No-May day

 People think I know stuff. It's the burden a man carries when he spent a good chunk of his life sitting in press boxes eating hot dogs and watching games and then hammering sentences together about them.

And so these days they ask me who will be Indiana's next basketball coach, now that Mike Woodson is stepping down (and who seems already to be checking out, frankly). And I shake my head and look all sage-y and give them the sum total of my revealed wisdom.

"Hell, I don't know," I say.

And I don't. 

I do know whom it won't be, however, and whom I never thought it was going to be.

That would be Dusty May up at Michigan, who won fame coaching humble little Florida Atlantic to the Final Four two years ago and cashed in those chips to grab the big chair at glitzy big-boy Michigan. He's in his first season in Ann Arbor now, and he's already working wonders; the Wolverines, a flat-tire program coming off a last-place finish in the Big Ten, are now 20-6 and 12-3 in the Big Ten, half a game out of first after losing to frontrunner Michigan State.

No matter. The other day, Michigan extended May's contract anyway -- in large part because May, a one-time student manager when Bob Knight was coaching in Bloomington, is an IU grad and therefore the name most prominent on Candy Stripe Nation's lips.

Let me tell you why I never thought that was realistic, with or without May's shiny new deal in Ann Arbor.

I never thought that was realistic because, let's face it, jumping from one Big Ten school to another after just one season would have been a jackass move, and everything I've seen and heard about Dusty May suggests the one thing he's not is a jackass. He is, by all accounts, a standup guy. So to come to Michigan, get paid a carload of jing to do so, and then after one season say "Just kidding!" and sprint five or so hours south to Bloomington seemed highly unlikely.

Now, there are some morals-clause guys I could see doing that, because there are plenty of them out there. But not May. And even though I suppose Mark Cuban or some other moneybags IU alum could have opened enough bank vaults to make it tempting, Michigan's one of the few schools that can go checkbook-to-checkbook with Indiana.

So, Dusty May is out as a potential target in Bloomington. And who's still in?

Hell. I don't know.