Former Michigan coach John Beilein on meeting with Dusty May: 'Every answer was perfect'

Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel hadn’t had much contact with John Beilein since the winningest coach in the history of the basketball program departed Ann Arbor for the Cleveland Cavaliers. But on Tuesday, March 19, the two reconnected, with Manuel reaching out.

Manuel fired Juwan Howard the previous Friday and was in the midst of searching for the Wolverines’ next leader. There aren’t many better options to call than Beilein, who led the Maize and Blue to 20 NCAA Tournament wins, four Big Ten titles and two national championship game appearances in his 12 seasons at the helm.

Manuel and Beilein, currently an analyst for Big Ten Network, spoke on a Zoom call for 90 minutes and planned another conversation for the same time the following day.

“At my age now, you’re always trying to give back as much as you can — whether it’s with talent or treasure or anything,” Beilein said on ‘The HUGE Show.’ “And when he reached out, honestly, I got emotional about it, actually. I want Michigan basketball … we worked so hard, [wife] Kathleen and I, for the first four years, they were so hard, to get it going in the right direction.

“And don’t forget, I gave up a Final Four team in West Virginia to come here. I could’ve stayed, plus I gave up a million-and-a-half dollars to come here. That’s back in the day when people didn’t buy out buyouts. It’s emotional for me to get this program back to where we worked so hard to achieve it to be.”

Beilein and Manuel shared that joint mission, each in their specific roles, in the search for the next coach. At the end of Wednesday’s meeting, Manuel revealed to the former Michigan coach that Florida Atlantic’s Dusty May — who was ultimately hired and announced at a press conference Tuesday (March 26) in Ann Arbor — was his top target.

“That’s great, let me also do some analysis for you and analytics and all that stuff,” Beilein said, per Manuel.

Beilein didn’t have to flip that many pages in his Rolodex to get some insight on May. He got on the phone with Darris Nichols, one of his former starting point guards at West Virginia and the current head coach at Radford. Nichols coached alongside May at both Louisiana Tech and Florida, both as assistants.

“When I talk with Darris, we don’t mince words,” the former Michigan coach explained. “I said, ‘Tell me about him.’ The first thing that came out was, ‘He’s a grinder, he works hard.’

“My next questions were, ‘What about following the NCAA rules?’ Because Florida has similar academic requirements as we do in some areas. And he answered every question perfectly, as well, Darris did.

“And I said, ‘Darris, this is your old coach. If I’m going to recommend that they take a strong look at him, you gotta tell me the truth here. In other words, nobody will ever know.’ And he actually answered all the questions. So, that helped [May’s] credibility with me, definitely.”

“He had a lot of insight on everybody, but then really dug in on Dusty and provided me with some great insight on him,” Manuel added.

John Beilein was Michigan’s X-factor in meeting with Dusty May

Manuel told Beilein Saturday that he was going to meet with May in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that evening. Beilein, who has a home in Naples, a two-hour, cross-state drive away, volunteered to join in.

“It took me about five seconds to say ‘yes,’ because I thought, he can talk to Dusty about basketball and how he did it here,” Manuel said.

“I was glad I could make that drive across Alligator Alley to get there,” Beilein said.

Better Beilein than him, Manuel said, when it comes to basketball and running the program.

“Him and John, they speak the language, they know how each other have coached and they can interact in a way that his basketball questions could be answered better by him,” the Michigan athletic director continued. “So it was a great service for John to volunteer to want to come over, and I saw the value in it immediately. And I was like, ‘Love it.’ 

“He probably actually stayed for an hour and a half actually. And then for another hour, Dusty and I, [Michigan athletics chief of staff] Doug [Gnodtke], Chad [Chatlos] from the search firm [TurnkeyZRG], we all sat in the room, talked and then he agreed to come on.”

Before the deal was done, though, there were some ideas bounced back and forth, the questions going both ways.

“I asked him other questions about his coaching style and what his staff and what his practices would look like. Every answer was perfect,” Beilein raved.

Beilein provided some great insight and assurances about the Michigan job, and May gave the answers Beilein and U-M were looking for.

Academic restrictions have been a hot topic surrounding Michigan basketball in recent years. Under Howard, the Wolverines missed out on some top transfer portal targets that had admissions issues.

“He asked about admissions, and I said admissions was never one time a problem with us getting guys into school,” Beilein noted. “But we did make sure we brought the right young men to that process.

“You can’t be the No. 1 public university in the world and just say, ‘Well, we can just get anybody in.’ It’s not fair to anybody. But if you selective in who you recruit, admissions has worked really well with us.”

“Academics is an issue. Really?” Manuel said. “How many championships have we won in our history in different sports? The standards haven’t changed at the University of Michigan. So when people say, ‘Well, it’s a better job to go here than go to Michigan because you can get anybody in,’ well, we’ve never taken anybody. That’s not us. But we’ve won and had great success.”

May also asked about Michigan’s ups and downs over the last few decades. There were some dark days from the late 1990s until Beilein took the Wolverines on a tremendously successful ride from 2007-19. And even now, they’re coming off an 8-24 season under Howard.

“His whole thing was, things like, ‘Why have you guys been so up and down over the years?’ I was able to answer that question for him, from what I could see,” Beilein explained. “We just had bad, bad facilities after the ‘90s. Actually, we didn’t have great facilities during the ‘90s, but we improved the facilities, we got the right fit of the young men on the campus, so we were able to win during that time.

“I think those two things were very comforting to him, that he knew that this was a proud university.”

It’s a proud university with a proud tradition in basketball. Michigan appeared in a national championship game in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s (two) and 2010s (two). If the Wolverines reach the Final Four this decade, it’ll likely be May that leads them there. There’s a chance he wouldn’t have been to Ann Arbor in the first place, though, without an assist from Beilein.