Michigan added Brown head coach Mike Martin to its basketball staff on Monday, bringing a 44-year-old Ivy League veteran onto the bench after 13 seasons at Brown. The move gives Mike Boynton another proven coach as he keeps shaping his first staff after taking over on a two-year contract.
Martin leaves Brown with a 171-202 record, but his stop there was about more than wins and losses. He is a Brown graduate who began coaching on Glen Miller's staff at Brown before following Miller to Penn, then returned to Brown and spent more than a decade guiding the program.
Readers searching this now are really looking for what Michigan just changed. Boynton received his contract on Friday after serving as interim coach for the previous few weeks following Dusty May's departure for the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, and he has been building around that transition while recruiting with Kyle Church in Las Vegas at the Nike EYBL event over the weekend.
The hire also lands at a moment when Brown's recent surge and slide sit side by side. Brown came within one possession of its first NCAA Tournament in 2024, falling 62-61 to Yale in the Ivy League tournament championship, but the program then lost three of its five leading scorers after the 2023-24 season and went 9-19 in the Ivy League over the past two seasons. That is the backdrop Martin leaves behind.
What Michigan is getting is a coach who has lived inside the Ivy League long enough to know how thin the margins are. The open question is not whether Martin knows offense; it is how Boynton will use him inside a staff still taking shape. For now, the biggest fact is simple: Michigan has added experience, and Brown has lost a coach who had spent 13 seasons trying to push the program through the league's narrowest door.
