretty much from Day 1 of the season leading to Monday night and may go down as one of the best ever if it can beat UConn. But the idea that all May had to do was flash a bunch of cash and — boom, he had this college all-star team — does not comport with what actually happened when the portal opened a year ago.

Here’s a more accurate look at what happened:

• Yaxel Lendeborg was widely considered to be the top player available in the portal and decided to play one more year in college because it was not certain he would be picked in the first round of the NBA Draft. But at UAB, where he played for two years after junior college, he played a lot of minutes at center because he was the biggest player on the roster. At Michigan, he functions as an NBA-sized wing who has significantly expanded his game, more than doubling his 3-point volume (from 1.9 to 4.5 attempts per game) while becoming more efficient on 2s.

• Cadeau was indeed a ballyhooed recruit that Hubert Davis intended to build around at North Carolina. But when he decided to leave last year after the Tar Heels squeaked into the NCAA tournament and quickly exited, few were shedding tears in Chapel Hill. Fans, and even former players, criticized him publicly for being too erratic, committing too many turnovers and being a mediocre shooter from distance.

• Aday Mara, the 7-foot-3 Spaniard who could be positioned to get drafted in the NBA lottery after dominating Arizona on Saturday night, started one game for UCLA last year and played 13.1 minutes per game. For two seasons, Mick Cronin essentially buried him on the bench.

• And sophomore forward Morez Johnson Jr. was a 17-minute per game player off the bench at Illinois last year who was told to set screens and rebound and not empowered to do much else. He’s gone from 7.0 points per game to 13.1 at Michigan.

“The program that [May] implements brings the best out of you as a player,” said senior Nimari Burnett, the fifth starter. “It unlocks all your talents and abilities. He maximizes your repertoire and combines that with the individual superpowers that we all have that allows us to play off each other.”

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Perhaps if the NCAA’s transfer rules still required players to sit for a year, all four of them would have stuck it out at their old schools and eventually been just as happy as they are at Michigan and improved their games just as much. We can’t know for sure.

Likewise, there was no guarantee when May put this team together that it was going to work anywhere close to as well as it has. Asking players to fill new roles in a different system is always a chemistry experiment with a wide range of outcomes.

Michigan just happened to hit the sweet spot with this group. Given the current rules, why should anyone look at that skeptically?

“I know this is going to set off a Twitter firestorm, but I think we all are better in certain situations than others,” May said. “There's an environment that's right for me. There's an environment that's right for you. Sometimes you don't choose the right environment from the beginning or sometimes as people we change and we need something different, for a number of reasons.

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“The way we choose to look at it, we're going to bring in really, really good guys that are high achievers, that want to do it the way we want to do it. And when the Oklahoma City Thunder won the championship last year, I wasn't judging them because Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was drafted by the Clippers or because they signed Isaiah Hartenstein as a free agent. I thought, ‘Wow, those guys played beautiful basketball. That's a great team. That's a real model for young players to watch.”

May is correct. Putting any kind of stigma on Michigan because he doesn’t do it the way Dan Hurley might do it at UConn or the way Bob Knight did it 40 years ago is absurd when this is how NCAA rules allow you to build a team.

UCLA’s Mick Cronin is one of many coaches who laments at every opportunity the way things work now. In an interview last month on the “Petros and Money” radio show in Los Angeles, he said: “Every player has an agent. Every player has a number. You have to detach yourself from what college basketball used to be. 'Hey, you didn't know how to practice. You weren't very tough. You have no idea what you're doing.' And I spent two years developing you and you're going to leave.”

It’s understandable Cronin would be frustrated that a talent like Mara is flourishing now after struggling to get on the court for his first two years. He may even be right that Mara needed that kick in the rear end he got at UCLA to grow to where he is now.

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But it’s not like UCLA was some juggernaut for the two years Mara was there. The Bruins were a No. 7 seed in the NCAA tournament last season and missed it entirely the year before. If Cronin couldn’t find a way to get more out of Mara to help the team as much as the player, isn’t that ultimately on the coach?

“I knew that I was able to do all these things that I’m doing right now,” Mara said. “It was more trying to change the system [I was in], the program, maybe trying to find more opportunities.”

It’s certainly possible, whether through Congressional legislation or some type of complete system overhaul leading to collective bargaining, that college sports will eventually return to a system with tighter rules. In the big picture, it would probably be healthier for the sport to allow players one free transfer rather than the ability to do it every year. As things stand, though, the NCAA has no chance to enforce such a rule without it being struck down by the courts.

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So coaches and fans of college sports have a choice: Accept that Michigan is the product of terrific evaluation, player development and great coaching, or complain that things aren’t the way they used to be. Which, by the way, wasn’t so great either. Would you prefer to return to the days when shoe company reps and AAU coaches were cutting under-the-table deals that stocked the top programs with the best recruits?

“Whatever the rules are, we're going to go at it,” May said. “But our job is to put a competitive roster/team on the floor that represents Michigan the way we think they deserve to be represented.”

If the Wolverines win Monday, they’ll be represented by a national championship banner that hangs in Michigan’s Crisler Center forever. The complaints will disappear into the void.