Back-to-Back Champions: How UConn and Purdue Built NCAA-Winning Rosters

GLENDALE, Arizona — Monday night’s grand plan for men’s college basketball was once again visible, albeit with distracting confetti flakes drifting into the vicinity. It is quite difficult to win a national title twice in a row, but Connecticut did it again. Nonetheless, any coach or administrator who chooses to look may see the footprints and spoor that lead directly to hordes of contented humanity in April. Right now, this is the winner. Although complex and precarious, it is actually not that difficult to understand.

Actually, it was right there behind the depressed stairs Purdue removed off the State Farm Stadium floor. West Lafayette, Indiana residents could have a lifetime of regrets regarding the game, but the architecture should not be one of them. The Boilermakers’ actions to merit the opportunity to feel depressed were essentially what any team in this league ought to accomplish. It just did not hold up against a single squad. And when it is just UConn, what else is new?

“Pure dominance,” Huskies senior Hassan Diarra said amidst the revelry of a 75-60 win and a sixth national championship for the program. “Offensively. Defensively. Our connection with each other. This team is amazing.”

It is, but it is also an old film that we have seen before, remastered in high resolution. In men’s college basketball, winning national titles does not come from developing players, bringing in fresh talent, or deft use of the transfer portal. You win if you put in the effort. in the right ratio and most likely in the order mentioned above. Connecticut and Purdue verified what Kansas, Baylor, Virginia, and Villanova had previously told us before they even began play on Monday. What could have been added if a pandemic had not wiped out the postseason four years ago for the Jayhawks, Gonzaga, or Dayton.

Substance over schtick. The shiny new thing, tossed into a shoebox and shoved in the closet.

This pattern is the only thing to pursue. When you might be the only guy in the room, why deceive yourself into believing you are the smartest guy there? For the foreseeable future, this will continue to be the way that things are and have been for a while.

“I think all of us should just shut up about it,” Huskies coach Dan Hurley said a day before seizing back-to-back titles, “and stop trying to help the people that don’t know what they’re doing.”

This is where it is acknowledged that you need to be good, not just following the crowd. On national championship eve, Boilermakers coach Matt Painter properly observed, “I have not seen anybody come up here and get interviewed all the time with bad players.” On the rosters of the two teams competing on Monday, however, there was only one five-star recruit overall. In contrast, the 10 starting had played a total of 27,063 minutes in Division I before to this. There are two types of goodness: the worthwhile kind and the wrong sort.

A third-year forward who missed his freshman year, two sophomore guards who bear several scars, a fifth-year transfer guard who was carefully chosen from the portal, and a senior All-American who may be the best example of patient player development ever seen were all produced by Purdue. “A lot of people that are picking out of the portal, they’re trying to get the most talented guys, if they’re getting multiple guys,” Painter said. “Someone has to get six or seven guys — there’s no way six or seven guys are going to be successful. It’s impossible, right?”

Connecticut University? Plenty of changes from year to year, but plenty of consistency as well. For the second time in as many years, the engine of a title game victory was guided on Monday by Tristen Newton, a former transfer guard who was wrapping up his second year with the program. A fifth-year transfer guard who was very carefully chosen from the portal, a sophomore and a freshman who will be first-round picks, and a third-year forward who missed his rookie season were also started. “Young players with talent that are insulated by returning players to your program that can uphold the culture,” Hurley said, releasing the not-so-secret codes he said he’d prefer not to release. “Then strategic portal additions that can put you over the top.”

Since the overall idea is not novel, it is all the more impressive when other programs do not attempt to imitate it. In 2023, UConn had a roster that included mature veterans like Andre Jackson Jr. and Adama Sanogo, a developmental transfer named Newton, a rising sophomore named Jordan Hawkins, and sprinklings of young talent like Donovan Clingan and Alex Karaban.

Kansas in 2022? Developed veteran stalwarts (Ochai Agbaji, Christian Braun, David McCormack), a talented sophomore (Jalen Wilson) and a veteran transfer (Remy Martin) rounding out the mix.

2021—Baylor? Talented youngster (Adam Flagler), a developed star (Jared Butler), transfers in their third year of the program (MaCio Teague and Davion Mitchell). There was one standout sophomore and all juniors on Virginia’s championship squad. Jalen Brunson and Mikal Bridges were the aged bedrock of Villanova, supporting the younger generation.

Of course, the mental games continue once everything is put together. The task of defining a role is to get there while putting more mines in your path than safe passage.

Everyone must be motivated to follow your instructions and remain put even if they disagree with you.

There’s apparently a trick to that, too.

“They’re brutally honest,” Karaban said.

UConn’s starting power forward was a consensus top-50 recruit. He joined the Huskies as a mid-year enrollee in 2022. He didn’t play a minute. “They wanted me for my offensive talent,” Karaban said, “but they were honest with me, that on the defensive end, you gotta get better.” He took the fourth-most shots on a national championship team as a redshirt freshman. He’d taken the third-most shots for UConn going into Monday. He has gone nowhere and will go nowhere unless it’s to an NBA franchise.

It’s gratification by degree, not by decree. “We don’t kiss the kids’ a– during recruiting,” Hurley said. “We don’t kiss it while they’re on campus. We bring tremendous value to our players because we’re old school and we push them to get better.”

Sunday afternoon, two players sat in stalls in the other locker room, clearly delighted to be here but probably not expecting to be here in this particular capacity. During the previous season, Ethan Morton played 880 minutes and started 29 games for Purdue. This year, he started at zero and put in over 500 fewer minutes. Caleb Furst saw his minutes drop from 18.4 per game as a freshman to 9.2 as a junior. “It pains me that they don’t play,” Painter said, before noting that he is paid to make decisions for the betterment of Purdue. Easy and fair to say. Not easy to digest when you are the person doing nothing for the betterment of Purdue. Particularly challenging when there is not a definable conversation about it as much as the expectation that a player can read the room as the year moves along.

And as far as anyone is willing to say, there has been no corrosion. “I’ve told people this a lot,” Morton said. “If you’re not going to buy into what they want you to do, you’re going to stick out in a bad way.”

Even though Purdue could not match UConn’s one key component of the game plan—big guards that little guards can not see over or get past, essentially—both of these teams and their coaches had it figured out.

Painter called off the intentional fouls, which is why the Huskies could begin their embrace and celebration with 36 seconds remaining in the game. He had confirmed what he had likely been suspecting for some time: he had made his program into a team capable of defeating every other program, save the one sitting on the other bench.

Hurley gave his son Andrew one piece of advice to do with the basketball in the last seconds, as the shot clock was running down and UConn was voluntarily accepting the foul: spike that ball. Andrew Hurley did as his father asked. For those who are interested, here’s an exclamation point—though how could they not?

For two years in a row, a 7-foot-4 giant tilted the floor, forcing the Boilermakers to figure out how to survive. Without Zach Edey, who finished with 37 points on Monday, they will not be the same at all. That is not possible. Despite this, they should still be quite substantially old, and their experience will help a top-15 recruiting class that matriculates this summer. It is an alternative iteration of the same scheme. “When you have the most wins in school history, you’re the first team to win back-to-back (Big Ten) championships by multiple games since 1976, and you get an eyelash away from winning it all, that’s the standard,” Painter said.

Please do not hesitate to try it another way. These two programs will be delighted to return here at some point, as will any others who have been watching the past few championship Mondays.

(Top photo of UConn’s Alex Karaban, Stephon Castle, Donovan Clingan and Tristen Newton: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)