NCAA Men’s Tournament First Round

BROOKLYN, NY – Yes, Dusty May sees his name attached to all those open positions. Louisville. Michigan. West Virginia. (Especially Louisville.)

And it’s been hard for him to tune out much of that noise as he prepares for Florida Atlantic’s biggest game of the season: the NCAA Tournament opener against Northwestern here on Friday. But he knows he’s not alone – and that the extra attention and rampant speculation comes because he’s done such a good job with his Owls.

It started early, too, as Ohio State opened in mid-February to get the coaching carousel going.

“I think a lot of coaches deal with this — it’s not uncommon,” May said Thursday. “It now only happens over a longer period of time, because jobs become available during the season. So this probably started a month or so ago. Last year that happened earlier in the season. As soon as we had success, our players came to me and said: ‘(They) said you won’t be here next year, my mother said she heard this from the neighbors, from the postman’s neighbor that you are going to coach here.” And every time we just laughed about it and said, let’s focus on what’s important.

“It’s the same thing. I try not to get caught up in it. But as a college basketball coach, I talk to a lot of people. I talk to coaches, I talk to recruits, I talk to our signees, so it comes up a lot. It’s distracting, but it is our job to distribute what we ought to do.

“But I would also like to add that Instagram is distracting. Twitter is distracting. If your children are watching movies with you while you are trying to watch movies, it will be distracting. We all have a lot of distractions and we all have a job to do and that is prepare to play our best against Northwestern.

FAU players said it’s not a problem for them either. They feel that they can go to May at any time and ask him about rumors – and they will get an honest answer.

“If you really know Coach, you don’t really pay much attention to the articles online,” guard Nick Boyd said. “I mean, if it’s his last game or whatever, we just want to make it special. So, who cares?”

FAU is back in the NCAA Tournament for the second consecutive season, following the Owls’ remarkable run to the Final Four a season ago. May, 47, is 126-68 at FAU over five seasons.