Dusty May previews Arizona

And we'll start, Coach, over on the back, on the right-hand side, towards the back. Dusty Alec Giannakopoulos with Wood TV in Grand Rapids. I asked Charlie about your time in high school. He mentioned a buzz cut.

Being here in Indianapolis, does this bring back any memories? And how special is it to have a Final Four not so far from where you grew up? Well, it's special simply being here. It's a little bit overwhelming with friends and families and old teachers and whatnot, but it's a full circle moment.

I still remember as a junior, senior manager when the Final Four was here in Indianapolis myself, and all of us managers wanted to find a way in coaching in any capacity, would pile in a car and just get out and hopefully bump into any coach and find a way to make an impression. Obviously using the Coach Dusty badge to get in any conversation.

And so just a full circle moment from chasing around coaches trying to beg for a GA spot to be back here with this team is— it's surreal.

Dusty, Chris Ballas with the Wolverine On3. Just talk about the matchup with Arizona and your bigs versus their bigs and how critical that's obviously going to be. Well, we feel like we're very— we're built in a similar fashion as Arizona. And I'll begin with the veterans on both teams and how they've taken this off-the-bench role, and they've impacted winning almost every game.

I just see so many similarities with the intangibles and the team character of both of us. And then obviously when you factor in the size, and both teams get a lot of credit for how good our front lines are, but there's some great guards and very intelligent basketball being played by both teams. And so we— when we watch them, we see ourselves other than a few stylistic differences, we see a lot of ourselves in them.

And it's going to be a battle. We believe it's going to be won in the 39th or 40th minute of this game.

Well, I have a whole different perspective on the retention piece, and I'll be as quickly as I can with this answer. If you're retaining the right guys, yes, you have to retain the right guys. And I think that's a big part of our success. The guys that we retained earned the trust of our new guys immediately because they wanted to win.

There was no hidden agendas. They were all about the team. They taught all of our unwritten rules. They expressed how much Michigan had meant to them and what this place can do for all of us after we're done playing.

So there's my stance on retention. We brought back our entire team after the Final Four run at FAU, and it was the hardest coaching job, the most difficult year of my life as an assistant, as a video coordinator, as a head coach. That was the most difficult year for a number of reasons. And so that year, it would have been much healthier for the group if we didn't retain everyone.

Because when you look at college basketball, Trey Carroll was an all-Big East player that didn't get a play. Brennan Lorient was a big-time player at West Virginia that didn't get a play. Nick Boyd was injured and was playing behind Jalen Gaffney and B.J. Greenlee. So we had these guys that were Power Five starters that weren't able to play in games.

And so it was difficult on everyone. And so that was a nice segue into into this high-major Power Five stuff because we had all of the high-major problems in a minor— in a minor scale, but they were all there. And so we were forced to deal with that stuff before. So when you talk about retention, retention is not always good.

It's retaining the right guys and making sure they still have the same agenda and objectives, which is to win and do it together.