Against All Odds: How UConn Defied Expectations to Become a Basketball Powerhouse
GLENDALE, Arizona —The fact that Jim Calhoun, who was 75 years old at the time, almost kicked Dan Hurley in the ass is so quintessentialally Connecticut that it ought to take the place of the state flag. It was in the early spring of 2018. Calhoun was the esteemed former head coach of the program and helped Hurley get hired. Hurley had just been named head coach at UConn.
Hurley’s first practice with the team he was given was horrible. Because UConn is a prestigious brand in collegiate basketball and had won four national titles in the previous 20 years, he had left a position he liked at Rhode Island. However, Hurley did not see what he had anticipated. Hurley wanted to pull out of the arrangement and see whether Rhode Island would accept him back, so bad that he called his agent. Hurley’s agent informed him that the buyout clause in his contract precluded such a move, thus Hurley had to concede that he might have erred.
The situation was so dire that Hurley eventually walked into Calhoun’s on-campus office, where he worked while assisting the school as a quasi-statesman. As Hurley remembers it, the conversation began with him telling Calhoun something like: “This is bullsh–. Nothing is in place. This is UConn. Where’s the infrastructure? What’s been going on here?”
Calhoun’s gaze fell on the haughty 45-year-old. Then, never one to back down, he gave Hurley a tour of the genuine UConn basketball team.
“He said, ‘Are you sh—ing me? Maybe you’re not the person we should’ve hired. If you ever come in here like this again, I’ll never talk to you,’” Hurley said late Monday night, remembering back. “I mean, he ripped me.”
Hurley recounted the tale from a State Farm Stadium tunnel. Hurley could only smirk as another UConn men’s basketball national title occurred around ninety minutes prior. That cunning, smug smile of his that is all his own—a bit haughty, a bit loving. His Huskies completely destroyed the second-best team in the nation, defeating yet another elite squad. This year Purdue was excellent. Zach Edey was incredible. Like all the other people who had collided with this freight train, the boilers were also exhausted. The Huskies’ average victory margin in the 2024 NCAA Tournament increased to 23.3 points after the 75-60 thrashing. They had trailed for 6 minutes and 22 seconds during the previous three weeks. Whole. In
“We won,” Hurley deadpanned in Monday’s postgame news conference, “by a lot, again.”
Over the course of six games, the average margin of victory was 20 points last year.
How can this possibly be put in context? UConn’s back-to-back national titles have come at a time when mass parity is flattening the landscape of college basketball. That the place was dormant only a few years ago is impressive, but also typical. While so many awaited the Huskies’ demise in recent years, they somehow only grow stronger.
What is the actual accomplishment here? Over a 25-year span, three different coaches led six drastically different teams from two separate leagues to six titles. Six additional titles to the eleven national wins won by the women’s program since 1995.
The men’s six-pack from Connecticut has surpassed those from Duke and Indiana and is currently tied with North Carolina. UCLA with eleven titles and Kentucky with eight are the only programs still holding more victories. What is the difference? In the time that UCLA has zero wins and Uconn has accumulated its full share, Kentucky has won one. When Dan Hurley was a junior guard at Seton Hall in 1995, the Bruins had won their previous championship.
Over the past 25 years, a number of contenders have emerged and are beginning to share the stage with teams like Duke, North Carolina, and Kansas as the traditional blue bloods and Indiana have faded (at least in terms of national titles). Florida made a move. Villanova as well. However, those merely demonstrated how difficult it is to endure. It is difficult to determine if such nets were destroyed by the programs or by a select group of legendary head coaches.
Connecticut, a former regional program with some modest success and only two NCAA Tournament invitations from 1968 to 1989, is the only location that has completely demonstrated it most belongs.
UConn is in a club of its own. When Hurley yelled into a microphone at State Farm Center on Monday that Connecticut has “been running college basketball the last 30 years!” it wasn’t some hyperbolic lark.
Take it for what it is: UConn is not just the greatest college basketball program available right now, but it also stands alone as the definitive work on contemporary college basketball.
Consider this. Worcester (Mass.) Academy’s youthful coach Dee Rowe needed a backup on his bench in 1961. He took note of the suggestion made by renowned New England basketball coach Joe Mullaney, who put forward a young guy by the name of Dave Gavitt.
Between 1956 and 1959, Gavitt was a player at Dartmouth. After that, he moved to Washington, D.C., to work for AT&T. Gavitt detested everything about working in the real world, and this would ultimately have a profound impact on the collegiate basketball industry. In Worcester, he joined Rowe because he needed basketball. The two soon developed a friendship that would last a lifetime.
After leaving for an assistant position at Providence College after two years, Gavitt went on to become head coach at Dartmouth in 1967 and then head coach at Providence in 1969. In March of that year, Rowe moved from Worcester to UConn, even though there was a lot of talk that he would take over as Boston College’s head coach to succeed the retiring Bob Cousy. (BC substituted Chuck Daly, a 39-year-old assistant from Duke, for the position.) Now opposing coaches, Rowe and Gavitt remained the best of friends.
