HOUSTON — Dusty May rides his bike to work. This is not new or surprising information. It’s baked into his emerging personal mythology as the Coach Who Led Florida Atlantic to the Final Four. And yet, often enough, he’ll be talking to a good friend and it will sound like a tornado has passed through Boca Raton and, in that moment, Mike White will be startled. Then he’ll remember: Oh, right. Dusty rides his bike to work.

At which point Georgia’s head coach just laughs and asks if maybe May could call him back when he’s, you know, indoors.

“He’s just very comfortable in his own skin,” White says, taking a break from scouring the transfer portal to talk about his friend. “He pays less attention to exterior noise than most. Where a lot of people are consumed with how they’re perceived, what their next move may be, what the industry says should be next for them — Dusty is probably most consumed with being his best version. Getting a lot of stuff done today. Living in the moment. He’s just locked in.”

Maybe this doesn’t perfectly articulate how the sport’s coach of the moment views the time beyond this weekend at NRG Stadium, but also maybe it kind of does. There is a long history of coaches achieving something like May has achieved, with a program that looks something like his, and then immediately grabbing the first available bigger and shinier gig. There is also a mounting consensus among those who know him and those regularly involved in the coaching carousel that May sees things differently. That in a sport of climbers who’ll step on someone’s face to make their way up, May might be a singular phenomenon.

He doesn’t currently have an agent. Never mind actually interviewing for a job; one industry source wasn’t sure May so much as raised his hand to demonstrate the faintest interest. It’d be naive to believe he’ll coach in Boca Raton forever. It’s also possibly a fool’s errand to try to tell Dusty May’s future. “He was arguably one of the hottest names of the cycle,” one coaching agent says. “But it became clear it was going to take a great job to get him to leave FAU.”

Internally, Florida Atlantic is not expecting to conduct a coaching search whenever its season ends. (Texas Tech is the only high-major job available and widely believed to be Grant McCasland’s after North Texas plays in the NIT final.) May hasn’t shown a strong indication to leave. He enjoys living in Boca Raton. On top of the whole bike-to-work scenario, he’s rumored to be getting a new deal and is losing just one senior off this team. He’s proud of the program he built from the ground up and it’s making the leap to the American Athletic Conference next season, and while Houston, Cincinnati and UCF are headed to the Big 12, it’s still an upgrade from FAU’s current home in Conference USA.

After the Owls punched their ticket to the Final Four, athletic director Brian White — Mike’s brother — told The Athletic he’s had over 250 unread texts at any given time throughout the team’s run. He tried to parse it down at times, only to see it go right back up. That’s how much interest this run has generated with various parties, many of whom have money they’re eager to spend. Upgrading the facilities and NIL situation seemingly just got easier.

When you ask what’s important to May, what appears to be happening at Florida Atlantic adds up. “Can you win there?” May says, describing what he looks for in any job. “Can you recruit quality people and can you win? It’s that simple. And there’s different layers in every job. Sometimes it’s a facility. Sometimes it’s a fan base. In our situation, it was the area, the growth of the university, my faith in the administration, and then the recruiting base. I recruited the state of Florida for a long time, and we’ve had great success with guys that were a little bit under the radar, underrecruited, but had boulders on their shoulders.”

It’s a straightforward answer for a guy who does operate on a separate wavelength. Mike White has told and retold the story about sharing a hotel with May on the recruiting trail when both worked at Louisiana Tech and waking up to the light of a laptop in the middle of the night, as May watched film of two pro teams from Turkey and clipped examples of good ball-screen connectivity. While most young coaches populate a Final Four city to network and have a good time, May spent his time at the convention center taking notes from keynote speakers. When asked Thursday to highlight a big name who’s reached out to him during this run to Houston, May cited Doug Lemov, the author of “The Coach’s Guide to Teaching.”

“Probably not the national celebrity you guys are wanting to hear,” May says, “but in my world that was the coolest text.”

If there’s a corollary for May’s situation, it’s probably Shaka Smart and VCU after the 2011 Final Four run, in which a young coach suddenly had the world at his fingertips and a school had the means and motivation to build and enhance and effectively turn itself into a better job than it was. (Unlike, say, a George Mason.) That’s conditional, of course. FAU has to actually get the money and do the building. But that might be where May’s relationship with athletic director Brian White eases any concerns while buying the school more time.

