Michigan’s season ended with an NCAA title. It started with winning the transfer portal.

It was 1989, and the word was out.

Only weeks before Michigan began playing in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, the team’s coach had accepted a job at another school. Though the coach had planned to leave at the season’s end, Michigan’s athletic director, famed football coach Bo Schembechler, immediately dismissed the coach and replaced him with someone deemed more loyal.

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“A Michigan man is going to coach Michigan,” Schembechler said.

The line only grew more memorable when the Wolverines, weeks later, won the school’s first basketball national championship. Over time, the quote became something of an unofficial job requirement in Ann Arbor.

Thirty-seven years later, Michigan won its second national title Monday night when it beat Connecticut 69-63 — and this time, being part of Michigan basketball no longer required a maize-and-blue pedigree.

Wolverines coach Dusty May was an Indiana man, one who had spent his college years as a student manager learning from iconic coach Bob Knight, a longtime Michigan rival. And May deployed a starting five this season made up entirely of transfers. It was the first time in NCAA basketball history that a team with an all-transfer starting five won the championship.

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Celebratory confetti was still falling inside Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis when Yaxel Lendeborg, a transfer from UAB who had become this season’s leading scorer, took pleasure while hinting at criticism of his team.

“They might still be calling us mercenaries, but we’re the hardest-playing team in national basketball. We’re the best team in college basketball,” Lendeborg told TBS when he was asked in a postgame interview how this team would be remembered.

Such a roster construction might have been unthinkable once. But in a more permissive NCAA era — when athletes often are given incentives to transfer by big-dollar name, image and likeness payments and rules that no longer require transfers to sit out one season — it’s a modern…

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Publish date : 2026-04-07 04:55:00

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