GLENDALE, Ariz. — Dan Hurley is college basketball's perfect villain. He is as brash as he is good, he is as evasive as he is short-tempered.
On Monday night, Hurley gesticulated, shouted and bullied his way to a second straight national title as his University Huskies once again made it through the NCAA Tournament without much difficulty. He lost 75-60 and barely fought.
“For the last 25 or 30 years, UW has been running college basketball,” Hurley said, tipping his hat back in celebration as confetti rained down on the Huskies for the sixth time in the past 26 years.
The son of legendary but incendiary high school coach Bob Hurley Sr., Hurley doesn't think college basketball coaches are all that outgoing, openly encouraging each other and thinking how good they are. It's a throwback to the days when people told exactly what dolphins were. And Harley thinks – no, he knows – that he's really, really good.
“I'm still just a worse version of (my dad),” Hurley said before stopping. “He's a little bad. He's getting better, so I'll go get him.”
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He's the perfect sports heel. And he's in a perfect heel program. After coaching the best team ever and coming off a two-year run we may never see, his best bet would be to trade in his gear for a brighter shade of blue. .
Hurley shouldn't just go to Kentucky, but run with the challenge of restoring the dominance, pride, and yes, arrogance of America's most extravagant program, just as he saved the university from its brief period of devastation. Should.
“I don’t think it’s a concern,” Hurley said when asked if he plans on doing other jobs, including one that officially begins Wednesday when John Calipari officially signs a new contract at the University of Arkansas. He said with a laugh. “Her wife, you should let her answer that. She'll answer that question better than I can.”
Maybe there's nothing Kentucky can do to lure Hurley from the frozen fields of Storrs to the bluegrass of Lexington. Perhaps his outward confidence hides a deep-seated fear of leaving the safety of the Northeast for a show with a fan base that spans the country. Maybe he's just happy where he is. Maybe he thinks he'll eventually leave college and go to the NBA, a league where he can rub shoulders with arguably the best coaches in the world and the X's and O's.
I mean, did you look How did UW completely shut off the water for everyone but Purdue big man Zach Eady on Monday night? Did you know that his teammates had a totally unlucky 9-of-29 shooting total on 5 free throw attempts? It was at the Sistine Chapel in Hurley that Matt… It was a perfectly coached game against another great coach in Painter, and it looked like there was nothing his opponent could do to change the course of the game.
Did you? look How does he move without the basketball, shut out shooters, and stay disciplined in his game plan at a level rarely seen at the college level? , did he completely defeat his opponent on pure fundamentals?
“They just made a decision and were like, we can protect the perimeter and we can take this away from you,” Painter said. “Then you just give the ball to your best player. He'll be one-on-one and that's it. They were going to accept it and live with it. Everyone did what they did. You have to give credit to their defense and how they're coached and how they're wired.”
But here's what you saw too. The coach lost a game to the officials every 30 seconds all night, complaining about every call or no call that didn't go his way. A 51-year-old with the onlooker disposition of a toddler engrossed in an IV drip containing Red Bull. The control freak was directing every dribble until the last second, when his son Andrew spiked the ball from the floor to end the final possession of the college season. A short-tempered player who glared a little when Eadie went into a timeout in the first half, wondering if an illegal screen wasn't called by the referees.
“This was the energy he was giving when I played against his team in the tournament…The guy is crazy. Competitive!” Atlanta Hawks All-Star guard Trae Young said in 2018. posted on X, formerly Twitter, mentioning Hurley's Rhode Island team defeating Oklahoma.
And clearly, it works at UConn.harley doesn't do that need To go anywhere. It's easy to argue that he shouldn't be going anywhere.
But after Calipari pulled the trigger on Sunday, ending his 15-year tenure, the leader whose combination of ridiculous coaching chops and cartoonish swagger gives Kentucky an aura it desperately wants to regain. There are only a few people in the coaching profession.
Once the ink dries on the new contract, Calipari is scheduled to sign at Arkansas — which is expected to happen Wednesday, a person familiar with the negotiations told USA TODAY Sports on condition of anonymity — in the latest coaching search. One of the most interesting sports history begins.
Hurley should be Kentucky athletics director Mitch Barnhart's first choice. And aside from the huge amount of money Kentucky can raise to pay him, the pitch for why Hurley should take the job is pretty simple.
Indeed, looking at what UConn has done in the tournament two years in a row, it looks like the Huskies can keep winning and winning and winning forever.
But sports, especially college basketball, never work that way. Just ask Billy Donovan, the last coach who coached there two years in a row. He turned down Kentucky jobs in 2007 and 2009 and headed to the NBA after reaching just one more Final Four in eight seasons.
Hey, just ask Calipari. Calipari's performance at Kentucky began to deteriorate just as he seemed to have found the formula to dominate college basketball until the end.
Even the best lemons have a limited amount of juice.
There are many reasons why Hurley now has two titles under his belt, but the most important of them is that he and his staff were able to help the 7-foot-2 They hired a point guard named Tristen Newton. Defensive freak Donovan Clingan played high school basketball 45 minutes from his college campus.
Maybe he can do it again. Maybe he can't. Nothing is certain, especially these days.
“We’re going to work hard and put together a group that can play basketball at a similar level,” Hurley said. “That's our mindset. We want to plan for three years, not just two years.
“We're going to try to recreate it again. I don't think it's going anywhere.”
Despite incredible odds, UConn remains the ultimate outlier in college sports. Big East programs spend like superpowers on basketball while losing millions of dollars to non-conference football programs.
This isn't the most sustainable model on paper, and UConn's long-term future will always be in a strange state of financial purgatory until it figures out how to generate more TV revenue. – In the current situation, that may or may not come true. The Big East has been a good home for UW basketball since returning to the Big East from the American Athletic Conference in 2020, but it remains to be seen how much money the league will take away from its next television deal, which begins in 2025. It is still unclear whether they will be able to obtain it.
Given the turbulent situation of conference realignment and the potential employment model for college athletes going downhill, UConn could end up in the ACC or Big 12 in order to maintain its national brand and ability to compete in basketball. Do I need to enter it? Is it better to leave it as is? No one can answer those questions at this time.
But we know what happens in Kentucky. A preeminent sports conference that pays someone a lot of money and won't tolerate anything but the best.
Maybe Harley doesn't think such a place is for her, and that's okay. It's his life and his career. But a history-altering marriage between college sports' craziest fan base and the sport's emotionally volatile phenom is a story that everyone — well, except Kentucky's opponents and the university's fans. Then anyone would want to see it.
