Only a select few were a part of both of Dusty May's year ones as a head coach,

2018-19 at Florida Atlantic and 2024-25 at Michigan.

One of them, Akeem Mischidine, is our guest this week.

As he'll mention, there were a ton of differences between that first year in Boca Raton

versus year one in Ann Arbor, but take out

some of the obvious ones.

College basketball as a whole is entirely different.

This was pre-pandemic, pre-NIL, and it wasn't pre-transfer portal, but the differences between

the portal in the spring of 2018 versus the spring of

2025 are exponential in number and in conversations.

But there was one similarity, proof of winning, proof of concept.

Now, that first year at FAU was not the drastic resurgence that we all witnessed here

at Michigan last season,

from eight wins to 27, from last place in the Big Ten by a lot, to the last team standing in the

Big Ten tournament.

But Michigan's success in college basketball wasn't so far off, or in a lot of ways,

non-existent like it was at Florida Atlantic.

Even if Dusty and Akeem's arrival at FAU overlapped with the current landscape of college basketball, a slower

build would have probably been necessary at a program that played its first division one game

in 1993, a program that had only been to one ever NCAA tournament in D1 back in 2002 as a 15 seed.

And FAU had not had a winning season since 2011.

But that first year, 17 and 16 overall, 8 and 10 in Conference USA, it does not seem like much.

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