Dusty May has been on a recruiting tear, and it’s going to help the program in the long run

In his first season at the helm for Michigan, head coach Dusty May has landed a big time recruit already.

This past weekend was a net positive for the Michigan men’s basketball team: even though the Wolverines lost to a good Wake Forest team in Greensboro, they picked up a huge win in the recruitment department, with five-star in-state guard Trey McKenney committing to the Wolverines on Saturday.

That commitment marks McKenney as the first five-star that Michigan head coach Dusty May has landed since taking the Michigan job in March. And with how active May has been on the recruiting trail, I doubt McKenney will be his last.

It’s relatively early in the 2025 recruiting cycle, but with the commitments of McKenney, four-star forward Winters Grady , and New Zealand forward Oscar Goodman , the Wolverines now have the fifth-highest ranked class on the 247 Composite , behind only blue bloods in Duke, UConn , Kentucky and a Notre Dame team led by a really good recruiter in Micah Shrewsberry.

The latest commitment of McKenney, fresh off leading Orchard Lake St. Mary’s DI state title this past season, is a testament to the newfound energy May has brought to the program. This win proves that Michigan can land elite recruits with NBA upside, which only raises the ceiling of what this program can accomplish under the former FAU coach.

It’s not hyperbole to say that this commitment has both local and national implications, and helps the Wolverines in both the immediate and the distant future.

Let me break it down for you, starting with the local implications.

Tom Izzo and Michigan State have landed the top in-state kids for decades now: take a gander at MSU’s all-time recruiting board on 247 , and you can see that Izzo almost has a monopoly on the top talent in the state, including Cassius Winston, Drew Neitzel, Draymond Green and a plethora of top in-state talent. Izzo has basically been a finalist to land every top-100 player in the state over the last two decades.

Izzo’s recruiting domination in his home state spans multiple Michigan coaching staffs. While John Beilien developed a pristine reputation for developing talent once they got on campus, outside of Derrick Walton and Brandon Johns Jr, most of his top recruits came from out of state. While Juwan Howard should get credit for landing Grand Rapids Christian standout Kobe Bufkin, the vast majority of his recruits came from prep academies in other states, and they often struggled to improve once they got to Michigan.

McKenney choosing Michigan over MSU, the latter of which being linked to the talented guard before he revealed his top three , doesn’t fully dismantle the empire Izzo has built on the recruiting front, but it’s certainly a chip in the armor.

The state of Michigan is a hotbed when it comes to recruits, with tons of talent coming from Detroit, Lansing and Grand Rapids. While Izzo has owned his home state, landing a player as good as McKenney takes some power away from MSU and gives it to Michigan.

Landing five-star players isn’t the only way to win championships obviously: as Michigan fans know from the Beilein era, developing talent is just as important. And when you factor in the whirlwind world of NIL and the transfer portal, you need a committed, energetic coach to give your program a fighting chance nationally.

May appears to have that energy. When Maize N Brew asked him at his intro presser how much of his time is spent on NIL, he replied that 25-30 percent of his time is spent “on NIL, and recruiting donors, giving access to our program, doing everything we could to provide opportunities to our players.”

While McKenney hasn’t explicitly said how much NIL played a factor in his recruitment, that time allotted to NIL had to play a factor in landing him. And high schoolers are as impressionable of a group of people as anyone: top recruits are certainly taking notes with this latest recruiting win, and I really do think more talented players will follow in the coming years.

May was able to land six talented players out of the portal, but he won’t always have that much roster turnover — and you can’t always count on the portal to land top talent and remain consistent. Building a consistent recruiting base is how the Blue Bloods in the sport stay relevant all these years, and while the Wolverines are far from being a mainstay in the national college basketball landscape, May’s commitment on the recruiting trail is a great way to jumpstart Michigan’s pursuit back to relevance.

This was a program that hit rock bottom just over six months ago, with an alumni fired after an historically bad season that was littered with off-court controversies . They needed a fresh start , and just under six months into his tenure, May is off to an incredible start.

Recruiting wins like the commitments of McKenney, Grady and Goodman give that start even more juice, as if May is playing Mario Kart and just landed a few red mushrooms. And as I mentioned earlier, this incredible class helps Michigan in the short term and in the long term.

In the short term, these three players could contribute to next year’s team, when key rotation players such as Vlad Goldin, Nimari Burnett and Rubin Jones will be out of eligibility. And when you factor in the unpredictability of the portal, having high-school and international recruits are like holding onto the Bowers in game of Euchre: you can count on them to win you games if you use them right.

In the long term, May’s energy on the recruiting trail speaks wonders to incoming recruits. It felt like every day this off-season, he was at a different showcase or AAU tournament, getting his eyes on top talent with the likes of Izzo, John Calipari, Dan Hurley, and other top recruiters in the sport.

The more uber-talented players like McKenney May lands, the more that top recruits start to notice. It will take more than a few seasons for Michigan to be in the National Championship conversations with the likes of the Blue Bloods, and not even a year into his tenure, Dusty May is on the right track because of his recruiting prowess.