The chaotic, tumultuous offseason of the reigning champion Michigan Wolverines

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  Jeff BorzelloNov 5, 2026, 07:41 AM ET

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  • Basketball recruiting insider.
  • Joined ESPN in 2014.
  • Graduate of University of Delaware.

It's not exactly a calming beginning: inheriting a team coming off a national championship and entering essentially a one-year prove-it season on the job. And leading a group of players gathered from the transfer portal with little experience playing together.

One could forgive Mike Boynton for feeling the stress as the 2026-27 college basketball campaign gets underway. But in Boynton's mind, it's the opposite. The first-year Michigan coach finally has time to take a deep breath.

"Things are normalizing now," he told ESPN in October.

"The year in totality has been crazy. The run, then the portal and recruiting, then the [coaching] change. Then, it got really crazy with everything that comes with being in this chair again. But now it's kind of normal. You switch your mindset. You just focus on preparing your team and trying to coach the games."

Michigan is coming off the most tumultuous, chaotic offseason of any reigning champion in recent college basketball history. The Wolverines beat UConn on April 6 to secure the program's first national championship since 1989. Forty minutes later, the transfer portal opened. Within three weeks, lottery picks Aday Mara and Morez Johnson Jr. declared for the NBA draft, and Michigan replaced them with transfer bigs J.P. Estrella, Moustapha Thiam and Jalen Reed.

As the dust settled, Michigan looked to be a team that could compete for back-to-back titles. Then seismic, landscape-shifting news broke on the morning of June 22: Michigan coach Dusty May was leaving to become the coach of the Dallas Mavericks.

Suddenly, Boynton, a top assistant under May, was the interim head coach in charge of rapidly cementing a roster without much of a contingency plan.

His mission to navigate all the expectations placed on him begins in earnest Friday in a national championship rematch against No. 4 UConn at TD Garden in Boston -- which feels like a walk in the park compared with his summer.

"From June 22 to Aug. 1, I was just trying to survive 24 hours at a time," Boynton said.

Boynton woke up on the morning of June 22 as a Michigan assistant coach, expecting to join May at the second session of his summer basketball camp.

Shortly after 10 a.m., Boynton was the interim head coach of Michigan basketball.

He had been through a similar situation when he took over at Oklahoma State in 2017, getting promoted to replace Brad Underwood after Underwood left for Illinois. But that transition happened in March, giving him a full offseason to figure out how he wanted to handle the job -- and it came in a different college sports climate without a transfer portal. Replacing May in late June 2026? Not quite the same grace period.

"This literally happened in the middle of the day," Boynton said. "Here's the job. Everything that comes with it."

Boynton knew there was a chance May could leave for Dallas. The two had spoken about it a few days earlier, when May was still discussing the job with the Mavericks and talking to Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel. But it still felt like a shock -- even more so to the Michigan players.

Estrella, a transfer from Tennessee who had arrived on campus just a couple of weeks earlier, was on his way to a Monday morning workout when one of his friends FaceTimed him.

Is the news true?

I don't know what you're talking about.

Then, Estrella walked into the weight room and saw all of his teammates sitting in a circle.

"The vibes were a little different," he said. "We were in shock."

"I was just in a state where I didn't know what to do," point guard Elliot Cadeau added.

May called the players in for a meeting after the morning lift and told them the news was true. He was leaving the reigning champions to coach in the NBA.

Boynton was happy for May, but his own challenge was coming into focus. Under NCAA rules, Michigan players could enter the transfer portal 31 days after Boynton's appointment. He had a month to keep the roster together, fighting off desperate coaches attempting to sign his players. And given the point in the calendar, the options to replace anyone who might leave were basically nonexistent.

"You got 15 guys on June 23 that are free agents," Boynton said.

He and the staff -- Boynton retained assistant coaches Akeem Miskdeen, Kyle Church and KT Harrell, while adding Brown head coach Mike Martin and Osceola Magic head coach Dylan Murphy -- had to prioritize which players they needed to get back in the fold immediately, with Cadeau and Trey McKenney at the top of the list. Cadeau started all 40 games last season and won Final Four Most Outstanding Player, and McKenney averaged 9.9 points as one of the best sixth men in the country.

Not only were they expected to form one of the best backcourts in the country in 2026-27, but they were also the two most high-profile returnees from the national championship team, and other players were waiting to see what the team's headliners would do.

McKenney recommitted not long after Boynton was named interim coach, and then Cadeau followed two days later.

"I feel like the other people on the team had to hear from one of the leaders that it's OK to stay and that people wanted to stay. Me and Trey kind of made that an emphasis," Cadeau said. "As soon as we made the decision, we texted the group chat and said, 'We want everybody to stay. Everybody stay.'"

"We did a pretty good job of just calming everybody down and making everybody realize that what we had in that building is very special," McKenney added.

The rest of the key players agreed. Moustapha Thiam, a top-10 transfer from Cincinnati and potential NBA prospect, recommitted June 30; Estrella, one of the most efficient big men in the SEC at Tennessee, a couple of days later; and five-star freshman Brandon McCoy Jr. on July 4. Those three, combined with Cadeau and McKenney, would form one of the best starting fives in the country.

"They were here last year; they know everyone on staff," Estrella said of Cadeau and McKenney. "Them committing that quickly, showing they had trust in Coach B, gave me that insight. If they trust him, I trust him as well. If they think they can do it again this year, there's no reason I'd want to leave."

