Takeaways: Michigan caps magical turnaround under May with national title

Elliot Cadeau scored 19 points to lead the University of Michigan Wolverines to a 69-63 victory Monday night over the University of Connecticut Huskies and capture the school’s first NCAA Men’s Division I national championship since 1989.

Yaxel Lendeborg, who suffered an injury during Michigan’s national semifinal against Arizona Saturday and whose status was up in the air leading into Monday’s national title game, added 13 points, while Morez Johnson Jr. had a 12-point, 10-rebound double-double in the win.

UConn was led by Alex Karaban’s 17 points and 11 rebounds.

The win cements a sterling start to coach Dusty May’s Michigan tenure. Just a year after leading the Wolverines to the Sweet 16, May captured his first-ever national title in just his second Final Four appearance — he previously reached the Final Four with Florida Atlantic in 2023.

May took over a floundering Michigan basketball program that had failed to reach the NCAA Tournament in the past two seasons, leading to coach Juwan Howard’s dismissal.

Interestingly enough, senior Connecticut centre Tarris Reed Jr. just missed out on being coached by May. He initially played his first two seasons of college basketball for the Wolverines under Howard, but transferred to the Huskies in the 2024 off-season.

Cadeau was named the Final Four’s Most Outstanding Player.

The national championship win caps off an outstanding season for the Wolverines that saw them finish with a 37-3 record and battle with Duke and Arizona all season long as the best team in the nation.

Considering the fact that the Wolverines blew the doors off Arizona and were able to handily control Dan Hurley and UConn, who were appearing in their third national championship game in four years, it’s safe to say that the 2025-26 NCAA season belonged to Michigan.

Here are a few more takeaways from the game.

Super-sized Wolverines prove to be too much

For all the strategy and scheme that can go into a game plan, basketball is actually a very simple game.

If you have a team that’s bigger, faster and stronger than the other guys, you’re probably going to win.

That was the case for Michigan for nearly every game it played this season, and Monday night’s national championship was no different.

Michigan’s starting five was monstrous, made up of seven-foot-three centre Aday Mara, six-foot-nine forwards Lendeborg and Johnson, six-foot-five guard Nimari Burnett and the lone non-huge exception being six-foot-one Cadeau, who still plays bigger and more physically than he actually is.

The game plan for the Wolverines against UConn, as it had been all season, was as simple as it gets: Pound the ball inside, kick it out for open threes if they’re there and run as much as possible because the team’s size, speed and strength can’t be contested against any other in the college game.

For proof of this, look no further than the fact that Michigan was abysmal from three-point range in the final, going 2-for-15 from the floor after coming into the game making 11.4 threes per contest during the tournament. But the Wolverines absolutely swallowed up the paint, outscoring UConn 36-22 inside and, most importantly, getting fouled as they went to the basket.

As well, the size of the Wolverines managed to come away with six blocks on the evening, neutralizing Reed’s post-up game, in particular, who finished just four-for-12 from the floor as the Huskies, in general, shot just 31 per cent from the field.

And the length and athleticism of Michigan seemed to bother Connecticut’s guards, as the Huskies made a number of uncharacteristic turnovers in the game.

Size matters in basketball, and while UConn isn’t exactly small, it’s nowhere near as big as Michigan is.

The bigger, better team won.

With that said, there is the elephant in the room and that’s the foul disparity between the two sides.

Michigan shot 28 free throws to UConn’s 16, making 25 of them, including a streak that saw them hit 20 straight.

Cadeau, alone, went eight-for-nine from the charity stripe, contributing to his big game.

There was also the matter of the controversial flagrant foul called on Karaban with just a little over three minutes to play in the first half that flipped the game on the Huskies a little, turning a 25-23 lead into a 27-25 deficit, allowing the Wolverines to go into halftime with a 33-29 lead.

To say nothing of the early foul trouble this all put UConn into, including forcing key Connecticut guard Solo Ball to sit with four fouls at the 16:20 mark of the second half.

All of what has been described happened in Monday’s game.

So then, was Michigan gifted this championship by the officiating? Absolutely not.

The Wolverines recognized that their threes weren’t dropping and instead played an aggressive style of basketball to put the onus on the officials, sending them to the line where they converted.

The Huskies have no one to blame but themselves as their aggressive “hands-y” defence ended up getting exploited by Michigan.

If they didn’t want to give up that many free throws, they should have, perhaps, tried playing some defence without fouling.

Dan Hurley’s still a pretty good coach

Despite how apparently overmatched the Huskies were in Monday’s game, it was still a close affair, with UConn fighting and scrapping right to the very end, even making it as close as a four-point game with 37 seconds to play.

This was a testament to Hurley’s game plan, which largely worked.

Given the differences in sheer, raw physicals between Michigan and UConn, the only way the Huskies were going to win was if Hurley could dial up some magic.

The spell he chose to weave on Monday appeared to be to try to drag Michigan into the mud and hopefully make enough shots to win it.

Neither team cracked 70 points on the evening, so Hurley did effectively manage to slow the game down to give his team a shot at the end. The second part of that equation proved to be the real kicker, however.

After going five-for-15 from three-point range in the first half, UConn went ice cold in the second half, going four-for-18 from distance, including a streak that saw them miss 11 straight triples over nearly the first 15 minutes of the second half.

No matter how well you do the other things, if you don’t hit shots, you aren’t going to win. Something that even the bombastic Hurley was able to live with.

“We just had to make more shots,” Hurley said on the national championship’s post-game broadcast. “We had great opportunities, I thought, from three.”

And love him or hate him, Hurley, objectively, is a good coach and likely isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Sometimes basketball is just a make-or-miss game.