Biggest takeaway from Dusty May’s first year with Michigan basketball
Tony and Andrew talk the unexpectedly successful first year of the Dusty May era for U-M hoops and how the coach is already gearing up for next year
An NCAA Tournament rematch seems poised to come to Ann Arbor.
While the final agreement is yet to be finished, a person with knowledge of the scheduling process confirmed to the Free Press on Thursday, May 29, that Michigan basketball is close to lining up a home-and-home series against Villanova. The date and time of the games are still to be determined.
CBS Sports’ Jon Rothstein first reported the series was all but finalized.
The plan is for the Wildcats to visit the Wolverines in the 2025-26 season with U-M then set to visit Villanova’s arena (just outside of Philadelphia) in the 2026-27 campaign.
It would be a true home-and-home against the Big East member, unlike U-M’s series against ACC foe Wake Forest which began last season. In that one, the Wolverines faced the Demon Deacons in Greensboro, North Carolina — about 30 miles east of Wake Forest’s campus in Winston-Salem, North Carolina — with the Demon Deacons set to take on the Wolverines this season at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit (at a still to-be-announced date).
The Wolverines are expected to enter the season as a top-10 team this season, while Villanova is rebuilding under first year coach Kevin Willard, newly arrived from Maryland (and a buzzer-beating loss to U-M in the Big Ten tournament).
Michigan is 2-4 all-time against Villanova, with four of those games coming in the past 11 years.
Before that burst of action, the Wolverines and Wildcats had met just twice, with U-M winning the inaugural meeting in a December 1970 blowout in Hawaii, and ‘Nova squeezing out a win in Dayton, Ohio, in the second round of the 1985 NCAA tournament. The Wildcats went on to win their next four games en route to the program’s first NCAA title.
John Beilein’s group lost in the programs’ third meeting, in New York in November 2014. That was followed by one of the most important games in modern U-M hoops history in April 2018, when ‘Nova knocked off U-M in in the 2018 NCAA Tournament in San Antonio.
Michigan got revenge just seven months later by dog-walking the Wildcats at their freshly opened arena, but the Wildcats again knocked U-M out of the NCAA Tournament, with 2-seed Villanova defeating Juwan Howard’s 11-seed Michigan team in the 2022 Sweet 16 — also in San Antonio.
Tony Garcia is the Michigan Wolverines beat writer for the Detroit Free Press. Email him at apgarcia@freepress.com and follow him on X at @RealTonyGarcia.
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