Michigan's Season Goals Are Written Into Section 3.01c-ii Of Its Coach's Contract

Michigan won the national championship on April 6, beating UConn 69-63 in Indianapolis for the program's second title and its first since 1989. Its head coach is guaranteed one season of employment.

Both of those are true. The second one is not an outrage, because it is not the same head coach.

Dusty May went to the Dallas Mavericks on June 23, a Tuesday afternoon, and that night the first round of the NBA draft took Morez Johnson Jr. ninth to Dallas, Yaxel Lendeborg eleventh to Golden State and Aday Mara twelfth to Oklahoma City. So Michigan lost the man who drew up its offense and the three men who played in front of the rim on the same calendar day, which is a bad Tuesday by any standard you want to use.

Mike Boynton, who had been on the staff, ran the program as interim through the wreckage and was made the permanent hire in July. He signed his contract that month. So did Warde Manuel, the athletic director, and Domenico Grasso, the university president. Maize n Brew obtained a copy of it through an open-records request, and it is a more honest season preview than anything anybody will write in October.

Year one runs July 1, 2026 through April 30, 2027, and pays a base salary of $3.6 million. Year two runs May 1, 2027 through April 30, 2028, pays $4 million, and does not exist yet. It arrives only if Boynton satisfies a list, and the list is where this gets interesting, because Michigan did the thing schools almost never do in writing.

It said what a good season is.

Section 3.01c-ii asks for at least two of the following four: win 24 regular-season games, finish in the top four of the Big Ten, win the Big Ten tournament, reach the Sweet 16. A Final Four satisfies the whole thing on its own and moots the rest. There is no committee, no "direction of the program," no evaluation of culture. There is a number, a standing, a tournament and a round, and Boynton needs two of them.

The contract also pays for some of it twice. Winning the Big Ten tournament is one of the four benchmarks and carries a $100,000 bonus of its own, and the NCAA tournament, where the Sweet 16 sits, has an escalator ladder that tops out at $1.5 million for a national title. The same outcomes that keep Boynton employed are priced separately in cash.

For context on the 24: Michigan went 29-2 in the regular season last year, which is the most games the program has ever won in a regular season. The contract is asking the new guy to win five fewer than the best regular season in Michigan history and still keep his job, which sounds generous right up until you look at who is left.

Two players from the championship rotation are back. Elliot Cadeau, who played 1,092 minutes and led the team in assists at 234, and Trey McKenney, who played 883 as a freshman off the bench in all 40 games and shot 39.1 percent from three. Below them, Oscar Goodman logged 85 minutes and Howard Eisley Jr. logged 11. Add those four and you get 2,071 of the 8,028 minutes Michigan played last season, which is 25.8 percent, and 842 of its 3,493 points, which is 24.1 percent. (Michigan has not published a 2026-27 roster, so the count of who is on the team comes from the reporting rather than from the school, and it will move if the Roddy Gayle eligibility case in Denver moves.)

Here is the comparison that makes the number land. The team that won the title in April was itself a heavy rebuild: it returned 38.7 percent of its minutes and 37.1 percent of its scoring from the year before, which was already the kind of turnover that used to get a coach a grace year. This roster returns about two thirds of that.

Boynton has been direct about what he is doing with it, which is not rebuilding it. "It's not like we rebuilt the (incoming) roster, we just reshored the roster that was already recruited here, so we'll play the way we thought we were going to play when we recruited these guys all the way to June 21st," he said in July. "There was a plan already in place, and that plan is the plan that we're looking forward to continuing to implement." Every player who had committed to May stayed except L.J. Cason. The rest of them are playing for a coach whose second season is a list of conditions. The system stays too. The men who ran it are in Dallas, Oklahoma City and San Francisco.

Anyway. The clause that nobody talks about is the one that has nothing to do with basketball.

Alongside the wins, Boynton has to avoid Level I and Level II NCAA violations and any material misconduct, which is standard. He also has to ensure that every athlete who is academically eligible at the start of the fall 2026 semester is still academically eligible at the start of winter 2027. That is a real condition on a real contract, and it means part of a head coach's employment in 2028 depends on whether a group of teenagers passes classes in December. Coaches have always been responsible for that in the abstract. This one is responsible for it in a numbered subsection.

The buyout language tells you what Michigan learned this summer. If Boynton leaves for another job before seven days after the 2026-27 season ends, postseason included, he owes Michigan $3 million within 60 days. Nobody writes that clause in a vacuum. Somebody in that athletic department watched a national championship coach walk out the door in June and went looking for a pen.

The first thing on Boynton's calendar is a trip he did not book. On May 18, Dusty May announced a nine-day foreign tour of Lithuania and Croatia, August 21 to 29, three exhibitions: the Lithuanian men's national team on the 23rd, the Lithuania B team on the 24th, the Serbian club Mega Superbet, in Croatia, on the 27th. Private donors paid for it. Michigan has done this before, in Belgium in 2010, Italy in 2014, Spain in 2018 and France and Greece in 2022, and the games are the smaller half of what it buys.

The bigger half is ten extra practices. NCAA Bylaw 30.7.6 permits no more than ten days of practice before departure, and all of them have to fall inside the 20 calendar days immediately before the team leaves. Michigan leaves on August 21. The window opened on August 1 and it closes on August 20.

So the ten practices that decide whether a first-year head coach can teach his predecessor's offense to a roster that mostly never played in it are happening this week, in Ann Arbor, on a trip the predecessor announced in May.

Twenty-four wins. It is written down.

Sources: Michigan's 2025-26 game log, season totals, minutes and points from Sports-Reference, including its returning-production line for last season; the 29-2 regular season and its standing as a program record from the 2025-26 season record; the 2026 national championship result and Michigan's title history from the game's record; 2026 NBA draft order from the draft's official first-round results; Dusty May's hiring date from the Dallas Mavericks' announcement of June 23, 2026. Boynton's contract terms, including the year-two criteria, the salary figures, the academic clause and the departure buyout, from Maize n Brew's report on the copy it obtained by open-records request, and from the Detroit Free Press's July 17, 2026 report on the same document, which is where section 3.01c-ii is identified. The Big Ten tournament and NCAA tournament bonus figures are from On3's July 17, 2026 report. Boynton's quotations and the L.J. Cason departure via UM Hoops, July 28, 2026. Foreign-tour dates, opponents, funding, tour history and the ten extra practices from Michigan's own release of May 18, 2026. Practice-window rules per NCAA Bylaw 30.7.6 as reproduced on the NCAA foreign tour certification form. Returning-minutes and returning-points percentages are computed here from the 2025-26 season totals; Michigan has published no 2026-27 roster, so the list of returning players is drawn from reporting. Nobody from this site was in Ann Arbor and nobody here spoke to anyone in the program.