Dan Hurley Staking Claim as Best Active Men's College Basketball Coach with 2nd Natty
GLENDALE — The night before the Connecticut Huskies put the finishing touches on the most impressive, dominant—Dare we say, dynastic?—two-year run in at least the past three decades of men's college basketball, it was already abundantly clear that UConn head coach Dan Hurley had been chiseled into the Mount Rushmore of active coaches.
In a 24-hour news cycle that was hijacked by John Calipari's reported decision to leave Kentucky for Arkansas, the big question immediately became: Who takes that job in Lexington?
Alabama's Nate Oats, Auburn's Bruce Pearl, Baylor's Scott Drew, former Kentucky coach Rick Pitino and—per usual for every big college opening over the past decade—Billy Donovan were all thrown out there as viable candidates.
But Hurley leaving UConn for UK?
That was immediately dismissed as laughably unrealistic, both by the vast majority of those of us in the media, as well as by Hurley himself, when someone in the postgame presser had the audacity to ask him 75 minutes after winning his second consecutive national championship if he would be back with UConn next season.
"I don't think that's a concern," Hurley said after laughing for a bit. "My wife, you should have her answer that."
After all, why would he leave the wagon he has so meticulously constructed over the past six years?
"We're kind of getting used to this up here," Hurley told Ernie Johnson after the game on the championship podium. "For the last 25-30 years, UConn's been running college basketball."
Well...yes and no.
When Hurley first took the UConn job in 2018, the Huskies were a program in disarray.
Sure, now we're talking about the fact that they've won six of the last 25 national championships, as if they've been consistently good for a quarter century. But that simply isn't the case.
They had missed the NCAA tournament in each of their final two sub-.500 seasons under Kevin Ollie, and they went through a nasty breakup when they terminated him, resulting in a lawsuit against the university which Ollie won.
Moreover, they were stuck in a conference (AAC) their basketball program never wanted to be a part of in the first place. It wasn't until they returned to the Big East for the 2020-21 campaign that a return to anything resembling a dynastic run felt plausible again.
Even when they won their third and fourth national championships in 2011 and 2014, respectively, those were sort of one-off hot streaks for a program that struggled to generate sustained success, earning a No. 6 seed or better in the NCAA tournament just once in the span of nine years before hiring Hurley.
Long story short, UConn was a far cry from the annual juggernaut it has become today.
Building something out of nothing, though?
That's just what Hurley does.
You might love him. You might hate him.
You might view his antics on the sideline as the petulant outbursts of an overgrown toddler, or as the maniacal motivation that drives his teams toward greatness.
But, either way, it works, and you have to respect the results.
His teams just keep getting better and better.
In each of his two seasons at Wagner, the Seahawks were better than the previous year.
Only once during his six years with Rhode Island did the Rams post a worse record than the year prior.
And now in six years with UConn, he has once again worked his magic, increasing their winning percentage in each season at the helm, and making an even more relentless run through the NCAA tournament than last year, now winning 12 consecutive tournament games by double digits.
Can't say he didn't warn us, though.
Remember that press conference after the loss to Villanova in January 2020?
"You better get us now, because it's coming."
At the time, we all kind of laughed it off as unwarranted bravado. It was a classic spot to use that Jennifer Lawrence sarcastic "yeah, ok" thumbs-up gif, as Hurley was 26-24 in his first 50 games with the Huskies, leaving many to wonder if he was the right man for the job.
Hard to believe that was only four years ago, right?
Because now—with two national championships on his mantle and all of the positive momentum/recency bias in the world—you could make the case that Hurley is the greatest active men's basketball coach.
He's now tied with Bill Self and (if you count the vacated one at Louisville) Rick Pitino for the most natties among active coaches. And Hurley has done so in just 14 years as a coach—and without any of the scandals that Self and Pitino have been involved in, unless you count occasional technical fouls or openly talking about superstitious underwear as scandalous behavior.
But if you think Hurley is satisfied with back-to-back titles, clearly you've never met the man.
Confetti was still falling from the rafters from this second national championship when he was turning his attention to the next one.
"On the flight home tomorrow, we'll start talking about what the roster's going to look like...We're going to be focusing on trying to put together a three-year run, not just a two-year run."
"I don't think that we're going anywhere."
Of course not. As already noted, in 13 of Hurley's 14 years as a D-I head coach, his team had a higher winning percentage than the previous season.
And, well, there technically is still room for improvement.
This 37-3 UConn team was arguably the most dominant men's college basketball team of the past quarter century, probably since the 1998-99 Duke team that UConn defeated in the national championship to really put this program on the map for the first time.
But Hurley's perpetual drive to get better just might push this program to the brink of the fabled 40-0 campaign in 2024-25.
Also, you know damn well he caught wind of the fact that Duke has already opened as the betting favorite to win it all next year, right?
Can't wait to see how he uses that as bulletin-board material for the next 12 months.
