Dan Hurley is an ideal sports activities heel, so Kentucky can be good match

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April 11, 2024

Dan Hurley is an ideal sports activities heel, so Kentucky can be good match

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GLENDALE, Ariz. — Dan Hurley is an ideal faculty basketball villain; as cocky as he’s good, as inevitable as he’s hot-headed.

On Monday evening, Hurley gesticulated and screamed and bullied his means to a second straight national title, his UConn Huskies as soon as once more rolling by an NCAA Tournament with out a lot of a problem — together with from Purdue, the supposed second-best staff within the nation, which might barely put up a battle in a 75-60 loss.

“For the last 25 years or 30 years, UConn’s been running college basketball,” Hurley mentioned, hat turned backwards, celebrating because the confetti fell on the Huskies for the sixth time within the final 26 years.

Hurley, the son of legendary however flammable highschool coach Bob Hurley Sr., is a throwback to the times when faculty basketball coaches did not appear so company, publicly beefed with one another and advised you precisely how good they thought they had been. And Hurley thinks – no, he is aware of – that he’s actually, actually good.

“I’m still just a worse version of (my dad),” Hurley mentioned earlier than pausing. “A little bit worse. Getting better and I’m coming for him.”

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He’s the perfect sports heel. And he belongs at the perfect heel program. After coaching the best team he’ll ever have, completing a two-year run that we may never see again in our lifetimes, Hurley’s best move would be trading his gear for a lighter shade of blue.

Hurley shouldn’t just go to Kentucky, he should run to the challenge of restoring the dominance, the pride and, yes, the arrogance of America’s most extravagant program, just as he rescued UConn from its short period of disrepair.

“I don’t think that’s a concern,” Hurley mentioned, laughing as I requested if he deliberate on entertaining some other jobs — together with the one which will officially open on Wednesday, when John Calipari officially signs his new contract at Arkansas. “My wife, you should have 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 farmland of Storrs to the bluegrass of Lexington. Maybe his outward confidence is hiding a deep-rooted fear of leaving his comfort zone in the Northeast and going to a program whose fan base touches all corners of the country. Maybe he’s just happy where he’s at. Maybe he sees himself eventually leaving UConn for the NBA, a league where he would undeniably be able to match X’s and O’s with the best coaches in the world.

I mean, did you see how UConn completely shut off the water for everyone Monday night except Purdue big man Zach Edey? Did you see how utterly hapless his teammates were making 9-of-29 shots with five combined free-throw attempts? It was Hurley’s Sistine Chapel, a game so perfectly coached against another outstanding coach in Matt Painter that there was seemingly nothing the opponent could do to change the flow of the game.

Did you see how UConn, game after game in this tournament, completely crushed opponents with pure fundamentals – like moving without the basketball, closing out to shooters and staying disciplined to its gameplans to a degree you almost never see at the college level?

“They just made a decision, like, we can defend the perimeter and we can take this away from you,” Painter said. “Then you’re just going to get the ball to your best player, he’s going to be one-on-one, then that’s that. They were going to live with that. Not everybody can do 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 also saw: A coach who lost it with the officials every 30 seconds the entire night, complaining about every call or non-call that didn’t go his way. A 51-year-old with the sideline comportment of a toddler hooked to an IV full of Red Bull. A control freak who was dictating every dribble down to the last second as his son, Andrew, spiked the ball off the floor to end the final possession of UConn’s season. A hothead who had a bit of a stare down with Edey going into a timeout in the first half because he thought an illegal screen went uncalled by the officials.

“This was the energy he was giving when I played his team in the tourney … dude is crazy. Competitive crazy!” Atlanta Hawks All-Star guard Trae Young posted on X, formerly Twitter, referring to Hurley’s Rhode Island team beating Oklahoma in 2018.

And, clearly, it works at UConn. Hurley doesn’t need to go anywhere. You could easily make an argument he shouldn’t go anywhere.

But there are only a few people in the coaching profession with the combination of absurd coaching chops and cartoonish swagger to give Kentucky the aura it so desperately wants to recapture after Calipari pulled the ripcord Sunday, ending his 15-year run.

Once the ink is dry on the brand new contract Calipari goes to signal at Arkansas — it will occur Wednesday, an individual with information of the negotiations advised USA TODAY Sports on the situation of anonymity — one of many most interesting coaching searches in the recent history of the sport will begin.

Hurley has to be Kentucky athletics director Mitch Barnhart’s first call. And the pitch for why Hurley should take the job is fairly straightforward, besides the gobs and gobs of money Kentucky can put together to pay him.

Sure, after seeing what UConn just did for two straight years in the tournament, it looks like the Huskies can just win and win and win forever.

But it by no means actually works that means in sports activities, and particularly in faculty basketball. Just ask Billy Donovan, the final coach who went back-to-back, turned down the Kentucky job in 2007 and once more in 2009 and solely reached another Final Four over the subsequent eight seasons earlier than heading to the NBA.

Heck, just ask Calipari, whose run at Kentucky began to sour at the very moment it looked like he had found the formula to dominate college basketball until the end of time.

Even for the best of the best, there’s only so much juice in the lemon.

Hurley has two titles now for a lot of reasons, but among the most important are that he and his staff recruited a point guard in Tristen Newton, a zero-star recruit who started his career at East Carolina, and a 7-foot-2 defensive freak in Donovan Clingan, who played high school basketball 45 minutes from UConn’s campus.

Maybe he can do it again. Maybe he can’t. There are no sure things, especially these days.

“We’re going to dive in and put together a roster that can play a comparable level of basketball,” Hurley said. “That’s what our mindset will be. We’re going to try to put together a three-year run, not just a two-year run.

“We’re going to attempt to replicate it once more. I don’t assume we’re going wherever.”

Against loopy odds, UConn has remained the last word outlier in faculty sports activities: A Big East program that spends like a superpower on basketball whereas additionally dropping hundreds of thousands on a soccer program that has no convention to play in.

It’s not essentially the most sustainable mannequin on paper, and UConn’s long-term future is all the time going to exist in a bizarre state of economic purgatory till it figures out a option to earn extra tv income — which can or might not occur in its present state of affairs. As good because the Big East has been for UConn basketball ever since transferring again there from the American Athletic Conference in 2020, it’s nonetheless unsure how a lot cash the league will have the ability to get from its subsequent TV contract that may begin in 2025.

Given the tumultuous panorama of convention realignment and a possible employment mannequin for school athletes coming down the pike, does UConn ultimately want to finish up within the ACC or Big 12 to keep up its nationwide model and skill to compete in basketball? Is it higher off staying put? Nobody can reply these questions proper now.

But we all know the place Kentucky’s going to be: In the preeminent athletic convention, paying somebody a ton of cash and tolerating nothing lower than the very best.

Maybe Hurley would not assume that sort of place is for him, which is okay. It’s his life, his profession. But the craziest fan base in faculty sports activities and the game’s emotionally risky genius of the second can be a history-altering marriage that anybody – effectively, anybody besides Kentucky’s opponents and UConn followers – would wish to see.

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