“Shaka had a lot of opportunities to leave VCU, but he was very happy at VCU,” one industry source said. “I think Dusty May is the same way. He’s very close with Brian. They’re gonna pay him really well. Dusty’s very happy in Boca Raton. Now that he’s made the Final Four — kind of like Shaka did — he can wait for the right opportunity to come around. He didn’t have to look at a Penn State or pick-a-school. He can wait for an Indiana to open. In my opinion, he’s in a different stratosphere once you make that Final Four.”

Apparently putting that line on the resume is more determinative than you might expect, particularly when Florida Atlantic is the program you lead there. It’s like a seal of approval etched in tattoo ink. It’s an achievement that lasts.

It gives May a little more elasticity when he thinks about any next steps; making a Final Four, apparently, means he more easily can bounce back from a down season in coaching-carousel evaluations. “Making the Final Four just makes you different,” the industry source said.

Dusty May is happy in Boca Raton and isn’t eager to leave for just any job. (Troy Taormina / USA Today)

There are rewards to running in place. Like, say, that imminent new contract that may not nudge May into the upper crust of men’s college basketball coaching salaries but will make him very comfortable, with many guaranteed years of that comfort. “If he wants to stay at FAU forever,” the industry source said, “he probably could do that.” There is, though, always the risk of being too picky. “He can probably bet on himself more than most now,” the coaching agent said. “But I do think there’s a balance between that and striking while you’re hot. The perfect job doesn’t always become available.”

Nor is a coach always ideally positioned to grab it when it does. The increasingly transient nature of the sport, meanwhile, undermines the concept of solid footing year-to-year. As the industry source noted: It’s to May’s credit that he has discovered and developed good players, but now everyone is going to want those good players. They’ll offer them bigger platforms and more robust NIL packages than FAU can offer, no matter how its resources grow. May can never assume his core will remain the same and therefore give him pretty good odds to keep winning at a high level.

FAU’s coach does, at least, realize this all too well. During the East Regional in New York, he acknowledged players on his roster were getting recruited more or less as he sat there talking. “Here’s our approach,” May says. “We’re going to put our guys in the best situation, environment, every single day, to be the absolute best they can be. We are who we are. If they want to be part of it, we love our guys and want them here. But if they want something different — and we’ve had some want something different — we support them, give them a hug, we still talk to their parents and support them. It is what it is. We’re going to be on the phone recruiting the next player to replace them. It’s all part of it. Our job is to do the best we can for our guys every day.”

While May’s current players echoed the sentiment — “We knew that the grass isn’t always greener,” junior guard Bryan Greenlee said — it will be nevertheless fascinating to watch how it plays out for both the roster and the man running it.

May is not, it should be noted, oblivious. To any of this. It’s not like he’s never been offered chances to leave where he’s at or weighed one job against another. “He’s had opportunities I know for a fact that he’s turned down since he’s been in Boca, including recently,” Mike White says. But it’s not a straight line to the horizon. There are a lot of tight curves and lane changes and detours involved, it appears.

“He wants to grow in his profession,” Mike White says. “He wants to grow as a coach and as a person. He wants to help young men reach their best version. Those are the things that are most important to him. I can’t speak for anything really beyond that. Who knows what the future holds? He loves where he is, and he’s going to continue to always have options.”

No matter what happens over the first weekend in April, May does not appear to be headed anywhere. Maybe the core Owls won’t take off, either, if the school and the staff can ward off the vultures circling the transfer portal.

Which means everybody could be doing this again next year. Maybe not the Final Four part, no, but at least a reprise of FAU being good and the whole world guessing where its head coach will go next, with absolutely no idea when that answer will be anywhere but Boca Raton. “You can’t put Dusty in a box,” the industry source says. “A lot of times our own values are to get to the next job. And I don’t think he thinks like that. I think he’s happy where he is. He’ll know when the right opportunity comes around. But we can’t tell him what that is. Which is pretty refreshing to see.”

(Top photo: Al Bello / Getty Images)