Month: May 2026

NASCAR Hall of Fame (Charlotte, N.C.) — A driver known as a throwback to the rough-and-tumble days of NASCAR will join many of those who embraced a similar style who already are in the NASCAR Hall of Fame. Former Cup champion and current FOX Sports analyst Kevin Harvick will be among the three inductees of the 2027 class as the 60-time Cup winner also earned the distinction as a first-ballot Hall of Famer. “I’ve been told a few times in the NASCAR trailer [that] this sport will go on with or without you, so you can either get it straight or you can keep going, and that’s true,” Harvick told me and other reporters following the announcement. “Everybody’s career ultimately comes to an end, and the things that you do are what they were, and so to be able to have accomplished enough to be standing here today, I feel pretty fortunate because I had a lot of good people, a lot of good cars, and a lot of great moments to be able to have the success that we did. It’s quite an honor to be able to stand in here and have your name next to so many of the greats in our sport.” Harvick, Jeff Burton and Larry Phillips — all three heralded drivers in their careers —  will be enshrined in the Jan. 22 ceremony, joining the 70 other inductees since the Hall of Fame opened in 2010. Harvick and Burton, who were teammates at one point at Richard Childress Racing, were the two selections from the 10-candidate Modern Era ballot, while Midwest short-track star Phillips got in as the selection from the five-candidate Pioneer Era ballot. A voting panel of 49 industry executives, former drivers and crew chiefs and media met Tuesday to deliberate and vote. An online fan vote was combined into one vote, to make for 50 on the panel. Harvick appeared on 46 of the 50 ballots, Phillips on 19 and Burton was on 16. Neil Bonnett was third in the Modern Era voting, followed by Randy Dorton and Greg Biffle. When told he earned 92 percent of the vote, Harvick seemed appreciative. “When you look at just the grand scheme of everything, you look at the whole Hall of Fame piece of it, and you talk about your reputation, and you talk about the respect, I think that speaks volumes of the things that you were able to accomplish,” Harvick said. “And I can say it now: I’m proud of that. That’s what this is for, right? You get to reflect back and be proud of the things that you were able to accomplish.” There was little doubt Harvick — dubbed “The Closer” because of the way he could win races with strong runs to the finish — would get in as his 60 Cup victories ranks 11th all-time and the most for any driver not in the Hall of Fame who is eligible. He also ranks fifth all-time in top-10 finish with 444. The 2014 Cup champion, Harvick has also won titles in what is now the O’Reilly Series in 2001 and 2006. He also won the 2007 Daytona 500 and was named one of NASCAR’s 75 greatest drivers. While virtually a given he would get in, Harvick sat in his truck outside the Hall of Fame during the announcement. “It’s been really weird,” Harvick said about how to handle the announcement. “It felt so arrogant to come sit in the room [for the announcement]. I’ve never been somebody who wants to pat myself on the back or show that you’re so confident in something that you’re doing. “I want to be respectful and I want it to be so that it feels right, and I don’t want anybody to think that you take it for granted.” Beyond the on-track statistics, he helped the sport through one of its most high-profile tragedies as he replaced Dale Earnhardt after the seven-time Cup champion’s death in the 2021 Daytona 500. Harvick was supposed to go full-time Cup racing the following year but instead drove the No. 29 car for Richard Childress Racing, which was renumber from Earnhardt’s No. 3. He won in his third career start at Atlanta. But Harvick’s resume doesn’t just include victories, championships and a FOX microphone. He and his wife, DeLana, owned the Kevin Harvick Inc. race team that competed in both trucks and the O’Reilly Series. He currently is a co-owner in the CARS Tour and involved in promoting the racetrack in his hometown of Bakersfield. The California native brought a stern determination built when racing the West Coast short tracks. He was demanding and relentless in the way he drove and the way he interacted with his own team and other teams. He has often said that when he struggled, he’d have to create drama to stay relevant, and his highlight reel is full of intense confrontations between him and other drivers. “Your reputation is first thing that you have, the second thing are your results, and ultimately, hopefully, whether I was high strung or competitive or rambunctious, or the guy that everybody didn’t like or liked, or whoever it was, hopefully they can still respect you,” Harvick said. “I think from the competition side, from the ownership side, from whatever that is, you might not like my opinion or you might not like what I did on the racetrack, but hopefully in the end you respect it.”​Latest Sports News from FOX Sports

For Michigan head coach Dusty May and his coaching staff — which had already lost one key figure during the early stages of this year’s carousel — the irony of presiding over the finest campaign in school history was preparing for an offseason that might be among the program’s worst. Figuratively speaking, of course. There’s nothing desultory about the afterglow of winning a national championship. May knew he was losing assistant Justin Joyner to the head-coaching job at Oregon State, a move that was finalized nearly a month before Michigan cut down the nets in Indianapolis. He knew it was becoming increasingly likely that Yaxel Lendeborg, Morez Johnson Jr. and Aday Mara would all turn pro following revelatory seasons out of the transfer portal. It’s now widely expected that the Wolverines will produce three first-round picks in a single year for just the second time in school history. “We tried to anticipate the worst-case scenario,” Michigan assistant coach Drew Williamson told me earlier this month, “which would be all those guys leaving. And so we kind of put a game plan together for trying to find the best fits that were similar to how we wanted to play. And the guys that we knew were returning, using their strengths to put guys around them [from the portal].” That approach quickly rendered point guard Elliot Cadeau the central figure to Michigan’s rebuilding efforts — even as Cadeau joined some of his teammates in declaring for the NBA Draft, launching into the pre-draft process while maintaining his collegiate eligibility. The understanding among the Wolverines’ coaches was that Cadeau, who had just completed his junior