Both of Mike Boynton's head coaching jobs opened when his boss left

Mike Boynton keeps a picture on his phone of a game Michigan lost. He described it on the school's own podcast, in an episode Michigan published in May, six weeks after the national championship. It is a final score, which he thought Cincinnati had posted, from an exhibition at Crisler Center the previous October, and he said he had shown it to about ten people.

The game was on Friday, October 17, 2025. Cincinnati won 100-98. Michigan trailed by 18 at halftime, outscored the Bearcats by 16 after it, and ran out of time. On April 6 the same team finished 37-3 and won the national championship, and in May Boynton was still carrying the evidence that it had once given up a hundred points in its own building.

"This isn't about Cincinnati, it's about us," he said. "We gave up one hundred points on our home court to Cincinnati in October."

He was an assistant coach then. He is the head coach now, of a team that has played three games, all of them in Europe in August, and lost two. It is the second time in his life he has been handed a program because the man he worked for left it.

2017#

The first time, he was 35.

Brad Underwood coached Oklahoma State for one season, went 20-13, lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament and left for Illinois in March 2017. Boynton had spent three years as Underwood's assistant at Stephen F. Austin, where the Lumberjacks won 89 games, and he was on Underwood's staff in Stillwater too. Before that he had spent four years as an assistant at South Carolina, where he had played four seasons and 125 games and taken a degree in African-American studies.

Less than a week after Underwood left, on Friday, March 24, Oklahoma State promoted Boynton. At his introductory news conference the following Monday, the Associated Press reported, he said, "I don't think about my age when it comes to this thing."

2020#

One hundred and eighty-three days after that news conference, on September 26, 2017, federal prosecutors in New York charged Oklahoma State's associate head coach in the college basketball corruption case. The university fired him two days later.

The NCAA's infractions panel ruled on June 5, 2020. It found that the former assistant had accepted up to $22,000 in bribes, and it banned Oklahoma State from the 2020-21 postseason, with probation, a fine and lost scholarships on top. The AP's account of that day noted that Boynton was not accused of wrongdoing. He said he planned to talk to Cade Cunningham, the top recruit in his incoming class, and the other players about whether they would stay. "In terms of a postseason ban for a group of kids, who were probably 15 and 16 years old when this stuff was going on, it's completely, completely out of bounds," he said.

The school appealed, and the appeal let the team play while it waited. That was the season Cunningham spent in Stillwater. Oklahoma State went 21-9, was seeded fourth in the NCAA tournament and lost in the second round, and that summer Cunningham was the first player taken in the NBA draft. It is the only NCAA tournament Boynton's Oklahoma State teams reached.

On Wednesday, November 3, 2021, the NCAA denied the appeal, and the ban moved to the season that was about to start. Boynton invited the people who had decided the case, in his words, "to meet with my team, to look each of them in their eyes and explain why illicit conduct committed by a rogue assistant coach five years ago should serve as a basis for denying them the opportunity to experience postseason tournament play."

"This is the greatest disappointment in my career as a head coach," he said. Oklahoma State went 15-15 that season, and there was no tournament of any kind at the end of it.

2024#

There were two more seasons. The first ended at 20-16. The second ended at 12-20.

On Thursday, March 14, 2024, Oklahoma State's athletic director, Chad Weiberg, announced that Boynton would not return. "For seven years, Coach Boynton has led this program and represented this university with class," the statement said. "Unfortunately, the desired results have not followed." He left Stillwater at 119-109, with one NCAA tournament and two trips to the NIT quarterfinals.

Thirty-five days later, on Thursday, April 18, Michigan announced six additions to Dusty May's first staff in Ann Arbor. Boynton was one of them, an assistant coach.

On Michigan's podcast in July he said that he was not working when May arrived, and that he had to think about whether he wanted to take some time off. The host, Brian Boesch, said on the same episode that Boynton had told him that in the aftermath of the firing he had asked himself whether he was good enough.

Then he ran Michigan's defense. In the second season it finished first in the country in Ken Pomeroy's adjusted defensive efficiency, and in May, asked about May's habit of handing work to his staff, Boynton gave the defense back to him. "Our defensive philosophy comes from him," he said of May. "We do nothing without his blessing and his encouragement."

