Column: Don’t compare Mike Boynton Jr. to another former internal hire

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The Michigan Wolverines basketball team lost their head coach on Monday, as Dusty May agreed to a deal to become the next head coach of the Dallas Mavericks. Three years ago, the Michigan football team found itself in a similar situation when Jim Harbaugh agreed to become the head coach of the Los Angeles Chargers.

Both coaches just won the national championship in their respective sports, so both were wanted by numerous teams at the professional level. And even more coincidentally, the Michigan athletic department chose to go in a similar direction to replace both highly-respected coaches, hiring internal assistants to fill the void.

It’s quite remarkable that Michigan has won national championships in football and basketball in a four-year span, and that the university had to promote from within both times. But make no mistake, the hiring of interim head basketball coach Mike Boynton Jr. is not the same as when Sherrone Moore was promoted to the head football coach. Michigan fans should not be drawing comparisons given the completely different backgrounds the two coaches had before getting their opportunities.

Who Sherrone Moore was…and wasn’t

When Michigan named Moore its 21st head football coach, he had never run a program, at least not for a season. Moore served as interim head coach for four games during the 2023 season and went 4-0, including wins over No. 9 Penn State and No. 2 Ohio State. Those wins helped Michigan win it all, especially under the pressure the program was in.

Moore was a Broyles Award finalist and one of the great offensive line coaches in the country. He was the only Power 4 offensive coordinator also mentoring the offensive line in 2023, and his domain was squarely on the offensive side of the ball. Michigan won the Joe Moore Award as the nation’s top offensive line unit from 2021-22 under his guidance.

But Moore’s expertise was specialized. He knew the offense and the trenches, but he had to learn how to be a program manager on the fly. He had the recruiting background, but managing a complete staff, handling a locker room through adversity, navigating NIL from the top and making holistic program decisions were things he had no experience with.

Who Mike Boynton is

Boynton is not a first-time head coach being thrown into the fire. He is a former Power 5 head coach who has lived through everything the job throws at you.

His role at Michigan was more expansive and less neatly labeled compared to Moore’s. Boynton’s primary duty was being the defensive architect, creating coverages, scouting opposing teams and developing every player to be the best defender on the court. But he also spearheaded recruiting efforts, managed day-to-day relationships across the roster, and by May’s own account, was functioning less like a position coach and more like a co-pilot.

“He’s an elite basketball coach,” May said in April. “He did a really good job at Oklahoma State, especially considering the circumstances, and I’m not going to go on that soapbox. But he’s just as good as I am. I’m the head coach at Michigan. He’s just as good as I am. He’s just as prepared. He’s been invaluable for me. 

“The best part about him is he covers my blind spots before they’re blind. There’s not a day that goes by that he doesn’t call me and want to take something off of my plate that I haven’t thought of, and that’s what he is. He’s a forward thinker. He’s got a great feel for people.”

Boynton was the head coach at Oklahoma State from 2017 -24, compiling a 119-109 record that included three 20-win seasons. He has experience managing a roster and handling program adversity, including an NCAA investigation tied to an assistant coach that hammered his program through no fault of his own.

But most of all, Boynton didn’t become the head coach at Oklahoma State out of careful planning and leaping from another program. He was elevated in 2017 after Brad Underwood left for Illinois. Boynton has quite literally been in this exact situation before, so he knows what it feels like to inherit a program mid-chaos.

Where does Michigan go from here

Boynton made a deliberate choice when he left Oklahoma State. He could have chased another head coaching job immediately, but instead, he joined a staff in Ann Arbor built by a mid-major coach inheriting a program that had won just eight games the season prior. He spent two years watching, contributing, and learning exactly what it takes to construct a national championship roster from the ground up.

The scale of the job also matters. Basketball rosters carry 15 scholarship players and a small support staff. Football programs manage more than 100 scholarship athletes and dozens of coaches. The complexity Moore faced as a first-time head coach at the sport’s most resource-intensive level has no real equivalent in basketball, and that distinction matters when evaluating Boynton’s readiness.

Michigan fans are still stinging from the Moore era, and the instinct to be cautious about Boynton’s hiring is completely understandable. But the Moore situation was a specific confluence of circumstances, tarnished by an off-field situation that changed everything. Hiring internally has worked consistently across college basketball, and the Wolverines have something rare right now — a championship roster, and a proven co-architect that has held this job before.

Michigan chose stability over buying out a name from another program. If the goal is to protect a championship window that already exists, Boynton is the right call.

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