season, was more interested in gathering feedback from scouts and executives than actually turning pro. Sure enough, Cadeau withdrew his name from the draft’s list of early entrants over the weekend, reaffirming his commitment to Michigan. That was precisely the outcome May and his staff envisioned when they observed just how integral Cadeau was to landing the program’s latest batch of frontcourt reinforcements: former Cincinnati center Moustapha Thiam, former Tennessee forward J.P. Estrella and former LSU forward Jalen Reed. As eager as Cadeau was to work with Michigan’s coaches in identifying portal targets — constantly peppering them with names he’d seen and heard — the Wolverines soon discovered that just as many high-level transfers were eager to be his teammate. “A pass-first point guard,” May told me earlier this month, “that’s the biggest sell in today’s climate. To not have a high-volume scoring point guard helps the chemistry. When we took this job, we said, ‘We’re gonna get a good big [man] and a pass-first point guard.’ And we were going to try to make sure we have that every year. Everything else, in between, we felt like we could figure out a way to be successful.” That Michigan’s coaching staff coaxed such refinement from Cadeau emphatically squashed any external concerns surrounding both his ceiling as an elite guard and his long-range consistency following two uneven seasons at North Carolina. He completed his first season with the Wolverines averaging a career-high 10.5 points per game while also ranking 11th nationally in assists (5.9 per game) among players from the power conferences. When the stakes were highest — as the Wolverines steamrolled one opponent after another during the NCAA Tournament — Cadeau’s assist rate of 35.3% ranked fourth among guards who reached the second weekend or beyond, culminating in his selection as the Most Outstanding Player in the Final Four. Isolating and extracting the things Cadeau and his NBA-bound teammates had excelled at soon became the coaching staff’s primary goal once the transfer portal officially opened in early April. May understood that the chances of signing three more future first-round picks were exceedingly slim, especially once the prices for post players began to soar on the open market, but the Wolverines had two seasons’ worth of data that emphasized the benefits of high-level, fear-inducing positional size. Replicating that formula seemed like an obvious choice, with Cadeau and fellow returning guard Trey McKenney offering plenty of backcourt continuity from the title-winning group. [THE BLUEPRINT: Michigan Built A Formula Teams Are Racing To Copy] “Our phones are ringing more than they were before,” assistant coach Mike Boynton told me earlier this month, “with guys reaching out saying, ‘Hey, we’re watching what you guys have been able to do with this particular type of player and we have a guy who we think has a similar game, similar skill set, and we’d like to talk to see if there’s mutual interest.’” So which of those skills did the coaches believe would mesh most seamlessly with Cadeau moving forward? May told me his early studies of the Big Ten underscored the importance of having quality screeners, a category into which he grouped ex-Wolverine center Tarris Reed Jr. and Purdue standout Trey Kaufman-Renn. That realization led Michigan toward Estrella, who averaged 10 points and 5.4 rebounds per game at Tennessee, another program known for its physicality and toughness under head coach Rick Barnes. When the Wolverines studied Estrella’s high school tape, they saw shooting mechanics solid enough to believe he could eventually expand his repertoire to include pick-and-pop opportunities with Cadeau next season. Then there were the alley-oops, a trademark of Michigan’s offense whenever Mara was on the floor. Williamson told me the staff identified a handful of transfer centers with the requisite size and mobility to “fit that mold a little bit,” even if nobody could quite match Mara’s monstrous 7-foot-3, 255-pound frame — though the Wolverines certainly came close to finding a plug-and-play replacement in Thiam. A former top-60 recruit in the 2024 cycle, Thiam now stands 7-foot-2 and weighs 255 pounds after adding a considerable amount of muscle during stints at UCF and Cincinnati. He averaged 12.8 points, 7.1 rebounds and 1.6 blocks per game for the Bearcats last season before head coach Wes Miller got fired. He preempted those numbers with an eye-catching 15-point effort against Michigan in an exhibition game at Crisler Center on Oct. 17. The chance for Thiam to be on the receiving end of passes from Cadeau was exactly what he’d hoped to find after back-to-back seasons in which his team’s point guards averaged 4.3 assists or fewer per game. “He saw enough, and I think we were able to give him enough evidence that Elliot could be maybe the best facilitator in the country,” Boynton told me. “And we [explained to him how] that will make the game easier on you. You will have more baskets where you literally just have to catch it close enough to the basket to lay it in, instead of having to fight against a post defender, making a move and trying to create things yourself through double teams. You’re going to get, probably, two to three lobs per game. You’re going to be able to play in space a little bit more. You’re going to be able to get some throw-aheads because that’s the way that Elliot sees the game. “I think that was probably the thing that put us over the top versus some of the other schools that he was considering, is that he watched how we all believe Elliot helped Morez [Johnson] and Aday [Mara] make the game easier and put themselves in the position that they’re in now.” For all of those portal additions to unfold while Cadeau was still technically entered in the NBA Draft speaks to the trust that runs from May to his point guard and back again, an understanding that neither side would burn the other. Michigan’s coaches even went as far as consulting with Cadeau on potential targets, drawing on film the guard himself had studied or opponents he had faced earlier in his career. Eventually, Cadeau began sending names directly to assistant coach Akeem Miskdeen, according to Williamson, because he “wanted to have a little skin in the game.” That dynamic made Cadeau the most important figure in Michigan’s offseason and its bid for a second consecutive national championship. Some of his teammates might be departing, but Cadeau was always intent on running it back. “His clips and his highlights were involved in a lot of our recruiting pitches this offseason,” Williamson told me. “I think that was an easy sell.”​Latest Sports News from FOX Sports