Yaxel Lendeborg Reveals His Mindset Heading into NCAA Tournament

Michigan men's basketball enters the NCAA Tournament as a No. 1 seed and one of the national title favorites. This will be a different experience for Wolverines star forward Yaxel Lendeborg than the last time he played in the Big Dance, as a member of 12th-seeded UAB in 2024.

"It's definitely going to be a lot different," Lendeborg told Men's Journal this week. "My first time at UAB, I was more like starstruck, you know. I felt like I was in a movie. I guess I really lost focus of the game while I was there. And then, just the difference in like the team that I have now as well. All of these guys have experience with March Madness as well. Majority of my team at UAB didn't have many, so we were all pretty new to this."

During our conversation with Lendeborg, we covered all the bases regarding Michigan's March chances, as well as how he's dealing with a new reality for college athletes in the NIL era: taxes.

Here's what he had to say ahead of the Wolverines' first round game against Howard (7 p.m. ET Thursday, CBS).

The Wolverines are the hunted

Michigan has been one of the best teams in college basketball all season long, spending time atop the AP top 25 in February. Unlike when he played in the NCAA Tournament with UAB, Lendeborg didn't have to wait until Selection Sunday to clinch a bid by winning his conference championship.

He and his teammates have known for a while that they will have a target on their backs during March Madness, and a national title is the only goal.

"We've been pretty much preparing for this for a month or so now," Lendeborg said. "We made a shirt that says 'April Habits' as well. So we're not looking towards leaving or being first or second round exits. We wanna make it to the national championship game. We've just been just working on being more together, being a unit. And when we get to those moments that we just got tested on these last few games, when it gets super close, nobody loses their composure. We all still continue to play together, play hard. hen we find out who we need to run the offense through when we get bogged down and we need somebody to be instant offense."

The Taxman Cometh

Lendeborg caused a stir this week when he said he turned down an NIL deal between $7-9 million from Kentucky in order to play for coach Dusty May at Michigan.

Lendeborg claims he could have made roughly three times more money to suit up for the Wildcats, but even if that's the case, the 23-year-old standout is being pretty well compensated at Michigan.

As a result, Lendeborg is now dealing with the reality of taxes, which has been made easier by his partnership with TurboTax.

"This is going to be like pretty much my first year being involved with any of this stuff, so this has been a way bigger portion of my life than it's ever been so far," he explained. "TurboTax has been making everything really easy. They're experts, so they know what they're doing with this stuff. I don't know anything that's going on. So this is making my life a whole lot easier."

Big Ten loss a motivating factor

Michigan earned the Big Ten regular season title but came up short to Purdue in the conference tournament championship last weekend.

Lendeborg is hoping that the disappointment of that loss can spur a deep tournament run.

"I would say it's good and bad," Lendeborg said. "Bad because we obviously wanted to make history. Good because we got that loss out the way. We all don't like losing. It's only our third one of the year, so it's fairly new to us. So we all hate this now. We have a bad taste in our mouth, like you said. We're going to reflect, watch film, and figure out what went wrong, how our defense kept getting exposed, and then make sure that we can win games off of defenses and figure out what we need to focus on for the next games."