UConn’s national championship run last year may have triggered its men’s basketball blue-blood acceptance letter, but it wasn’t until months later, when I found myself furiously tracking the day-to-day movements of a teenage boy, that it became clear the program might be on the verge of becoming something more than it had been for the past three-plus decades.
The Huskies had landed plenty of major prospects since Jim Calhoun took over as head coach in the late ’80s, but rarely were they in the mix for superstars, the future no. 1 NBA draft picks just passing through college as a point of order. Cooper Flagg, though, was an inflection point. The mega-prospect who had built a Zion-esque buzz through outlandish highlight reels not only hailed from New England, but also had roots on the current roster: His mother had played with Donovan Clingan’s mom at Maine; the teammates-to-be even held a special (and genuinely touching) photo shoot wherein they each wore their mom’s college jersey. Flagg might as well have had a portrait of Mark Twain tattooed across his back; this was the pissah who was promised, here to lift the program to a whole other echelon. And so everything from his social media likes to his official visits became a daily news bulletin for sickos like me, whose families grew up with the Huskies as a part of everyday life.
Didn’t matter, of course. Flagg ultimately chose Duke, like Williamson and so many other future NBA stars before him. But his spurning of UConn matters for two very important reasons: (1) It gave us this photo of Flagg holding a burning pitchfork, which will surely come in handy throughout his career, and (2) it was a critical reminder that UConn is not Duke. Never has been Duke. Never wanted to be Duke, either.
That’s what’s been so hard for me to reconcile about this new era of Huskies, who became the first repeat men’s champions since the mid-aughts Florida Gators with Monday’s 75-60 win over Purdue in the national title game. Yes, it’s nice to be widely acknowledged as a “blue blood” alongside the schools that built college basketball as we know it. But this aristocratic shit is directly at odds with the program’s bedrock identity. It may be hard to remember now, as the sign trumpeting the university’s ring count slowly envelops I-84, but UConn made its bones as the underdog, the team that “shocked the world.” For most of its history, UConn’s program has been, for all intents and purposes, the anti-Duke—a swaggering, salt-of-the-earth production led by a coach who refused to give a dime back to help a budget deficit.
The old Huskies weren’t necessarily dominant, either—not even during their national title seasons. Three of the four championships they won under Calhoun and successor Kevin Ollie were improbable, at best: They earned their stripes by toppling the Blue Devils’ budding dynasty in 1999 and later won two more, in 2011 and 2014, almost exclusively through the heroics of scrappy (and often hangry) scoring guards, in runs that rank among the most miraculous in recent tournament history. And while the fourth championship team, in 2004, won it all in a relative cakewalk, its next contending bid ranks among the program’s lowest moments: a then-historic stockpile of NBA talent that slogged through a joyless three-loss season only to be upset by George Fucking Mason in the Elite Eight.
The current-day Huskies, on the other hand, are a goddamn juggernaut. Sixth-year coach Dan Hurley steamrolled to his first national title last season, with UConn recording the fourth-largest average tournament margin of victory in the 64-team era. Then the program came back this season even better. UConn lost just one non-conference game (by four points, without elite freshman Stephon Castle) and three overall in the regular season, somehow strung together an eviscerating 30-0 run in an Elite Eight game, and won another ring with the largest margin of victory. Zach Edey, the two-time national player of the year, stunned UConn with his prodigious size for the first 18 minutes on Monday, and then … the Huskies slowly but surely took control, securing an insurmountable lead midway through the second half with their across-the-board size, skill, and toughness.
These new Huskies are overwhelming, in the way the KD-era Warriors often were for NBA competition, but what’s most striking is the precision. The offenses of yesteryear were, let’s say, straightforward; in retrospect, the meteoric performances by Kemba Walker and Shabazz Napier may have been the unintended benefits of having to create something, anything, with single digits on the shot clock for four months. By contrast, watching the ball and bodies zip around in Hurley’s league-best offense feels like waking up to a future with flying cars. The versatility up and down this roster is startling; virtually every player can pass and dribble and screen, and the ones who can’t also shoot are giant athletes with great feel who will gladly dunk on your head.
