The Michigan Wolverines won a title by mastering college basketball’s new world. It might change the sport

Indianapolis (CNN) — The one-man tour began just above the 3-point line, not far from where the ladder stood beneath the recently cut nets.

Elliot Cadeau brought his favorite new bauble, the brow- wood 2026 NCAA basketball national championship trophy, over to where his mother, Michelle, and older brother and doppelganger Justin stood.

As Cadeau pecked his way through the blue-and-maize confetti littering the court, Justin did a quick change. He shook off his blue leather jacket, revealing a replica of his brother’s white jersey, then stripped out of his black sweatpants to show off his maize-colored Michigan game shorts. Justin popped a black national championship trophy on his head, scooped up some confetti and the brothers proceeded to bang out a photo shoot.

“This was all his idea,’’ Michelle said, nodding to Justin, a social media influencer. “Make it look like he won, too.’’

The brothers posed with the trophy on the court and held it in their arms. They snapped plain pics and others with confetti raining down on their heads. At one point, Justin went solo, as if he did indeed play, while Cadeau stood off to the side and smiled. In all they probably spent a good five minutes to get all the content they needed.

Except Cadeau was hardly done. Trophy in hand, he bounced over to the seats behind the Michigan bench. He posed with fans there, happily obliging when they asked him to lift it up so their cellphones, held over their heads, could snap a good picture. A few selfies later, Cadeau climbed back up the steps to the elevated court, this time stopping in front of the pep band who roared their approval and snapped more pics.

Finally, Cadeau cut across the center of the court, clutching the trophy to his chest like his favorite stuffy he refused to let go of. Asked by CNN Sports what it meant to him he said simply, “Everything. It means everything.”

Michigan, a team that has performed like a freight train in this NCAA tournament, won the national title – the Big Ten’s first in 26 years – by playing more like a bulldozer. Against a Connecticut team more difficult to kill than a cockroach in body armor and their leading scorer hobbling around with a knee sprain, ankle sprain and bone bruise, the Wolverines gutted out every point in their 69-63 national championship victory.

Usually a team of elegant offense, Michigan instead clanked 13 triples off the rim and relied on its inside defensive ferocity to win a game nearly as aesthetically unpleasing as UConn’s 53-41 win over Butler in 2011.

Delivered by a team full of transfers, Michigan’s championship will undoubtedly become a referendum on the state of modern-day college basketball. But lost in the transactions is what’s required to make the exchange work: A person who’s willing to take a leap of faith, and someone else offering them the safety net.

“Coach believed in me,’’ Cadeau told CNN Sports as he traipsed around with his trophy. “And I believed in him.’’

‘A bunch of outcasts’

There is a preconceived notion about transfers – that they are all mercenaries who trade loyalty for easy dollars, hard stuff for easy street and would happily trade the name on the front of the jersey for much bling around their own.

In the days leading up to the title game, it occasionally felt like reporters were trying to stump the Wolverines, as if trying to figure out just how invested they were in their new school. Someone asked Cadeau to rank his favorite Fab Five players. He declined, which could be construed as lack of knowledge. Or maybe that he wasn’t born until 2004, more than a decade after the Fab Five played. Another asked Nimari Burnett if he knew when Michigan last won a title.

“I know about 1989,’’ he said with a smirk.

To be clear, after the disastrous Juwan Howard run ended, administrators made sure May was armed with enough money to not have to shop in the bargain bin of the portal. But these Michigan players are not exactly off the designer’s rack, either.

“We’re all a bunch of outcasts,’’ May told CNN Sports as he stood on the court, waiting to snip the final piece of twine on the second net. “None of us had an easy journey to get here.’’

Aday Mara couldn’t get on the court at UCLA, sticking around for two seasons in the hopes that Mick Cronin would see his value. He didn’t, and so Mara took a flyer on May, liking how the coach developed big men Danny Wulf and Vlad Goldin. On Monday night, after jumping up and down like a little kid while bear hugging Morez Johnson, Mara dipped in the crowd to find a flag from his native Spain and made like Superman with a cape. Which he kinda was.

Mara was the immovable force not even the Huskies championship-wining unstoppable object could conquer. Mara was credited with just one block, but his mere presence made UConn either throw up circus shots high off the glass or retreat from the paint altogether.

Yaxel Lendeborg was pulling pallets in a warehouse in high school, a lost kid who spent more time playing video games than studying. Only his mother’s conviction that he could be something got him off the screen and back into the classroom, her determination leading him from a New Jersey high school to an Arizona junior college to UAB and finally to Michigan.

His knee and ankle banged up, he fought himself and his own insecurities en route to 13 points and a national title he never could have imagined.

“I didn’t think I belonged here,’’ he said. “I still don’t think I do. Only my mother did.’’

As Lendeborg spoke his mother, Yissel Riposo, stood behind him, resting her cheek between his shoulder blades.

“So blessed, so happy,’’ she said.

Cadeau finds joy at Michigan

Then there is Cadeau, maybe the most surprising reclamation project of all. A year and change ago, he because the central figure in North Carolina’s soap opera struggles. A former top recruit out of New Jersey, he turned into a freshman who couldn’t buy an outside shot and a point guard who turned the ball over nearly as much as he passed it.