When the smoke cleared, backup guard L.J. Cason was the only player who transferred.

"It was a lot to do. It felt impossible," Boynton said. "The cool thing is they all decided to do it. It wasn't like they didn't have a choice. They decided to play for us, for me. That gave me a, 'We're doing this together' kind of mindset. We feel confident that no one here is here for any ulterior reasons, so you can just go for it and do the job. It's the team we thought we were going to be on when we woke up on June 22."

While Boynton and his staff were spending almost every waking minute keeping the existing roster together, there was one critical detail to be solved: Boynton was still just the interim head coach -- and wasn't sure he wanted the full title. The school had offered him a two-year deal to take over on a permanent basis, but in early July, he still hadn't accepted it.

"There was a very, very, very small part of me in the first 48 to 96 hours like, 'I don't think I'm going to do this.' That's how crazy it was," said Boynton, who contemplated following May to Dallas, where he'd have the opportunity to work with players such as nine-time NBA All-Star Kyrie Irving and 2026 Rookie of the Year Cooper Flagg in Dallas. 'Is it worth it? I'll just go with Dusty and coach Coop and Kyrie. I don't know if I want to be dealing with this.'

"But it was a very small part. You reset your head like, 'What are you thinking? You're going to coach Michigan.' One way I tried to frame it for myself, when those moments came up. If you don't do this, what would you have to do to have an opportunity to ever be in this position again? There may be nothing I could ever do."

On July 10, Michigan announced that Boynton had accepted a two-year contract. A week later, some of the details of his contract were made public, including a stipulation that he must achieve two of the following four benchmarks to guarantee a second season as head coach in Ann Arbor: at least 24 regular-season wins, a top-four Big Ten finish, a Big Ten tournament championship or a Sweet 16 appearance.

It's the very definition of a prove-it deal, and it's why Boynton already finds himself on this season's hot seat.

"I don't think it matters anymore," Boynton said. "I think we're at a place now -- I mean, everybody's a three-game losing streak away from being [on the hot seat]. It's where our industry is now. Mine is just out in the open and more public. But I also got a chance to coach Michigan ... I would like to have fought more for a long-term deal, but I'm not going to overthink this, either."

Boynton and his players have tried to avoid the idea that they're defending a national title. The three best players on the team that won the championship are no longer in Ann Arbor. The head coach who guided this team to the title is gone. Much of this season's roster -- and coaching staff -- didn't have much to do with the 2025-26 title.

"It's a different team; it's a different staff. It's us building our own legacy," Estrella said. "We're not defending national champions. Last year's team was. We have to show people we can win it again."

"We can't stop people from talking about it," Boynton said. "Our opponents are going to talk about playing the defending national champions. That'll help them be motivated to play against us. Internally, we've got to understand we're not defending national champions. We can't show up with an arrogance that we get credit for last year."

There are still unanswered questions as Michigan's title defense gets underway this week. McCoy was penciled in as the fifth starter, but the McDonald's All-American tore his right ACL in late August on the Wolverines' European tour.

Returning wing Roddy Gayle Jr. started in Michigan's opener against Oakland, but he and Columbia transfer Kenny Noland Jr. are eligible under preliminary injunctions in New York and Indiana, respectively. There is still a chance neither fifth-year senior is cleared to play the entire season.

Cadeau and McKenney are poised to be one of college basketball's elite backcourts, but for the Wolverines to reach their ceiling, the frontcourt duo of Estrella and Thiam will have to continue the recent tradition of Michigan portal additions becoming key contributors.

"J.P. and Moustapha need to get to a point where we're not talking about Morez and Aday," Boynton said. "That needs to be their goal, that we're talking about Moustapha and JP, just the way that Morez and Yax [Lendeborg] and Aday made us stop talking about Danny Wolf and Vlad Goldin."

On the sideline, Boynton is looking to carry forward the standard that May established over the past two seasons.

"I definitely have so much confidence [in Boynton]," Cadeau said. "I feel like we have a very talented roster. Preseason, before Dusty left, everyone was saying we're a top-three team in the country, maybe No. 1 team. We feel like Dusty leaving doesn't change that at all. We feel like Brandon getting injured doesn't change it at all because we have other guys that can step up."

"With what we retained with the roster, the culture he wants to instill with the new guys, he wants to show the country that Michigan culture really runs deep in the program," Gayle said. "I don't really see much change. The foundation is still the same."

Michigan was ranked No. 16 in the preseason AP poll, but despite the departure of three lottery picks and a coaching change at the top of the program, the Wolverines will still carry a target on their backs this season. And there's a nonconference schedule befitting a title contender: vs. No. 4 UConn in Boston on Friday, at Villanova on Nov. 21, a trip to Las Vegas for the Players Era 16 on Nov. 24 and vs. Louisville in Detroit on Dec. 5.

The hope for Michigan is that it will again make the 45-minute drive from Ann Arbor to Detroit in early April for this season's Final Four.

"If we don't win, nobody will remember this team," Cadeau said. "They'll just remember last year's team. If we want to create an identity for ourselves, we just got to continue the winning culture."

For Cadeau, the rebuild, the coaching change, keeping together the roster, the general tumult of Michigan's offseason -- it doesn't overshadow what happened on the night of April 6.