LAS VEGAS — After a night like that, someone had to say it.
Might as well be the dude with the cartoonishly large MVP ring, standing in front of a diamond-encrusted basketball trophy, with a perfectly-white championship hat crammed sideways over his sweaty fro.
“If we all buy in together,” Michigan forward Yaxel Lendeborg said, “we’re gonna be the best team in the country — and that’s what we are.”
A bold claim, all of three weeks into this young college basketball season… but also, a completely warranted one. Michigan didn’t just beat Gonzaga to win the Players Era Festival championship on Wednesday night inside MGM Grand Garden Arena. No, no, no. It full-on obliterated the Zags: a team which entered the game No. 1 on KenPom, which had beaten all five of its previous high-major foes by at least 10, and a more-accurate average margin of 20.2 points per game.
All of which makes Wednesday’s final score that much more double-take-inducing.
Michigan 101, Gonzaga 61.
Yes, it was really that bad.
Two UNREAL slams and @umichbball is on the verge of capturing the @Players_Era Championship 👀🔥 pic.twitter.com/POcmpCFnEn
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) November 27, 2025
“I mean, come on. Literally every aspect of the game I could talk about was lacking,” said Gonzaga coach Mark Few, minutes after the worst loss of his 902-game career. “We just got absolutely throttled. So, I’ve never been involved with anything like that.”
The 40-point final margin was, as you might expect, the most lopsided of Few’s storied career. Coaches with Few’s resume — almost 750 wins, 20 West Coast Conference championships since 2000, two national championship game appearances — simply do not find themselves on the other end of losses like this… unless they run into an actual buzzsaw, like the Zags last did in the 2021 national championship game against Baylor. The last time Gonzaga lost by 40 points or more? Way back in 1990, to Loyola-Marymount — when Few was in his first season as a grad assistant with the program.
On the flip side, also unsurprisingly, Wednesday’s win was Michigan’s largest over an AP ranked team ever. And if you also factor in the Wolverines’ 30-point blowout over Auburn a night earlier, then it’s the first time in the history of the AP poll (dating back to 1948-49) that a team has beaten consecutive ranked opponents by 30-plus.
So, yes. A historic blowout in every sense.
“This is just scratching the surface of us, fellas,” Michigan coach Dusty May told his team in the postgame locker room, drenched from an impromptu water bottle shower. “This can’t be the pinnacle of our season. This has to be the starting point.”
What a terrifying thought: not just for the rest of the Big Ten, but for all of college basketball’s elite, who learned in the loudest possible way Wednesday that if they want to cut down the nets in Indianapolis in April, they almost surely will have to go through the juggernaut that won its three Players Era games by a stupefying combined margin of plus-110.
So, how did May do it? Build a team that shredded the Zags’ typically-stout defense like tissue paper?
You have to go back to 2016-17 to understand the roster-building philosophy that, a decade later, may have produced the most dominant team in all of college hoops. May was a Florida assistant under Mike White that year, and the Gators were top-five nationally in adjusted defensive efficiency in large part because of their length. So although White, May and the rest of UF’s staff “didn’t feel we were that good defensively,” May explained Wednesday, “because everyone was so big and long, guys just missed shots.” Then last season, May’s first at Michigan, he leaned into length offensively, too, taking the sport by storm by allowing two 7-footers, Danny Wolf and Vlad Goldin, to run pick-and-rolls together. That creativity led Michigan to a Big Ten tournament title, and almost to an upset over SEC champion Auburn in the Sweet 16.
May might have the built most dominant team in all of college hoops. (Kirby Lee / Imagn Images)
So this offseason, May built his roster with three specific attributes in mind: size, skill, and strong character. “We just thought, let’s get the best players we can get that are also great dudes,” May said, “and we can figure out the Xs and Os, and the spacing, or whatever the case.” In came Aday Mara, a 7-foot-3 Spaniard who toiled in relative obscurity at UCLA for two seasons, but who’d arrived in college with first-round NBA buzz. Then Morez Johnson Jr. made the in-conference flip from Illinois to Michigan, giving May a second skilled big to play through. But the piece who made everything come together took much longer, as Lendeborg — a former UAB star who committed to the Wolverines early in the transfer window — kept his name in the NBA Draft until the last possible second.