Although Rowe pushed himself into the ground as a successful collegiate coach, he finally moved into UConn fundraising. While his old friend Gavitt achieved tremendous success at Providence, he desired to better position the institution for the future. Gavitt came up with the concept of starting a brand-new, school-focused basketball league. Membership soon followed, including St. John’s, Georgetown, Syracuse, Seton Hall, Boston College, and so on. After Holy Cross repeatedly declined, Gavitt contacted his longtime friend
“Thick as thieves,” says Dan Gavitt of his father and Rowe.
Making basketball prominent in Connecticut was perhaps the greatest robbery of all. At that time, the Huskies shared the Yankee Conference with Boston University, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. “A group of really modest New England public universities that were not really good at basketball,” is how Dan Gavitt describes it. Very no tradition or history. UConn was among those. Between 1947 and 1976, the Huskies had won or shared 18 regular-season titles with other teams in the league. However, in the early to mid-1970s, UMass surpassed them as the best basketball team in the conference.
Private schools in big cities made up the majority of the newly formed Big East. And then there was the state university in the woods, UConn.
You are familiar with parochial cities. Indeed, Connecticut is a state with little towns. Currently, its 3.5 million acres, or 8% of New England’s total geographical area, and 3.5 million inhabitants are distributed among 169 distinct municipalities. On the map, those are the larger dots. Bridgeport, Stamford, and New Haven. added to the medium. Rocky Hill, Bethel, Stonington. And the tiny. Union; Lyme; Bozrah. Storrs was a college and cow pasture in the 1970s. However, Gavitt recognized potential and his standing with Rowe was significant.
It everything happened once UConn was admitted. Later on, the Big East emerged as one of the top conferences in the league. Later, Gavitt chaired the NCAA Tournament Committee, which oversaw the tournament’s 1985 expansion to include 64 participants. After helping to hire Calhoun and Geno Auriemma and raise funds to construct Gampel Pavilion, Rowe went on to become a pivotal player at UConn, helping to shape the course of the program that has dominated college athletics for the past 25 years. In the meantime, Gavitt’s son Dan serves as the men’s basketball senior vice president for the NCAA and is currently the closest thing the sport has to a clear leader.
All of this history serves to address the question that everyone is unable to get past. Connecticut University? Why? How? This program, of all locations, has participated in over 25% of the national championship games since 1999 and is 6-0 in those contests. 6-0!
“It doesn’t seem to make sense,” said Randy LaVigne, a star of the late 70s, who remembers practicing on a court surrounded by a curtain while the school’s track team ran laps around the court at UConn’s old Field House. “But I guess it just kind of snowballed. I think it’s because each individual group of players leaves it better for the next.”
In fact, the list is on par with those of any major collegiate basketball program. Ray Allen, Caron Butler, Emeka Okafor, Hasheem Thabeet, Kemba Walker, Shabazz Napier, Donyell Marshall, Richard Hamilton, and Caron Butler. Continues without end. This has offensive omissions. Calhoun opened up a talent-filled funnel at UConn that kept going until it was full.
Glendale’s court was replete with it. Hurley has a strong team. With lengthy professional careers ahead of them, Tristen Newton, Donovan Clingan, Cam Spencer, Alex Karaban, and Stephon Castle all average double figures.
“They have the greatest amount of trust that I’ve seen from a team, ever, in college,” said Allen, whose teams went 89-13 in his three years, but didn’t claim a title of their own. “Everyone did their job.”
Along with other former players, Allen was holding the national championship trophy and taking photos with Khalid El-Amin, the hero of the 1999 Huskies, who defeated Duke despite being a double-digit favorite to win the program’s first championship.
There is a rumor that UConn’s basketball players can only concentrate on their game when they reside in Storrs, and that is why the university is so successful. Actually, the opinion is probably more accurate to say that UConn not only attracts exceptional athletes, but also attracts elite athletes who are prepared to live in relative solitude in order to succeed. The fact that those are the ones who dash through barriers and stop a 7-foot-4 giant on one end while making 24 out of 30 2-point baskets above him on the other is most likely not a coincidence.
Everyone at UConn recognizes themselves in one another, and this starts at the top.
“You have to be a little bit crazy,” said El-Amin. “We all know Coach Calhoun was a little crazy at times. But Dan Hurley is the same way. He always has to prove himself. He’s feisty. He cares. And you’re gonna do it until you do it right.”
Sound familiar?
“To this day, Calhoun is so insecure that he needs to remind you that he’s won national championships and is in the Hall of Fame, and it’s like, right, yes, we all know,” Dan Gavitt said, laughing. “But that’s what drove him. He always had that thing — that he wasn’t respected enough, that Connecticut wasn’t respected enough. That place needed a personality like that. The fans embrace it.”
That is how the most unlikely modern-day Camelot in college basketball came to be. The team’s objective, according to LaVigne, was to be the best in New England when he played. Currently, the men’s and women’s teams at UConn have won 17 national titles between them; no other New England college has ever won either, save for Cousy and Holy Cross in 1947.
There’s no single explanation.
Only wins.
And banners.
And recent history.
(Photo: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)