BOCA RATON, Fla. — Dusty May and his assistants carry plates of lasagna to the coaches office on a recent Thursday night. They gather around a conference table to celebrate a win in what’s become a tradition. “Our favorite food,” May says, pausing as assistant Todd Abernathy swings open the refrigerator door, then finishes his buddy’s sentence, “is free.”
The coaches belly up to a conference table and rehash the night’s festivities. Abernathy is required to share what happened to him at UTSA earlier this season. He went to change pregame and realized the slacks he thought he’d packed were shorts. He scrambled to find a pair of pants. Then May found out. This was too good. Abernathy was wearing those shorts. Boss’s orders. The Owls won that night in overtime.
These moments make it feel like not a lot has changed at FAU. May still works out of an office that backs up to a janitor’s closet. Half the time it sounds like a construction zone. “Dental chair,” he says, as some sort of grinding roars on the other side of the wall. Across the parking lot from Baldwin Arena, the players work out in a revamped weight room that used to belong to football. The football team has a state-of-the-art facility down the street that looks straight out of the Power 5. Basketball snuck in there during Christmas break so they could lift together. Before that, they lifted in four different groups in what looks like a closet on the second level of the arena, where a yoga studio used to be.
The Owls still operate like a startup tech company, looking for creative ways to thrive, but a lot has changed. After Florida Atlantic made its miraculous run to the 2023 Final Four, Charles Barkley called it the greatest story in the history of college basketball. “You’ve got Texas Western!” May says. “Obviously, it’s embellished.” But it portended what would come next. Attention. Expectations. Fame. During a 20-game win streak last season, the Owls couldn’t fill their arena. Now, students line up hours before tipoff to get in and there’s tailgating in the parking lot.
This season was supposed to be the fairytale sequel. With transfer portal poachers circling with the lure of NIL dollars, May convinced every eligible player to return. Which he knew would actually be harder than if a few players had bolted.
“(It’d be) much easier for all of us,” he says. “Much safer. Much less risk. There’s a risk for everybody to come back and be expected to be perfect.”
They haven’t been perfect. Outsiders might even label them a slight disappointment. The Owls opened the year ranked No. 10 in the AP poll — and fell out of the rankings four weeks ago.
As they enter the American Athletic tournament this week as the No. 2 seed, they’re projected to make the NCAA Tournament. But at 24-7 overall and 14-4 in the AAC, they’re closer to the bubble than a lock. They have some awesome wins on the resume (beating four high-majors, including No. 5 Arizona) and also head-scratching losses to Bryant and Florida Gulf Coast.
Pull back, and it’s the second-best season in school history. “And there’s not even a close (third)!” assistant coach Kyle Church says.
But perspective is hard to find in the face of expectations. Even when they were handed the script before it happened.
Johnell Davis has increased his scoring average, but the Owls’ defense hasn’t been as strong as last year. (Scott Audette / AP)
This summer, May met with Ben McCollum, the coach at Division II Northwest Missouri State, at Larry Shyatt’s annual coaching clinic in Gainesville, Fla. McCollum asked May if he’d read Pat Riley’s book “The Winner Within.” The first two chapters hit on the innocent climb and what follows: the disease of me. May had read it before, but McCollum, who won four national titles in six seasons, said to read it again immediately. May did so, using orange highlighter for the passages that resonated, and then in June he shared the book’s lessons with his players.
“When you’re coming from obscurity, you’re lost in the process,” May says. “You’re lost in the day-to-day. After you make the climb, everybody wants more. And it’s not quite so innocent. It’s not just about winning, and therefore, everything becomes more difficult.”
Backup big man Giancarlo Rosado says it’s easier to be coachable before you experience success. “Expectations are the root of all evil,” he says. “People say money is. I say expectations.”
When rosters change, roles shift. Responsibilities shift. The hierarchy shifts. That’s easy to accept. A year ago, the Owls had a perfect storm occur when two of their best players — Johnell Davis and Alijah Martin — got hurt early in the season and came off the bench when they returned. The Owls were winning, so May stuck with that lineup for over a month. Minutes and scoring numbers were as close to even among a top seven as you’ll see in college hoops.
“It was all these oddities rolled into one,” May says. “There’s no way to reverse engineer it.”
It felt like the Owls were living in a movie. Then the offseason arrived.
“Once you win a championship, you feel like The Man,” Martin says. “You get treated like The Man. Everybody kissing your butt.”
This can often go one of two ways: You feel like you’ve made it and you’re not as driven, or you want more. The Disease of Me.
The Owls fell more in the latter group. They went to work on their individual games. Strides were made. That is reflected in the team’s offensive numbers. FAU’s adjusted offensive efficiency is 119.9; last season it was 115.1. Davis has bumped his scoring average to 18.2 points per game from 13.8, and his efficiency has gone up. Junior center Vladislav Goldin is averaging five points more per game by improving his back-to-the-basket game.