Eventually, though, Lendeborg withdrew from the draft in order to boost his stock under someone like May.
And, it goes without saying, to win a hell of a lot of games.
So it was only fitting, then, that in Michigan’s biggest game of the year so far — so far — Lendeborg was the one to push the boulder down the mountain. Nobody knew it then, but his 3-pointer nine seconds into the game gave the Wolverines what proved to be an insurmountable lead. Three minutes in, Michigan’s lead was 10. Then, just as quickly, 19. The 27-point gap at halftime — Gonzaga’s worst halftime deficit since Jan. 2007 — was more a gulf than just one uneven half.
The only two notable things about the second half were, one, that it regrettably did not come with a running clock, and two, that at some point, the Wolverines started doing their best Harlem Globetrotters impressions. Elliot Cadeau found Lendeborg — who finished with a game-high 20 points, plus 11 rebounds, four steals, three assists and two blocks — for a reverse dunk in transition that Michigan’s video team will have added to the team’s pregame hype video before the plane touches down in Ann Arbor.
Go down the list from there. Mara and Johnson — who combined for 24 points, nine boards and five blocks — were their typical stonewall selves in the paint, impressively holding Gonzaga forward Graham Ike without a made basket for just the third time in his 123-game career. Cadeau, the North Carolina transfer, lobbed full-court outlets and cross-court skip passes en route to 13 assists, ensuring seven other Wolverines made multiple baskets. Nimari Burnett cashed four 3s, while five-star freshman Trey McKenney added another three triples off the bench.
Even May’s senior walk-on son, Charlie, scored a late free-throw with the safety net of a 40-point cushion.
Consider: Gonzaga has led by 35 points in 68 games over the last eight seasons — but this was the Zags’ first time in that stretch trailing by 35 or more, which it did practically the entirety of the second half.
“You probably weren’t going to win tonight, the way we were playing,” Few added, “but we certainly could have kept it a lot closer than that.”
The silver lining for Gonzaga, if there is one, is that not many teams in the country are going to beat firing-on-all-cylinders Michigan. But that’s the thing. Until this week, that version of the Wolverines was the pot at the end of the rainbow, a supposed but unreachable gold mine. Less than two weeks ago, after all, the Wolverines were pushed to the brink in back-to-back games by Wake Forest and TCU, neither of whom projects as an NCAA Tournament team. Be it turnovers, or poor shot selection, or worse spacing than a Manhattan apartment, Michigan always seemed to be playing with a hole in the bottom of the bucket. Full enough, yeah, but clearly leaking.
But in the days before Michigan touched down in Las Vegas, clearly May found what he needed to plug that hole.
If only he could bottle performances like Wednesday’s, when his team shot 60 percent overall, 48.1 percent from 3 (on 21 attempts!), outrebounded the nation’s 13th-best rebounding team, and had 29 assists on 36 made baskets.
“A lot of the guys on the team felt we were being disrespected because of our first couple games struggles,” Lendeborg said. “Today was to put the world on notice that we’re here to be the best team in the nation, and we’ll continue to do that.”
From a basketball perspective, it’s difficult to envision anything but. Between Michigan’s size, its playmakers, its shooting, its depth, the Wolverines have every ingredient of a national championship formula. And in May, they have a coach with Final Four experience, and the level-headedness to handle what is about to become a scorching-hot spotlight.
That, if we’re being honest, may be the biggest challenge that lies ahead for the Wolverines.
Not pummeling every other team in sight — poor Rutgers gets the next crack, after an extended Thanksgiving layoff — or trying to play to the near-perfect standard it showed Wednesday. Not trying to get a group of newcomers to gel, given their clearly developed chemistry.
But avoiding the pitfall of fame. Of being, until proven otherwise, the frontrunner to win it all. Of bearing that No. 1 mark next to your name on KenPom, and likely in the AP poll, too, when the newest rankings are released next week.
“If we start listening to what everybody else is saying, then we’ll start wanting more individually, and then we’ll slowly — there will be cracks in the foundation, and then it will eventually crumble,” May said. “Hopefully that doesn’t happen, because we’re aware of what’s coming with all of this.”
After Wednesday, the rest of the nation is, too.
Because the Wolverine wagon is leaving Las Vegas with all its chips in the center.