Danny Hurley and UConn are officially “running” college basketball

Everyone already wrote the “officially blue bloods” story a year ago, so there’s no point in rehashing it. Although I can understand the urge. It is difficult to extract new narratives from periods of sustained domination.

No, this year’s story feels simpler. The 2023-24 Connecticut Huskies are one of the best men’s college basketball teams of all time. Any argument to the contrary will be made in bad faith.

The 2022-23 Huskies had a big start in March, becoming the first team in NCAA Tournament history to win six games by 13 points or more. If that wasn’t enough, UConn also became the first national champion in history to win all six games by double-digit margins while holding all six opponents to 65 points or less. Ta.

A year later, Danny Hurley’s team was an even bigger postseason juggernaut, winning the Big East tournament in that round and crowning the national champion with the most statistically dominant run in March Madness history.

“What can I say?” Hurley said after Monday night’s 75-60 win over Purdue. “We won. By a lot. Again.”

You could pretty easily argue that there haven’t been two years like this in college basketball since UCLA went back-to-back undefeated seasons in 1971-72 and 1972-73. Of course, back-to-back championships (or back-to-back championships in the case of the Bruins) were common in the past. after that. UConn became the first program in 17 years to successfully rebroadcast the sport.

The difference between Hurley’s second national championship team and his first is that this team lost two of the previous year’s leading scorers, but was also on the November varsity roster. And a huge event in December. And the big one in January. And February’s super big hit.

Since the beginning of this season, the UConn team has Ranked 3rd in its own conference The October game seemed head and shoulders above any other sport. When they finally faced the team with the most legitimate claim to being within shouting distance of the reigning champions, the Huskies held them at arm’s length in much the same fashion they had shown the previous three weeks. Ta. several weeks.

This season, Connecticut State fell just three times. All three losses were road losses, and all were characterized by unusually exquisite performances by their opponents offensively.

On December 1st, UW lost to the preseason No. 1 ranked University of Kansas by four points. The Jayhawks recorded a 3-point success rate of 64.3%.

On December 20, UW lost its first Big East road game of the season at Seton Hall. Donovan Clingan played just 14 minutes due to injury, but helped the Pirates shoot 51.8 percent from the field.

On February 20th, in the third game in seven days, UConn won a big game against Creighton as the Blue Jays made 14 of 28 from the field for a field goal percentage of 54.7 percent.

What about the remaining 37 games? All were Husky wins, 30 of which were double-digit wins.

The University of Florida made a similar leap from an “incredibly impressive March performance” to an “overwhelming performance from start to finish” in its pursuit of back-to-back championships, but that’s easier to explain. Ta. What Billy Donovan tried to do at the University of Florida 17 years ago is nearly impossible in today’s college game. The top five scorers on the 2006 national title team, Joakim Noah, Taurean Green, Corey Brewer, Al Horford, Lee Humphrey, Kris Richard, and Walter Hodge, will all start over for another year in Gainesville. I decided to do so.

So how did UConn make repeating look even easier nearly 20 years later? So what did Hare do?

Tristen Newton went from being the biggest question mark for the 2023 champions to being named to the 2024 All-American First Team.

Donovan Clingan went from being a promising backup to Adama Sanogo to being one of the most capable big men in the country and perhaps the most important player on the Collegiate Union team.

Cam Spencer arrived from Rutgers as an outside shooting replacement for the departed Jordan Hawkins. He successfully incorporated elite cunning and first-rate trash talk.

In his second season as a full-time starter, Alex Karaban improved his numbers in almost every major statistical category there is.

And then there’s Stephon Castle, the only true freshman starter on the team who will be in this year’s Final Four. Even though he knew he was the only guaranteed lottery pick on this Huskies team, Castle had no problem playing his role. It was a part that required him to be fifth on the team in scoring, but still to prove that he could reach stardom at the next level when the situation called for it.

As for Hurley, few things in sports have aged better since the pandemic than his January 2020 declaration to “help people get better now.”

Hurley declared from the podium, just after putting the finishing touches on the most dominant two-year tournament run in the history of the sport.

“For the past 25 to 30 years, UW has been running college basketball,” Hurley said. “I see all the former champions over there. We’ve been running college basketball for the last 30 years.”

In a sense, that’s certainly true. UConn has won the national championship all six times since 1999. No other player won more than three times during this period.

But if the Huskies have been “running the sport,” they’ve certainly done it in unconventional ways.

Seven times in the last 15 years, the University of Connecticut has not even made it to the NCAA Tournament. In five consecutive seasons, from 2016-17 to 2020-21, the Huskies failed to win more than 19 games. They finished with a losing overall record the first three of those seasons.

Until March of this year, UConn hadn’t been a No. 1 or No. 2 seed in the Big Dance since 2009. They are the only program outside of the top two seeds to win a national championship after No. 3. Seeded Florida won the national title in her 2006…and they accomplished that feat her third time.

And for those three championships, they were all against very strange national finalists.

In 2011, University defeated No. 8 seed Butler, a game in which the Bulldogs had the lowest shooting percentage of any team in NCAA Tournament history. Not just in the history of the U.S. Championship game; Any A game that will go down in NCAA Tournament history. Three years later, in a very strange clash of not-so-Titans teams, the seventh-seeded Huskies defeated eighth-seeded Kentucky. And last year, Hurley’s team prevented San Diego State from becoming the first five-seed national champion in history and the first non-power conference champion since 1990.

But there was nothing strange about 2023-2024, and there is nothing uncertain about UConn’s current standing within the sport.

Thanks to changes brought about not only by the NIL and the transfer portal, but also by a group of retiring Hall of Famers such as Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Jim Boeheim, and Jay Wright, the world of college basketball remains very It’s in a state of flux. , there are two very clear realities at the moment.

Danny Hurley is a newcomer to the college basketball coaching world, and the Connecticut Huskies are the current top dogs in the sport.