Hurley’s group has talent; Castle may not be in Flagg territory, but he is a consensus top-10 recruit and a likely top-10 pick in the upcoming NBA draft. But beyond him, UConn has used zero top-50 recruits in its rotation in either title run. Even Clingan, another projected lottery pick, was rated the 14th-best center in his class before Hurley plucked the now-beloved doofus from Bristol, Connecticut.
If there’s a secret sauce here, it may be the transfer portal. The same coach who recently took jabs at the newish transfer rules by comparing them to undergarments built a third of his rotation using them, including his starting backcourt. And while Clingan’s play at the rim has time and again been the differentiator for this team—including on Monday, when he scored just 11 points but muscled with the 300-pound Edey on one end and set approximately 37 screens every offensive possession—its identity flows from Tristen Newton and Cam Spencer, two fifth-year seniors who are malleable enough to initiate or shoot off the catch and also have the size and physicality to rip away a rebound in traffic. (Spencer, the shortest starter at 6-foot-4, had eight rebounds all by himself against Purdue.) It’s probably no coincidence that as Kentucky reconsiders the one-and-done worldview that shaped the sport for over a decade, UConn has pulled ahead of the field by leaning on 20-somethings who are seasoned enough to have developed the sort of versatility on which a modern offense thrives.
But pinning the Huskies’ success entirely on an exploited market inefficiency would be a disservice to Hurley. No one could have imagined that UConn would hire a more prickly head coach than Calhoun, yet Hurley has blown past even that high bar: In the past two years alone, he’s been caught calling an official a “fucking clown” before halftime and challenging two separate fans to fights. On Monday, he pushed Spencer, mid-dribble, into the play and then complained about the violation called on him. “I’m just, at times, an asshole,” he said recently. Needless to say, UConn fans love him. But while there may be some genuine anger management issues here, ones that elicit worries about burnout from those around him, he also has a showman’s flair and a clear understanding of how to leverage all the attention his takedowns receive. His press availabilities were made for social media; while talking about recruiting in the days leading up to this year’s title game, he sounded like he was cutting a promo to join the nWo: “We really hold out to get our type of people,” he told reporters. “We don’t kiss the kid’s ass during recruiting. We don’t kiss it while they’re on campus.”
That hardscrabble, we-only-do-it-the-hard-way routine might as well come with the NCAA manual. Upon taking over for Calhoun, Ollie famously declared that his teams would take only the stairs, not escalators; he went on to win a championship two years later yet missed the tournament twice as often as he made it. But the script feels more honest coming from Hurley, a scion of East Coast basketball’s first family, who has admitted he almost quit in his playing days because he couldn’t live up to the standards of his father, a Hall of Fame high school coach, and his brother, the star point guard at Duke. He is, at once, both outsider and institution—the coach who bootstrapped eight-win Rhode Island into a mid-major powerhouse and then heeded the advice of Coach K, a confidant dating back to his youth, who told him it was time to move up.
Now, after winning two straight titles (in half the time it took Krzyzewski to accomplish the same feat), Hurley has vaulted UConn into the stratosphere—past mere inclusion in the blue-blood club and in the running for a seat on the high council. Only two schools have more men’s basketball national championships than the Huskies’ six total, and in the lead-up to Monday’s title game, the fan base for one of them was bellowing for even an exploratory phone call with Hurley.
In the wake of the Huskies’ first four championships, there was an inevitable comedown, a grace period of unknown lengths. We savored the thrills because we weren’t quite sure when they would happen again. With his entire starting lineup likely to turn pro, Hurley will need time to reload, too—although as NIL money continues to flick away encroaching competitors such as the G League Ignite, recruiting NBA talent, either out of high school or in the portal, might serve as the ultimate reloading trump card.
But for the first time, anything seems possible for what comes next at UConn—whether it’s going toe-to-toe with Duke for another all-world prospect or maybe even becoming the Duke for a new generation. The Huskies’ surprise runs used to shock the world. Now their utter dominance does.