And then May came calling. He wanted a pass-first point guard that he could surround with equally unselfish but talented players. He heard the knocks about Cadeau but called Carolina assistant Sean May, who he coached way back when in AAU.

“I asked him, ‘would 17-, 18-year-old Sean May, who was a McDonald’s All-American, NBA player, would he want to play with Elliot Cadeau?” May said. “And he said an expletive, yeah, absolutely, let’s go.’’

When he got Cadeau to Ann Arbor, May did what he promised – he surrounded him with the sort of options that make a pass-happy guard salivate – but he also insisted that Cadeau not be afraid to shoot; that, in fact, the coach would be angry if he didn’t shoot.

Against Connecticut, for a while Cadeau was the only one who could shoot. In a case of serious schadenfreude, the player left on the Carolina trash heap earned most outstanding player honors, courtesy of 19 points, two assists and one turnover, on the same day that his old school finally found a new head coach – having been spurned by, among others, his current coach.

The thing about player development, sometimes the only that needs developing is confidence.

“He was struggling so much,’’ Cadeau’s mother, Michelle, said. “But now the joy for the game, it’s back.’’

Dusty May uses the transfer portal to become a Michigan icon

May rightly lumped himself into the group. He tried to play college hoops –at NAIA Oakland City – but quickly realized that his sub-six-foot height probably didn’t lend itself to a player career. Instead, he switched to student manager at Indiana, the lowest possible rung on any basketball ladder. His big break came 22 slogging years later at Florida Atlantic, a school with a great location and not much else.

Maybe it’s because he understands what it is to grind, or perhaps it’s a recognition that there is value in getting a chance. Whatever May’s own story helped fuel the way he built this Michigan team.

He was intentional with his selections, putting a premium on skill sets and personalities that blended together. He avoided divas, understanding that the only way the basketball InstaPot could work without exploding was if everyone at least played nice with each other.

“Just be coachable,’’ is how Roddy Gayle summarized it.

Michigan, not coincidentally, ranks fourth in the nation in assists per game and is 21st in the nation in assists per field goals made.

To coalesce, over the summer and into the season the players met up for team dinners – L.J. Cason hosted one, ordering up pizzas to watch Alabama play Texas Tech – but generally relied on the mutual language of hoops to figure it out and a willingness to subvert individual success for team.

“Once we all got together, they were super genuine with us the whole way,’’ Lendeborg said of his returning teammates. “They tucked us in under their wing and showed us the Michigan way. They could have easily got hurt or something because the new guys were coming in, stealing their minutes, stealing their points, but they didn’t care. All they cared about was winning and look where it led us.”

The new way or Michigan’s way?

Time will tell if this is indeed the new way to win in college basketball, or just the way that Michigan won. In 2012, when John Calipari stuffed his roster with one-and-done pros, everyone assumed that his was the new path to instant success. Since then, only one freshman – Tyus Jones at Duke in 2015 – has won the Final Four most outstanding players. Six seniors have won in that span.

But the portal does what one-and-done did not – it allows teams to get old in a hurry, and as those six MOPs show, old wins. The Wolverines may be new to wearing maize and blue, but they are not new to basketball. At an average 2.12 years of playing experience, Michigan is the 46th oldest team in college basketball.

People presume that, because May came up under Bob Knight as an Indiana boy living out his Hoosier dream as an IU manager, he is a traditionalist. If anything, Knight taught May how to live on your toes and think five steps ahead so as not to disappoint – or frankly be noticed by – the head coach.

He is, if anything, a coaching opportunist. Not unlike Calipari, who didn’t necessarily agree with the one–and-done rule but used it anyway, or Rick Pitino, who embraced out the 3-point line when everyone else fought it. May did not create the new world order; he’s just figured out how to maximize it.

May studied the Oklahoma City Thunder, last year’s NBA champion, and considered the team’s roster construction, even picked Mark Daigneault’s brain about it a little bit. He considered how the team used the NBA system to their advantage – traded for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and brought in Isaiah Hartenstein as a free agent – to build a team that played some beautiful basketball.

Why couldn’t he, May argued, do the same thing? The angry purists shrieked their response, rattling their Converse sneakers in their fists, to remind everyone that trades and free agents aren’t part of college basketball.

Except, of course, they are. Mere hours after the last bit of blue-and=yellow confetti was swept away from the Lucas Oil Stadium floor, the transfer portal opened and the pre-game social media feed was filled with players shared long posts professing their love for (Insert School Here) Nation and their gratitude but announcing they were leaving anyway.

Armed with money to spend a year ago, back when the portal opened in the middle of the NCAA tournament, Michigan already had essentially assembled its roster within a week of Florida cutting down the nets, signing Cadeau (March 31), Johnson (April 1), Lendeborg (April 5) and Mara (April 11), and partnering them with Burnett, who came in 2023 and Gayle, who arrived in 2024.

Are the critics right? Is May right? Does it even matter anymore?

For better or worse, this is where college athletics has landed and for at least one moment, a shining one, it worked quite well.

The-CNN-Wire
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