IF HURLEY “SUCKS AT WINNING CLOSE GAMES,” WATCH AN EPIC ONSLAUGHT
Connecticut has become an all-time team in the NCAA tournament, leaving a sneering coach to laugh at a mocking Larry David and ask about his team’s “unparalleled” level as it takes on fretting Alabama
One side of me would like to take his confetti, as Dan Hurley pours it over the 68-team bracket he is demolishing again, and dump it over his hairless head. Or use the scissors as he removes a new set of nets and slash his backwards cap. There is plenty we could do to quiet a sarcastic, overweening coach who has turned the NCAA tournament into a Connecticut mob scene like no team in college basketball history.
But that would require a criminal act, as all he must do is point out the facts. The Huskies have won 10 consecutive games in this jamboree by at least 13 points, by an average margin of 23.1, including 39, 17, 30 and 25 points this year. They have won 50 of their last 55 games. They scored 30 straight points against an Illinois team whose coach had been spraying players with a water gun and whose best weapon was about to be examined nationally for a September rape charge.
The parody reached a point where comedian Larry David, in Boston for a tour date, said from the front row in TD Garden: “You can stop coaching, the game’s over. Stop coaching! Shame on you. Take the starters out.” Yet even then, Hurley laughed.
“I’m the Larry David of college coaching with my antics and idiosyncrasies,” he said. “No, ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm,’ that’s a good show.”
It’s time for the ghost of John Wooden and a retired Aflac ad-hawker like Mike Krzyzewski to pay heed. The moment a UConn game begins is when it finishes, of course, at which time we wait for Hurley to sneer once more and his competition to quake. This is a man who said the other day, “We suck at winning close games. So you have to go with the alternative.”
And a man who said, “We have also talked about legacy. These guys right now are leaving a legacy in a place that's hard to leave a legacy. It's been a historical season. They're galvanized by that.”
And a man who said: “The level of basketball we've played to this point has been unparalleled, in terms of what we've been able to do and the domination of the quality teams. The level of basketball we’re playing at is going to be really, really hard to beat. We play at a level that is demoralizing.”
And a man who told his own fans during a game, “Stand the (bleep) up!”
And a man who says his wife, Andrea, doesn’t get enough credit: “She’s got to get the hand washer going to get these dragon underwear clean for a quick turnaround.”
This is a man who told a heckling fan at Creighton, “I will knock you out.” And told another rabble-rouser at Providence: “Come here … you’ll get hurt.”
And a man who commented about a former Illinois player, Sean Harrington, before the 77-52 fallout Saturday: “He said UConn has not had to play against as physical a team and they’ve never seen someone like Terrence Shannon. Statements like that are just asinine. You’re going against beasts and monsters every night in the Big East.”
He’s also a man who said his team is loathed. “Everyone hates us,” said Hurley, preparing for more verbal attacks in a stadium outside Phoenix. Next Monday night — after thrashing an Alabama team that requires Nick Saban and likely a Purdue team with 7-4 Zach Edey, who went for 40 points and 16 rebounds in a Sunday win over Tennessee — Hurley should become the first coach to win back-to-back titles since Billy Donovan at Florida in 2007. Most domineers who master the sport have a certain elegance. Hurley never forgets his past, when he quit basketball at Seton Hall and wandered into alcohol and depression, and can’t help but apply it to his present. Last year, he fell into an emotional daze with his first glory.
“He wishes the other part had gone well,” said his father, Bob Hurley, the famed high school coach. “When you’ve had times in your playing career where you have struggled, I do think it hardens you, it toughens you up. You’ve dealt with a lot of adversity, and you know how to handle failure, and I think as a coach in this business if you can’t handle adversity, failure, you’re going to have a very, very hard time. Yeah, bricking all those shots back at the Hall certainly paid off.”
Now, he realizes he’s the king of college hoops, at a time when the women’s event is supreme and the best men’s players won’t be near the top of the NBA draft. So why not have fun and mock the world? He’s a unique cat, not only with his lucky underwear and socks and the same blue suit. But also with the sage he burns before games and the germ-leery plastic gloves he wears at practice. Can you imagine the equipment person who sorts his color-coded M&Ms? “It’s almost like you’re putting on armor,” Hurley said. “It just kind of takes my mind away from thinking about all the bad things that could happen over the course of the next couple hours.”
Nothing bad happens. Nothing. He can’t help but preside as the face of the game, now that Krzyzewski, Roy Williams and Jay Wright are gone. “If I am one of those, I'm probably a good one because I'm authentic, and I am who I am,” he said. “I’m basically a high school coach that's like masquerading up at this college level. I don't really care what people necessarily think of my intensity, it obviously shows up the right way with my team. We don't cheat, we don't lie. I think we're about all the right things.
“Just, at times, I'm an a—hole.”
He knows what’s coming. When he walked into the home of the Boston Celtics, he looked at the 17 championship banners and counted them with a finger. UConn has grasped him for years. Here comes America’s whiff. “They're not going to get some guy that's going to rest on his laurels after winning one, and he's just going to go and ring the bell at the stock exchange and go hang out with (President) Biden, and then he's going to take a year off and do the honeymoon," he said. “I’m an obsessed coach, and I'm going to be more of a maniac the next couple of days than I was leading up to this. I promise you. And then when this season's over, it's going to be worse.”
Could his team play the 13-61 Detroit Pistons and prove worthy of the NBA? It’s the only place where Hurley objects. “That’s crazy talk,” he said. But as we begin to ponder his future — he could almost name his NBA job, if that’s what he wants, if those multi-millionaires won’t hack him up — he has other positions in mind. “I guarantee you that I coach at a much lower level once coaching at this level is gone,” he said. “My dream jobs are, like, Montana, Montana State, Idaho. To coach at a low-major or a high school and just having the purity back after I’m done chasing this s—. It’s in my blood.”
We would have loved UConn facing Houston with a healthy Jamal Shead or North Carolina without Hubert Davis reduced to tears. It wouldn’t have mattered. We hear Alabama coach Nate Oats quoting Saban, saying, “The best team doesn’t always win because it’s a one-game elimination.” We also dream of Zach Edey shattering him in Glendale, but why? “We suck at winning close games,” Dan Hurley said.
He chooses the other option.
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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.