Jeff Borzello Nov 5, 2026, 07:41 AM ET Close 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 Face Timed 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 af...
Source: ESPN General · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing