Dusty May is far from the first college basketball coach to try his hand at the NBA. He is not even the first Michigan coach to make that jump, as John Beilein left for the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2019. So in a vacuum, May trading Michigan for the Dallas Mavericks would not be a big deal on its own.
But May is the first coach in 38 years to win a national championship and not come back the next season. That is a major warning sign for college basketball, because May's departure says the quiet part out loud. It is currently easier to coach in the NBA than in college basketball.
Until NIL and the transfer portal situation changes, this dynamic is going to keep chasing good coaches out of the profession. Here is a deeper look at what is going on.
College Coaches Have to Roster Build Every Year
In the NBA, a team is more likely to come back largely intact most years. That is because the league has contracts in place. There is a soft salary cap, which allows teams to exceed it to re-sign their own players. There is also a loyalty incentive in the form of Bird rights, which is why free agents will often agree to sign-and-trade deals.
In short, the NBA offers genuine financial incentives for players to stick around. College basketball is nothing like that.
Each year, the coach has to recruit his own players and keep them out of the transfer portal. He has to manage NIL deals, and he has to bring in freshmen and junior college players to fill gaps. There is no such thing as trading players, there is no draft, and it is entirely possible for a school to lose its whole roster from one year to the next.
It is a never-ending headache, and it leaves coaches almost no real downtime during the year. Yes, a coach is paid handsomely to deal with the job, but burnout happens even at seven figures. In the NBA, May will have players signed for multiple years and draft picks ready to replace the ones he cannot re-sign.
That gives him a little more room to have an actual life outside the job. And that matters.
Lack Of Defined Structure
College basketball has become the Wild West. Nobody knows how to govern NIL, in part because schools were never supposed to get this involved. NIL was originally meant to let players make commercials, sign endorsement deals, appear at autograph shows, and get paid for it. Instead, the schools jumped in headfirst and started paying players directly.
Now it is an expected part of the job, and it is one more issue for a coach to manage. The lack of defined structure also means not everyone is operating under the same rules.
Texas A&M coach Bucky McMillan recently alluded to that reality. He noted that some of his SEC rivals had gone past the point of being profitable with how much they spent on their rosters. Some schools can absorb that thanks to deep-pocketed donors, while others simply lack that financial base.
In the NBA, everyone competes under the same structure. The cap is the cap, and the only real advantage teams have is the ability to exceed it to re-sign their own draft picks or free agents. May has to worry about stopping Victor Wembanyama. He does not have to worry about the Spurs operating under a different set of rules than his own team. In college, that imbalance could have worn on him over time.
May Had All the Leverage
One thing that has not changed is that this was May's best chance to cash in. He was never going to have more leverage than he did immediately after winning a national title. From his point of view, he had nothing to lose by going for it.
If he succeeds in Dallas, he will be very wealthy and will have proven himself at yet another level of basketball. If he fails, he will still be very wealthy and will remain on speed dial for athletic directors around the country.
Brad Stevens has not coached a college basketball game in 13 years and has built a successful career as the Boston Celtics' president of basketball operations. Yet his name still comes up in nearly every high-major coaching search. Fred Hoiberg flamed out with the Chicago Bulls, yet Nebraska did not hesitate to hire him once he became available. The Huskers just reached the Sweet 16 for the first time in program history, and nobody in Lincoln cares that Hoiberg finished 40 games under .500 in Chicago.
The truth is that there are college coaches and there are professional coaches, and those are not the same skill set. Hoiberg is a great college coach and was a below-average professional one. Quin Snyder was a mediocre college coach and is a first-rate pro coach. Very few can follow the Stevens path and succeed at both.
May now has his best shot at finding out which kind he is. And given that his move will serve as a wake-up call for college basketball, all the better for him if he gets to sit out the chaos that follows.
College Basketball Needs a Change
There is no question that college basketball is in flux. Something has to change, or the sport will keep watching good coaches leave for other opportunities.
Few will ever have the opportunity May had. But that does not change the fact that college basketball is worse off for losing him to the pros. The lesson from his departure needs to be that the sport has to get NIL and the transfer portal figured out, so coaches actually have a real chance to build rosters without sacrificing any chance at a real life.
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