2026#

Michigan beat UConn 69-63 at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis on Monday night, April 6.

In the episode published six weeks later, asked what moment stayed with him, Boynton did not describe the game. He described about two minutes on the floor afterward with his wife and their two children. "My wife, who's usually not very emotional, was overcome with emotion," he said. "And my son, who may be the least emotional person in the history of humankind, was emotional." Then he added a number. "I've been doing this twenty two years now. It's the first time I've ever even played in the game."

Seventy-six days after Indianapolis it was Father's Day, Sunday, June 21. That night, as Boesch put it to him in July, May called to say the Dallas Mavericks job might happen. "The next couple of hours was me talking to my wife about, how do we proceed?" Boynton said in July. "And the next morning, obviously, the news breaks and it became real."

The team's first workout after that was on the Tuesday morning. When the players huddled for it, Boynton said, "the huddle looked exactly the way they thought it would look, minus one person."

He was interim head coach for 18 days. On Friday, July 10, Michigan made it permanent, on a two-year contract.

So the job came to him the same way twice, nine years apart, both times from the next chair over, both times because the man in the first chair had somewhere else to go. What changed is how he talks about being handed it.

In August, on the same podcast, May was asked why he believed Boynton would succeed. He began with the obvious, that Boynton was a proven head coach who had sat in the seat, and then he talked about himself. His first head job had been at Florida Atlantic. "I got FAU and I wasn't ready," May said. "I don't think any first time head coach is ever ready. And because there was eight people at our games and there's no pressure, I was able to literally learn, grow, experiment, throw stuff at the wall, be really, really bad before we could be great. And he never had that opportunity."

Boynton, three weeks earlier, had said a version of the same thing about himself, in fewer words. Asked how he would handle a job in which he would spend less of his day on basketball, he said he would lean on what he had learned in Stillwater, the good and the bad. "I probably didn't know as well how to delegate, how to identify my own weaknesses and have people that can cover those for me." His first hire as head coach was an assistant, Mike Martin, who had spent fourteen years as head coach at Brown, his alma mater, and who would be, Boynton said, somebody he could "lean on to ask questions."

In 2017 he said he did not think about his age. In 2026 he hired a man to ask questions of.

The first game#

The first game Michigan played under him was on Sunday, August 23, at Arena Vilnius, against the Lithuanian senior national team. Michigan led by 12 at halftime and by 14 early in the third quarter, and lost 96-84. The next night, in Utena, it lost again, 82-77. It won the third game, in Montenegro, and on that night a freshman guard who had started all three games tore the ACL in his right knee.

Michigan's first game that counts this season is in Ann Arbor, against Oakland.

Its first game that counted last season was in Ann Arbor, against Oakland, seventeen days after the score he keeps on his phone. Michigan won it by 43.

Sources: Michigan Athletics, "Boynton Jr. Named Head Coach of Men's Basketball Program," July 10, 2026; Michigan Athletics, Defend the Block 386 transcript (Mike Boynton Jr.), May 19, 2026; Defend the Block 393 transcript (Mike Boynton Jr.), July 21, 2026; Defend the Block 396 transcript (Dusty May), August 11, 2026; Michigan Athletics, exhibition recap, Michigan vs. Cincinnati, October 17, 2025; Michigan Athletics 2025-26 and 2026-27 schedules; Michigan Athletics staff announcement, April 18, 2024; ESPN schedule and results, Michigan 2025-26; Associated Press, "New Oklahoma State coach Boynton, 35, says he's ready," March 27, 2017, as published by KOSU; KOSU, Oklahoma State associate head coach charged and fired, September 26 and 28, 2017; Associated Press, "NCAA hits Oklahoma St with postseason ban in corruption case," June 5, 2020; Lawrence Journal-World and wire reports, "NCAA denies Oklahoma State appeal, Cowboys get postseason ban," November 3, 2021; Oklahoma State Athletics, "Oklahoma State Men's Basketball Update," March 14, 2024; Sports Reference, Oklahoma State men's basketball season records, 2016-17 to 2023-24.