Dusty May is leaving Michigan to take the Dallas Mavericks job. He leaves chaos behind in Ann Arbor

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One of the major tenets in the Protect College Sports Act, a federal bill designed to clean up the chaos of college athletics, is that coaches no longer will be permitted to change jobs in the middle of the season. Call it the “Lane Kiffin line item.”

But when exactly does the season start?

On June 1, the eight-week summer practice window opened in college basketball. In Ann Arbor, three prized transfers – J.P. Estrella, who came from Tennessee (“(He) fits exactly what we’re building here,’’ Michigan head coach Dusty May said of Estrella); Moustapha Thiam, who left Cincinnati (“He’s still improving, too, so we’re ready to get to work.”); and Jalen Reed, a big man from LSU (“Having someone with that experience is important for our program.”) – joined two freshmen and the returning players, to get to work on defending Michigan’s national championship.

On Monday, three weeks after practices began, a source close to the program told CNN Sports that May is leaving for the Dallas Mavericks – a decision that may send shock waves across college basketball but has very real ripple effects in Ann Arbor. This is not the middle of the season, by the bill’s definition, but it might be as every bit as disruptive as a December departure in football.

ESPN was first to report on the impending hire.

Michigan now needs to find a coach. The most likely on-staff successor, Justin Joyner, took a far lesser job at Oregon State back in March. Mike Boynton, a possible interim choice, has head coaching experience (he was the boss at Oklahoma State) but he’s made one NCAA tournament appearance in his career.

Maybe athletic director Warde Manuel gets lucky and pulls the ultimate end around and convinces Billy Donovan, who briefly left Florida for the Orlando Magic after winning a title, to return to the college game.

But a search takes time and the Wolverines don’t have a lot of it. And lost in all of this is the players, who are practicing on a season that kind of began but didn’t. Five days after a coach is named, by NCAA rules, they will have a 15-day window to look elsewhere. Except the very busy transfer portal season is over and rosters are largely set as teams get to the important business of preparing for the season.

The players can leave; they just don’t have anywhere to go.

Maybe tsunami effects is more appropriate.

In April, in the afterglow of winning his title, May was asked about the impact his coaching staff had on his team’s success.

“We have an incredibly talented group of coaches that never make it about themselves,” he said. “Look this is an ego-driven business. There are a lot of alpha males with great egos and that’s why they’re successful doing what they do. These guys have made our players the No. 1, 2 and 3 priority over their own careers, their own individual attention and accolades. It’s hard for our players not to follow the team, which is the staff, when they’re modeling that behavior every day.”

“Modeling that behavior.” The three words on one wants to talk about.

May has every right to take a new job. No one will begrudge him that. But it becomes increasingly hard to criticize athletes for a lack of loyalty when the people they’re meant to pledge it to show so little in return.

May’s decision to scoot comes a week after the athletic director up the road bolted after barely a year on the job. On May 31, 2025, J Batt was the athletic director at Georgia Tech. On June 1, 2025, he was hired as the athletic director at Michigan State. On June 15, Kentucky announced Batt as its new boss.

Three schools, barely one calendar year. Modeling behavior, indeed.

There will be a temptation here to opine about whether May’s decision to jilt the Wolverines after a two-year stopover is yet another sign of college athletics gone to pot, to deflect the chaos May has created and turn him into another victim of a bad system.

But in his short stay at Michigan, May was given the keys to the kingdom and the cash register. If the excessive pay permitted for college athletes was offensive, no one seemed to care much in Ann Arbor.

After winning the title, May said he expected his roster budget to increase and did not seem upset by the largesse required.

“If you have to pay – let’s factor in the scholarship and operating budget of our team – and then you have to pay them a salary of, call it $10 million, that’s a pretty good return,” he told Front Office Sports. “And obviously you’re not going to be able to do that every single year. But if you can invest $15 million and you get a return of multiple billions, I think a lot of universities would take that gamble.”

Last year, May used the cash to build a roster that took advantage of the very system everyone else decried. Of the eight Wolverines to make it into the championship box score, five were transfers.

He had money to spend and had no qualms about spending it. He was not morally opposed to transfers, nor did he get offended about assembling rather than growing talent.

In April, in fact, May was held up as the new standard bearer, a man who figured out how to win in this new era and was as unbothered by it as he was successful.

And despite all that, he left anyway.

So, is he another Jay Wright or Tony Bennett?

Or is he just a man who saw a bigger, better job and took it, unbothered by the detritus left behind in a season that hadn’t started but already had begun?

This story has been updated with additional reporting and analysis.

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