DAN HURLEY COULD WIN ANOTHER TITLE, EVEN AS HE PICKS FIGHTS WITH FANS
The one way to crack UConn is to ignite Hurley’s temper, which has erupted too many times this crazy season and brings back Bob Knight echoes when men’s college basketball needs steady leadership
The tales are established about his battles with alcohol and depression, the cruel love of his father and brother. We know why Dan Hurley quit basketball as a collegian and returned, decades later, to lead Connecticut into another orbit of championship romance. If he wins again this year, his school will pass Duke and Indiana on the all-time national list, trailing only UCLA and Kentucky.
So why not enrage fans across the country?
If there is only one way to beat the Huskies, who could go back-to-back on April 8 in Arizona, you might want Hurley to go Bob Knight on the world. We’ve lost the red rager in life but we’ll never forget his tantrums, including crusades against fans, one who turned against him and cost him his job. At this point, Hurley is known as one of the sport’s best coaches as he trots almost hairlessly with black glasses and tennis shoes and beads on his right wrist. But what exactly is he doing?
The week that wasn’t started at Providence, where he walked to the locker room and motioned to a fan while surrounded by police officers. “Look at this guy. Come here, come here, come here. You’ll get hurt,” said Hurley, who didn’t stop until a cop tapped him. He won the game by 14 points, days before his team enters the NCAA tournament at 31-3. He wasn’t done.
“You shouldn’t be yelling at me when you’re down 20,” Hurley told the media. “You should just wait for the game to be over and walk out. If he wasn’t barking at me, I wouldn’t have said anything to him. I had a similar thing at Butler, a fan was saying, ‘You suck, you guys haven’t won anything.’ And I told this guy, ‘I’ve got a national championship ring, and we won the regular season in the Big East, and we are champions.’ You shouldn’t be running your mouth at that point of the game. Just get out of here. Just go.”
This came only two weeks after he railed on fans at Creighton. After they yelled “F— Dan Hurley,” he turned to them and said of an accompanying security guard, “If you come over (the railing), he’ll knock you out.” Or would Hurley respond himself? Later, he responded by referencing a walk of shame from “Game of Thrones,” placing his head on Cersei Lannister after she was guilty.
Yet his fury continues. As if he needed to upstage the wrath of Rick Pitino, who had received a technical foul Friday evening, Hurley picked a fight with a noted St. John’s fan in Madison Square Garden. Tom O’Grady, a close friend of Pitino, claimed he was doing nothing more than reminding Hurley to remain his coaching box. The national title coach needed the last word and managed his own technical from official James Breeding.
“Obviously, the place was in a frenzy when Coach got his. And then there was a guy — there was a short guy in a red blazer that was on the court yelling at the refs, and then he started yelling at me and moving in my direction,” Hurley said. “So I was just kind of pointing out to (Breeding) that he was behaving worse than Coach Pitino. I was really just trying to help the officials. They might not have seen it. And then I got a technical for pointing out more increasingly aggressive fans. At courtside, you shouldn't end up on the court.”
Then Hurley tried to play hero, claiming he prevented O’Grady from being tossed into the Manhattan streets. “I kept him in. They were going to eject him from the game. I went over there to tell the ushers I wanted him to stay — not because I thought he was a good guy,” he said. “I thought it might be bad luck. Karma.”
When we recall champion coaches who recently left the sport — Mike Krzyzewski and Jay Wright — they might want a word with Hurley. Is this what you want to do in a sport that needs more fans, a sport where Caitlin Clark is gaining more attention? The reigning leader wants to be known for screeching at fans. Keep promoting the Hurley family, including his legendary high-school coach, Bob Sr., and Bobby Hurley, the Duke legend and Arizona State coach. Salute his players, such as NBA lottery pick Donovan Clingan, known to the coach as “Cling Kong.” Oddly, Hurley prefers to be an irascible character. Does his evil side bring story angles? Yes. Is it good for UConn and college basketball? Nope, especially if a fan takes him on and March Madness has a brawl.
“I think teams that tend to have a lot of success in terms of winning, and then you add in some fiery personalities … Yeah, you become the heel. You become the bad guy, the villain,” Hurley said. “And then I think that people in general are more aggressive, I think people are very aggressive on social media, I think fans have tended to get more aggressive at games. The temperature has been turned up across the board.”
Not that he’s bothered by it. He enjoys the toxins. Why? Haven’t we left the 20th century behind? “If your fan base loves you, loves you, loves you, and the people you’re competing against really despise you. “You’re probably doing pretty good,” Hurley said.
Sometimes even his fan base turns against the Huskies, knowing the men’s and women’s programs are legendary. Don’t badger him about social media. “It affects the players in a very negative way. It affects their confidence. They’re not like me, who’s 50 years old,” he said. “I cannot go on Instagram or Twitter, or any social media, and it will have zero impact and I would never look for it. Whereas these kids, their whole lives is looking on there and looking at messages and comments. That affected them, I think, a lot.”
His indignation, which includes wild courtside scenes that include screaming at referees and players and even himself, doesn’t bother his team. The Huskies have lost four times since Feb. 12, 2023. “Honestly, today, I thought he was a little more calm,” guard Tristen Newton said after the 95-90 win over St. John’s. That’s because Hurley may have calmed himself with a quick halftime meditation on his Calm app.
He is smart enough to know he has only 10 years left in the craft. No matter how many banners he posts in Storrs, he’ll be done at 60. “That's what I shoot for in my own mind, and then you evaluate and reassess things,” Hurley told Connecticut Insider. “I just can't imagine being in my 60s and continuing this version of what I'm doing at that age, because we do it very … If you can’t do this thing, I would never be someone who just hung around after he lost his fastball, where he can’t put everything he’s got into the job, isn’t as sharp.
“Forget legacy, too. I have this thing about me: This is kids’ lives. A head college coach is probably going to have the greatest impact on their lives, besides the parents. When they’re at an age where they can really start to understand and put their life together, who’s going to drive that home?’ We’re talking about impact on life. How do you become successful? How do you sustain success? What does a quality person look like? A family, what does that look like? You try to model all of that to these kids. It's a big responsibility. If you just like the status or like the money, that's not coaching. Now you've become something else.”
Might he also remember, given his emotional moods: “The stuff I expect my players to do, I model it for them on a daily basis.” He can’t actually mean it when he’s pinpointing “a short guy in a red blazer.”
Right now, Hurley is approaching 300 career victories in 14 college seasons. As Bill Self, John Calipari and Tom Izzo carry on, he’ll try to beat Purdue’s Matt Painter and North Carolina’s Hubert Davis for his repeat. Someone will try to rattle him in the coming weeks. The Echo Go+ contraption cost $250 and feeds hydrogenated water into his system. It just might qualify as his championship DNA.
“We have the best coaching staff in the country,” Clingan said.
Keep it that way.
“That’s how we do it!” Hurley said as confetti poured on him, another Big East championship in his pocket. “Now we ain’t done, right?”
It’s up to him. And his whims.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.