{"id":587603,"date":"2026-04-07T08:13:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T08:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/587603\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T08:13:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T08:13:11","slug":"the-michigan-wolverines-won-a-title-by-mastering-college-basketballs-new-world-it-might-change-the-sport","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/587603\/","title":{"rendered":"The Michigan Wolverines won a title by mastering college basketball\u2019s new world. It might change the sport"},"content":{"rendered":"

Indianapolis\u00a0\u2014\u00a0\n <\/p>\n

\n The one-man tour began just above the 3-point line, not far from where the ladder stood beneath the recently cut nets.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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\u2019s 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThis was all his idea,\u2019\u2019 Michelle said, nodding to Justin, a social media influencer. \u201cMake it look like he won, too.\u2019\u2019\n <\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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, \u201cEverything. It means everything.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Michigan, a team that has performed like a freight train<\/a> in this NCAA tournament, won the national title<\/a> \u2013 the Big Ten\u2019s first in 26 years \u2013 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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\u2019s 53-41 win over Butler in 2011.\n <\/p>\n

\"Michigan<\/p>\n

\n Delivered by a team full of transfers, Michigan\u2019s championship will undoubtedly become a referendum on the state of modern-day college basketball. But lost in the transactions is what\u2019s required to make the exchange work: A person who\u2019s willing to take a leap of faith, and someone else offering them the safety net.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cCoach believed in me,\u2019\u2019 Cadeau told CNN Sports as he traipsed around with his trophy. \u201cAnd I believed in him.\u2019\u2019\n <\/p>\n

\n There is a preconceived notion about transfers \u2013 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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\u2019t 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI know about 1989,\u2019\u2019 he said with a smirk.\n <\/p>\n

\"Michigan's<\/p>\n

\n 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\u2019s rack, either.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cWe\u2019re all a bunch of outcasts,\u2019\u2019 May told CNN Sports as he stood on the court, waiting to snip the final piece of twine on the second net. \u201cNone of us had an easy journey to get here.\u2019\u2019\n <\/p>\n

\n Aday Mara couldn\u2019t get on the court at UCLA<\/a>, sticking around for two seasons in the hopes that Mick Cronin would see his value. He didn\u2019t, 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\"Michigan<\/p>\n

\n 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\u2019s conviction<\/a> 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI didn\u2019t think I belonged here,\u2019\u2019 he said. \u201cI still don\u2019t think I do. Only my mother did.\u2019\u2019\n <\/p>\n

\"Michigan's<\/p>\n

\n As Lendeborg spoke his mother, Yissel Riposo, stood behind him, resting her cheek between his shoulder blades.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cSo blessed, so happy,\u2019\u2019 she said.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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\u2019s soap opera struggles. A former top recruit out of New Jersey, he turned into a freshman who couldn\u2019t buy an outside shot and a point guard who turned the ball over nearly as much as he passed it.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI asked him, \u2018would 17-, 18-year-old Sean May, who was a McDonald\u2019s All-American, NBA player, would he want to play with Elliot Cadeau?\u201d May said. \u201cAnd he said an expletive, yeah, absolutely, let\u2019s go.\u2019\u2019\n <\/p>\n

\"Cadeau<\/p>\n

\n When he got Cadeau to Ann Arbor, May did what he promised \u2013 he surrounded him with the sort of options that make a pass-happy guard salivate \u2013 but he also insisted that Cadeau not be afraid to shoot; that, in fact, the coach would be angry if he didn\u2019t shoot.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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 \u2013 having been spurned by, among others, his current coach.\n <\/p>\n

\n The thing about player development, sometimes the only that needs developing is confidence.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cHe was struggling so much,\u2019\u2019 Cadeau\u2019s mother, Michelle, said. \u201cBut now the joy for the game, it\u2019s back.\u2019\u2019\n <\/p>\n

\n May rightly lumped himself into the group. He tried to play college hoops \u2013at NAIA Oakland City \u2013 but quickly realized that his sub-six-foot height probably didn\u2019t 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n Maybe it\u2019s because he understands what it is to grind, or perhaps it\u2019s a recognition that there is value in getting a chance. Whatever May\u2019s own story helped fuel the way he built this Michigan team.\n <\/p>\n

\"Michigan<\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cJust be coachable,\u2019\u2019 is how Roddy Gayle summarized it.\n <\/p>\n

\n Michigan, not coincidentally, ranks fourth in the nation in assists per game and is 21st in the nation in assists per field goals made.\n <\/p>\n

\n To coalesce, over the summer and into the season the players met up for team dinners \u2013 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cOnce we all got together, they were super genuine with us the whole way,\u2019\u2019 Lendeborg said of his returning teammates. \u201cThey 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\u2019t care. All they cared about was winning and look where it led us.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n 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 \u2013 Tyus Jones at Duke in 2015 \u2013 has won the Final Four most outstanding players. Six seniors have won in that span.\n <\/p>\n

\n But the portal does what one-and-done did not \u2013 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.\n <\/p>\n

\"Michigan<\/p>\n

\n 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 \u2013 or frankly be noticed by \u2013 the head coach.\n <\/p>\n

\n He is, if anything, a coaching opportunist. Not unlike Calipari, who didn\u2019t necessarily agree with the one\u2013and-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<\/a>; he\u2019s just figured out how to maximize it.\n <\/p>\n

\n May studied the Oklahoma City Thunder, last year\u2019s NBA champion, and considered the team\u2019s roster construction, even picked Mark Daigneault\u2019s brain about it a little bit. He considered how the team used the NBA system to their advantage \u2013 traded for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and brought in Isaiah Hartenstein as a free agent \u2013 to build a team that played some beautiful basketball.\n <\/p>\n

\n Why couldn\u2019t 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\u2019t part of college basketball.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n Are the critics right? Is May right? Does it even matter anymore?\n <\/p>\n

\n For better or worse, this is where college athletics has landed and for at least one moment, a shining one, it worked quite well.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Indianapolis\u00a0\u2014\u00a0 The one-man tour began just above the 3-point line, not far from where the ladder stood beneath…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":587604,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[49,48,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-587603","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=587603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587603\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/587604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=587603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=587603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=587603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}