GLENDALE, Ariz. – He is 40 minutes from history. They will be 40 demanding minutes, at times maybe agonizing, probably periodically thrilling. That is the life of a college basketball coach, but no one ever has stood in the position Dan Hurley will occupy Monday evening – not even his brother, the All-American point guard, nor his father, the Hall of Fame high school coach.
Indeed, Dan Hurley will not be the first coach ever to lead his team to consecutive March Madness championships if the Connecticut Huskies are able to prevail over Purdue at State Farm Stadium. Hank Iba of what is now Oklahoma State did it first, just short of 80 years ago. John Wooden of UCLA did it best, stretching his string of championships to seven in a row.
If UConn wins, though, Hurley will become the first in recorded history to lose essentially 75 percent of his team and return to do it again. Kentucky in the 1940s, San Francisco in the 1950s, Cincinnati in the 1960s, UCLA in the 1960s and 1970s, Duke in the 1990s and Florida in the 2000s all retained significant portions of their rosters from championship season to championship season. (Stats for Oklahoma State's 1945 and 1946 teams are difficult to find.)
Adama Sanogo, Jordan Hawkins, Andre Jackson, Joey Calcaterra and Nahiem Alleyne – all gone. The first three left early for professional basketball. Calcaterra completed his eligibility. Alleyne transferred to St. John’s in search of a greater role.
UConn lost all these significant contributors from the team that defeated San Diego State in the 2023 championship game and somehow managed to improve. This year’s Huskies are the most dominant team in Division I basketball for 2023-24 and could become the most dominant champion in the sport’s modern era.
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When Hurley explains how this has happened, he reveals one of the elements that makes him uniquely Dan Hurley: his sense of humor. He is all business when haranguing referees, but he is not averse to demonstrating his quick wit, as when he told reporters it was “therapeutic” to watch the team plane being de-iced while waiting through a seemingly endless delay to take off for the Phoenix area and the Final Four.
“My biggest motivation for the last two/three weeks is I just don’t want to deal with the portal crap. That’s why we’re trying to win so hard right now,” Hurley told reporters, although he did not say “crap.”
“I’m seeing what other people are doing, and it’s chaos. I can hide behind: 'Hey, my season’s still going on.'
“For a lot of the year, we’ve used the external slights, the perceived slights … 'the world’s against us' mentality. I think that gets you through the regular season, Big East grind – January, February, where the team’s tired and you’ve got to create these different things.
“But once you get to this time of year, everything is just you and who your identity is. The way you play, it’s very automatic. It just comes down to hoping that it’s your night.”
Hurley has (re)built something extraordinary at UConn, and it’s taken fewer than a half-dozen years. He was hired after leading Rhode Island to NCAA Tournament appearances in 2017 and 2018. He could have chosen to become head coach at Pitt, but he had seen what was possible at UConn while playing in the Big East at Seton Hall, working as an assistant at Rutgers and then spending a decade at St. Benedict’s in New Jersey, a prep school with an elite basketball program.
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UConn made Hurley its almost singular target when deciding to replace Kevin Ollie, an alum who won a championship in 2014 but was unable to sustain success. University officials saw similarities to the great Jim Calhoun. There certainly is a similar intensity, although Hurley tends to reserve his harshest criticisms for private practice sessions, whereas Calhoun, in an earlier era, could afford to be emphatic with his players in front of 70,000 people at a Final Four game.
“Everybody thought he would be the perfect choice,” retired UConn publicist Phil Chardis, who’s helping out the Huskies during this Final Four, told TSN. “He had the energy to bring it back. He knew the UConn history – it’s hard to coach UConn if you don’t know UConn. It’s a unique place. He knew that, because he’s a Northeast guy.”
Externally, it did not seem inevitable it would come to this. The Huskies reached the NCAAs in his third and fourth seasons, but they lost in the first round both times. At the start of 2022-23, Jackson and Hawkins had averaged a combined 12.6 points. At the end, it nearly was double that and both were massive contributors to the championship run.
Freshman Steph Castle is acknowledged as the most talented player on the UConn team, the one that’s most coveted by NBA teams. It may appear now that he jumped onto a speeding train, but he committed to UConn in November 2021 – nearly two years before he would enroll and not long after taking an official visit to the campus. He is from Covington, Ga., not exactly Huskies country, but he recognized this was the program that offered what he wanted. And needed.
“My decision was easy. I feel like I committed to a program – and to a coach that I know will coach me. When I went on my visit, I saw the practices, I saw how hard he coached, and it was just easy for me to commit to a coach like that,” Castle told The Sporting News. “He’s a winner. I just felt like I wanted to be coached by a guy like Coach Hurley.
“I got coached by my dad a lot growing up. I was always coached hard, so I didn’t want any changes in that going into college. I feel like it's worked out for me growing up. I kind of saw a little bit of that in Coach Hurley, and I kind of got attracted to it early.”
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Castle and shooting guard Cam Spencer were the most important additions to the UConn roster this season. Castle is an elite defender though only a freshman and Spencer provided another consistent 3-point threat. The Huskies have the No. 1 offense in college basketball. According to KenPom.com, they have a higher adjusted efficiency margin — essentially, how many more points scored per 100 possessions than allowed — than all but two NCAA finalists dating back to 1999. (However, 1999 Duke and 2021 Gonzaga both fell in the title game.)
“My first recruiting call, they talked about going to the Final Four," said Tristen Newton, who transferred from East Carolina to UConn in 2022. "I committed because I knew Adama was going to be the best center in college basketball, and Jordan and Andre around me, they would be great pieces to develop my game. I saw the hard work they put in the great facilities, elite-level program.
“I saw how people had developed under him, and how he tells you the truth and how he pushes you. I knew he was going to be push me to be the best person I could be and the best player I could be, and I knew that’s why I needed to take that step.”
Hurley has been open about his mental health struggles, which dated back well more than 30 years, to his time as a player in the shadow of older brother Bobby Hurley, who won consecutive NCAA championships at Duke, as well as his extraordinarily successful father, Bob, who won 26 New Jersey state titles.
Dan now practices yoga to give himself some time at peace. And if he wins Monday, he will embrace all of it, as he has merely having the chance to take this shot.
“Listen, when you break through – that euphoria that you feel when you punch your ticket to the Final Four, just the bigness of this event, just participating in it as a coach or a player, the experience, this setting, the buses, police escorts, 70,000 people … I mean its an incredible, incredible experience,” Hurley said Sunday.
“The second time you make it feels as good as the first.”
