Michigan Wolverines Claim Their Crown as Kings of the Transfer Portal

INDIANAPOLIS—As the maize and blue confetti rained down on head coach Dusty May, Most Outstanding Player Elliot Cadeau and the Michigan Wolverines, fresh off their 69-63 national championship victory over the Connecticut Huskies, a different 40-minute clock was ticking ominously in the background.

The game ended at 11:20 p.m. ET.

The transfer portal opened at midnight.

And no one knows the power of the portal quite like this Michigan team.

Barely one year ago, four-fifths of this starting five was playing elsewhere.

Cadeau was starting for North Carolina, landing in the portal less than 100 hours after the Tar Heels' NCAA tournament loss to Ole Miss.

Yaxel Lendeborg was dominating as a center at UAB, but already beginning to contemplate his NBA future and looking to showcase his talents as more of a 3-and-D wing.

Aday Mara was hardly seeing the court at UCLA, desperate to find a new home that could tap into his ceiling as a 5-star recruit from Spain.

Morez Johnson Jr. was coming off the bench at Illinois, a square peg in a round hole in an offense where everyone was encouraged to shoot threes except for him.

Four guys who needed a fresh start, all of whom found the perfect fit in May's offense.

Go back a bit further and Michigan's fifth starter, Nimari Burnett, was playing at Alabama while key reserve Roddy Gayle Jr. was with Ohio State.

That made this the first time in college basketball history that the entire starting five for a championship team started its journey at a different school.

Yet, prior to needing to survive a brutal night of jump shooting against UConn, the Wolverines had obliterated seemingly everything in their path for months, hitting their stride before Thanksgiving had even arrived with that unforgettable 101-61 annihilation of Gonzaga.

Dusty May is the NIL era's Dr. Frankenstein, and these were his Portal Monstars.

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"Connected" was the trendy word throughout this entire 2025-26 college basketball season, with players and teams—not just Michigan, but perhaps especially Michigan—incessantly talking about how they'd never played on a more connected team.

After Michigan's Final Four rout of Arizona on Saturday, May opened his press conference by saying, "This game was very indicative of how this group has played throughout the season, unselfish basketball. A connected group who defends, gets out in transition and then shares the basketball."

Cadeau added shortly thereafter, "Just having five people on the court that are all playmakers and also great scorers just helps us have connectivity on the court, for sure."

How did this team of hired mercenaries form such an unbreakable bond?

Per Cadeau on Sunday, team dinners were a big part of it, making connections at the table in addition to the ones they were already forming on the court.

Preaching selflessness was also a huge piece of Michigan's championship puzzle. Cadeau racked up the biggest chunk of the assists as the point guard, but the Wolverines ended up with the second-most dimes in the country, averaging nearly 19 per game during their 37-3 campaign.

Even 7'3" Mara almost ended up with 100 assists.

"There's a baseline of talent for us to recruit you at Michigan, but we also try to recruit guys that are unselfish that enjoy passing the ball," said May on Sunday.

But fostering and forming those bonds on the fly is the secret sauce every head coach needs to figure out in this brave new world of short-term roster construction.

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Yes, we'll still have the occasional Alex Karaban who stays at one school for four years and becomes a program legend. And in the final chapter of his UConn story, he played all 40 minutes in the championship game, going for 17 points and 11 rebounds in his quest to become the first three-time champion since a few UCLA Bruins did it in the early 1970s.

Getting the right guys straight out of high school will always be critical, too, as evidenced by Trey McKenney's big night off the bench in the title game. The Wolverines' freshman played nearly 30 minutes, finishing with nine points and eight rebounds, including the massive three-pointer with less than two minutes remaining in regulation. Major onions on that one.

(Goodness knows UConn wouldn't have made it to the Final Four without its superstar freshman, Braylon Mullins, hitting that shot you'll be seeing for many Marches to come.)

Want to build a championship-caliber roster in this era, though?

Hitting the portal and hitting it hard has become the new way to go.

You might not love it.

In fact, a lot of people complain that the portal is hands down the worst thing about what this sport has become, with more than 1,000 players already unofficially in the portal before it officially opened Monday night/Tuesday morning.

To be sure, it's brutal for the smaller schools around the country. You find these diamonds in the rough, you let them cook for a few months and then you watch them leave for more money and more exposure.

For the big boys such as Michigan, though, now they have so much more room for activities.

"We used to recruit guys for three years and spend 80, 100, 200 man hours away from our families begging these 15- to 18-year-olds to come play at our university and then they decide to go another direction, and you just think of all the time and resources you've wasted," May said on Thursday. "(Because of the transfer portal,) Recruiting has been streamlined and it's much more efficient than it's ever been."

And so the end of one season bleeds directly into the next.

We all put out our way-too-early top 25s, because it's part of the Final Four tradition to throw those darts and laugh at them later. But we all know over the course of these next two weeks with the portal officially open, roster situations are going to change drastically for quite a few programs.

Thanks to Michigan, we now have proof of concept, that a team can roll with four portal starters and win it all—just like 2011-12 Kentucky showed that a team riding on the shoulders of four freshmen can become one of the most dominant forces in recent history.

It certainly won't always work, but get ready for dozens of coaches to try to cobble together the next version of these champion Wolverines.

(Including May, who was already hard at portal work after the game.)