Great, right? Well, there are only so many shots to go around.
“Naturally, when you work as hard as our guys do, they want a bigger role,” May says. “It’s like your kids that are growing, you see them every day. So you don’t realize they’re growing. And then someone doesn’t see them for a year, oh wow, he’s really sprouted up. It’s kind of like that, where everything’s growing behind the scenes that it gets to the point where it’s like, OK, we’ve done all this, but not a lot has changed. The roles haven’t changed much. My place in the pecking order hasn’t changed much. And it’s all subconscious, but it’s there.”
The offense hasn’t suffered because of this dynamic, but the defense has suffered. Last season, FAU ranked 34th in adjusted defense; this year it’s 106th. Not all of this may be psychological. The Owls are playing the same scheme as a year ago. In pick-and-roll, they play a drop coverage. It’s an analytically-driven approach, meant to force the ballhandler into taking inefficient shots off the dribble and keeping assist numbers down. A year ago, FAU ranked second in defensive assist rate; this year it’s third.
So what changed?
Opponents are shooting 4 percent better on shots off the bounce (per Synergy), which is reflected in FAU’s 2-point field-goal percentage defense, which is the only significant statistical decline from last season. May and his staff have theorized that a jump from Conference USA to the American has factored in. AAC guards are better one-on-one players and better at getting to their spots and making tough 2s.
But it’s not like Florida Atlantic avoided talented guards on its way to the Final Four. And that’s where the psychological component comes into play. Last season, the Owls were the hunters. “All of our guys have been underrated, and just kind of not valued,” Abernathy says.
It was reflected in the way opponents looked at them. They would see their record, but no one believed they were that good. “Then first five minutes, they feel us,” Abernathy says, “and they’re like, holy crap, these guys are legit. They’re tough.”
Now, not only is FAU respected, but it has become hunted. May says it’s almost like what Kentucky goes through, but those players have grown up with the hype. “They’ve always been the marked man when they walk into a gym, and our guys growing up, they were the guys that were doing the marking and going after certain guys,” May says.
The Owls all say they get it, but they’ve all been surprised by the intensity of it. And what has become a little bit of a curse is the faith they have in their offense.
“We always feel like we can get it back,” Rosado says. “So we get complacent a little bit because we’re like, all right, we’ll go shoot a couple 3s.”
Instead, they’ve lost some games that have left them feeling embarrassed. It hasn’t just been Bryant and FGCU. Even conference losses to lower-ranked teams start the “what’s wrong with FAU” chatter.
On Feb. 8, the Owls lost a heartbreaker at UAB in overtime. In the final seconds of regulation, point guard Jalen Gaffney had the ball in the open floor and spotted Goldin by himself streaking to the basket. Gaffney lofted an alley-oop pass, and it was like Goldin got struck by a nerve bolt that made his legs heavy. He didn’t jump as high as he’d normally jump, and he got two hands on the pass but just couldn’t reel it in to dunk it like he would 99 times out of 100.
The highlights — and that lowlight — played that night on “SportsCenter.”
“Sometimes you look and you check, Oh, who’s watching?” junior guard Nick Boyd says. “Last year, we didn’t really care about that.”
The bigger issue in that UAB loss was again the defense and giving up 16 offensive rebounds. A few weeks ago, the players realized they couldn’t keep putting themselves in this predicament. In a game at South Florida, they got down 25 points with just over eight minutes left. They somehow furiously rallied and had the ball with a chance to tie it in the final minute, but ended up losing, 90-86.
Two days later, ahead of the Feb. 22 SMU game, the Owls held a players-only meeting to address their defense and mindset. Meanwhile, the coaches workshopped an idea to recreate the innocence.
The day before the SMU game, May walks into the weight room at 10:54 am, six minutes ahead of the players’ lift. He tries to sneak in a workout at least three times a week, and he usually does it at the same time as his players. It’s just another setting to be around them.
Relationships are how May kept everyone out of the transfer portal. The players all say he’s like family. More father than coach. “I can talk to him about anything I want,” Goldin says. “I can ask him any question about anything, and it’s not like he’s gonna judge me, even if I’m wrong.”
The relational side of coaching has always been important to May, but this year more than ever. He says this season is almost like a social experiment. He has had to play psychologist. He’ll see the look in one of his player’s eyes and realize he should probably devote some time with that player the next day. Recently, he had a veteran who admitted he was questioning his importance to the group. They went for a walk.
“They’re a lot more open when it’s just me,” he says.
May walks around the weight room between reps, dapping up each player and sometimes stopping for a conversation. No one is prioritized. He encourages all of his players, even walk-ons, to come watch film with him. The next day at pregame shootaround, May stays on the same end of the floor when his starters and reserves switch sides. He devotes the same amount of time to both. He arrives that day to shootaround a few minutes early, sits down and then sees sophomore Brenen Lorient shooting on the far basket by himself. May walks over and starts coaching Lorient, showing him how he wants the angle of his hips and shoulders on finishes. Then he has him add a pump fake — SMU is one of the best shot-blocking teams in the country.
