Michigan Basketball HC Mike Boynton Jr. Talks Dusty May & More with Rich

Mike Boynton Jr. found out he might be the head coach at Michigan on Father's Day, took the news back to his own dinner table, and then woke up Monday morning still assuming he was an assistant.

"The problem was it was Father's Day," Boynton told Rich at the Champions Circle golf event. "And then I take this conversation back to the dinner table. And everybody in my house is like, what are you talking about?"

The warning had come from Dusty May the night before. May had already met with the Dallas Mavericks, and told Boynton that if this became real, he wanted to help him get the job, and if that did not work, maybe there was a seat with him in Dallas.

Boynton did not treat it as gospel. May's name had been attached to every opening in America, from North Carolina to the Orlando Magic to the Chicago Bulls. "Anytime his name comes up you're just kind of like, all right, it's another job," Boynton said. "We just have to accept it."

Then came the alert on his phone from Shams. It was done.

The detail that makes the whole thing land is what Boynton did next. He got up Monday morning, still an assistant as far as he knew, and drove his son to the Dusty May Basketball Camp at Crisler Arena.

"Dusty wasn't there when camp opened," Boynton said. "And that was the next sign that maybe there was a little bit more to the story than I understood the night before."

Michigan had three lottery picks come out of last season, three players taken in the top 12. Boynton insists the first pick happened a night early.

"The first draft pick was made the night before by the Dallas Mavericks," he said. "They drafted our coach."

He also pushed back on the way that title season is already being remembered. "The revisionist history tells us that this team was perfect," he said, before listing the parts that were not: figuring out their identity early in the year, stubbing their toe against Wisconsin at home as a 20-point favorite, and failing to win the Big Ten Tournament, which was one of the stated goals.

What did work was the versatility. "We had more solutions than most people could present problems for," Boynton said. The defense he ran finished 12th in the country in year one, after ranking in the hundreds before he and May arrived, and first in the country last season.

Their relationship goes back more than a decade to the low-major grind, May at Louisiana Tech and Boynton at Stephen F. Austin. There was no way to fly between the two towns, so when they shared a recruit's official visit, they met at a casino to hand the kid off.

Boynton already lived through the NIL and portal era at Oklahoma State with Cade Cunningham, and he sized this job up without flinching.

"I understand the gravity of it, considering now the expectation is you go 38 and 2 and you win all your games by 35 points," he said. "And you cut down three out of four nets."

He does not want that standard lowered, and thinks the roster supports it, led by what he called probably the best backcourt in the country. As for what he changes: "Just a different voice. I'm a little bit taller. My complexion's a little darker."

He left Rich with one more image. In his first week on the job Boynton flew to Argentina to watch Trey McKenney play, and counted Michigan hats the whole way. One at JFK. One in Buenos Aires. One in London on the way home.