Michigan Basketball: 11 candidates to replace Juwan Howard as Head Coach

Dusty May

When a head coach takes a mid-major program on an unexpected NCAA Tournament run, they tend to get thrown out for a lot of these high-major openings. We’ve seen it time and time again, with people like Gregg Marshall who stay, and others like Jim Larranaga and Shaka Smart who eventually accepted more prominent jobs. Will Michigan be the ones to lure May away from southern Florida?

A former student manager at Indiana under Bob Knight, May’s coaching career began as an assistant at several different colleges. He caught on at Louisiana Tech under Mike White and followed him to Florida before accepting his first head coaching job at Florida Atlantic in 2018. Slow progress produced nothing of note in his first four seasons, but he was quietly building a monster. May led the Owls to the Final Four as a 9-seed last season and has another very talented heading to the Big Dance this year.

May will almost have his pick of the litter when it comes to power conference head coaching jobs. He’s a former student coach in the Big Ten and returning to the league would likely be attractive for him. However, it’s worth wondering if he’s waiting for Indiana to open up one day, or if he’s already considering a lucrative offer from Ohio State, whose job opened up nearly a month earlier than Michigan. Whichever school hires him will be hitting a home run.