This is the kind of stuff May lives for. He loves teaching the game. He loves the X’s and O’s. He spent the previous afternoon watching video of the practice he just conducted — a daily routine — and then he minimizes that window and pulls up a recent Northwest Missouri State game. McCollum had recently started playing two bigs together because of an injury to his star player, and May wants to see what that looks like because he’s also considering some more traditional lineups. Then he starts watching offensive clips of Alabama. He’s been on the phone with Nate Oats. The Crimson Tide are on the verge of setting scoring efficiency records. He was curious if they were doing anything different to get their 3s — Oats says they were setting more flare screens. He calls these daily breaks his recess.
“Some people stop to watch Netflix,” he says.
May is constantly trying to learn, and that’s usually a luxury coaching an experienced team enables. In his early years on the job, he says his focus was coaching effort in practice and building an identity. Then he was “joysticking,” trying to get guys in the right spots on the floor. “Then last year, because we had such good players who played hard, I never had to worry about guys getting in spots,” he says.
He also didn’t have to worry about effort. He was living the dream. He’d built a machine. He realized lately that he’s been in the same mode this season, but he might need to get back to coaching intensity. Or at least setting up scenarios that create it.
Recently, the Owls have gone back to more five-on-five with the regulars going against regulars. SMU was the best offensive-rebounding team in the AAC, so every live rep that week started with a coach intentionally missing a shot.
As for the pressure, assistant coach Drew Williamson had an idea. On a recent bus ride from the Wichita airport to Koch Arena, Williamson looked out the window and spotted a boy shooting on a hoop with a bent rim in his backyard. “There was just an innocence,” Williamson says, “just a kid having fun playing basketball. And it just kind of hit me. We take for granted this is a game we all just love to play.”
Williamson pitched to the staff: Go find old video of every player from their high school days, when no one knew who they were, and show a mashup to the team.
“This season’s been very, very tense,” Williamson says. “We’re focused, but it’s almost like anxiety-focused, where you’re so anxious for the game that you can’t play your best because you’re just so on edge.”
After going over the SMU scouting report on gameday, May cues the video the players have no idea is coming.
“Coach Drew had a point this morning that this season has been weird,” May tells them. “Frustration is a matter of expectations a lot of time. But at the end of the day, we’re all in this room because we love this game and we love being a part of a team and we love hooping, right? So now let’s just take ourselves back to wherever you are in these videos. And picture yourself back then, think about where you are today and how we shouldn’t take it for granted.”
The video opens with Boyd, who will come off the bench that night for the first time in over a month. May hits pause.
“Boyd, after this game right here, if they would ask you (then) if you could be where you are now today, would you be pretty darn happy?”
“Probably paid money,” Boyd says.
“No doubt.”
May hits play again. The room fills with laughs and claps. For a moment, they all take a trip back in time. When they were just hooping.
Before tipoff, May takes them back in time again. Last season, before the Final Four and the fame, May heard from then-North Texas coach Grant McCasland about the first time those two teams met. After a late timeout, McCasland said he saw a look on the FAU players’ faces that told him the game was already over. It became a rallying cry. Let’s make sure we have the look. May hasn’t seen it much this year.
“Defensively,” May says before the team takes the floor against SMU, “a whole lot of want-to. We talk about it. Pride. Whatever you want to call it, but it’s a whole lot of want to tonight. Us getting back to having that look in our eyes.”
The Owls play with physicality. They hold the Mustangs to one of their worst offensive rebounding games of the season, limiting them to eight second-chance points.
“That’s the toughest we’ve played since Arizona,” May tells his players after an 80-70 win. “That’s the first team that’s came in here and felt us.”
They had that look in their eyes again.
“Going forward, no matter what happens, these teams have to feel us,” he says. “We can lose, as long as we’re playing with physicality, effort and together.”
It was a day to remember for our seniors.#WinningInParadise pic.twitter.com/C9rklg8flh
— Florida Atlantic Men’s Basketball (@FAUMBB) March 10, 2024
In his postgame media session that night, May gets asked about rumors that he’s the favorite for the Ohio State job. In the ensuing days, his players ask him about it. He tells them he hasn’t spoken to anyone at Ohio State and repeats what he told them last year when his name was bandied about: He’s focused on this team.
That weekend the Owls go to Memphis and “the look” isn’t there. They make some out-of-character plays late and lose by four points.
But they end the regular season on a three-game winning streak, getting payback on Memphis in Saturday’s finale. It was the final home game for at least three players — Gaffney, Bryan Greenlee and Brandon Weatherspoon. The players say this feels like a last dance. They do not mention May, but his name continues to float for bigger jobs.
It’s a lot. But they all still believe they can go on another magical run. “The Innocent Climb, No. 2,” Williamson says, smiling.
(Top photo of Dusty May: Butch Dill / AP)
