GLENDALE, Ariz. – The elevated stage at State Farm Stadium was ideal for Dan Hurley. His brand of coaching, so theatrical he may be nominated this season for a Tony Award, was fully displayed under the bright lights of the Final Four.
No call is too inconsequential for Hurley to ignore. And he does not merely work the officials. He implores them like Marlon Brando beneath Stella’s balcony. It’s not all that hard to understand why he operates this way: Right now, officiating is the one element of college basketball over which he does not exercise total control.
This is his game, now, the way it belonged to Mike Krzyzewski on that night in Minneapolis in 1992, or Billy Donovan in Atlanta 15 years later. Monday night, with Connecticut overpowering a terrific Purdue team for a 75-60 victory, Hurley became only the eighth coach in more than 90 years of the NCAA Tournament to win consecutive championships. And the reality is, he did it better than Adolph Rupp of Kentucky, Phil Woolpert of San Francisco and, indeed, John Wooden of UCLA (although Wooden didn’t stop until he’d won seven in a row).
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No coach in recorded history ever lost 75 percent of a championship team’s scoring and returned to win the title. No coach in the four decades of the expanded NCAA Tournament ever won a championship by such an overwhelming margin. The Huskies’ average victory of 23.6 points over the six games of this March Madness was more than a full basket better than the performance of the magnificent 1996 Kentucky championship team.
“I have complete trust in him. You see: back to back. Coach is a genius. He’s a wizard. He’s amazing, and I’m thankful for him,” reserve guard Hassan Diarra told The Sporting News. “Words can’t even describe this. The first one was good. The second one is way better.”
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The Huskies did it by overwhelming Purdue on their offensive board, seizing better than 42 percent of their missed shots, and by perfectly executing the defensive gameplan that insisted the Boilers not be allowed to gain comfort from 3-point range. The electric Huskies perimeter defenders hung tight to their assignments and allowed the Boilers to attempt only seven shots from distance, just one of which was converted.
We had reason to believe, for a while, this game would exceed its No. 1 vs. No. 1 reality. It was close through the first half, the UConn lead standing only 36-30 at the break, but Purdue’s inability to ignite its 3-point offense – the Boilers ranked No. 2 in 3-point percentage – made it impossible to keep pace with the Huskies.
UConn did not want The Sporting News Player of the Year Zach Edey to score 37 points, but they chose not to double-team him often and instead committed to preventing Lance Jones, Fletcher Loyer and Mason Gillis from finding the space necessary to fire from deep.
“Just guarding the perimeter was something we really wanted to do,” reserve guard Andrew Hurley, the coach’s son, told TSN. “Especially with how good Zach Edey is, how great of a player he is, we just had to kind of cut our losses somewhere.”
There still are a few of them left, the veteran legends, including at least one who appears to be on the move. Tom Izzo is in no hurry to leave the game. Bill Self is only two years removed from an NCAA Championship. John Calipari is so determined to remain active in the sport he is taking (a very long time to accept) a new job at age 65.
This decade has been the scene, though, of profound, rapid change in college basketball. Roy Williams retired, and Mike Krzyzewski and Jim Boeheim after, because that’s usually what you do when you’re absurdly wealthy and well past your 70th birthday. But even Jay Wright decided he’d had enough after a fourth Final Four at Villanova, and it was beginning to seem vacant at the top of the coaching profession.
Hurley is a burgeoning legend now in a family of established legends. His father is enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, considered perhaps the greatest high school coach of all time. His brother Bobby is one of the greatest college basketball players, ever, named Most Outstanding Player at the 1992 Final Four, when he joined the Duke Blue Devils as one of those repeat champions.
You do not win one of these titles without being an extraordinary coach. You don’t win two of them without being elite. And you don’t win them consecutively unless you rank among the very best.
“He’s just relentless with his passion,” Andrew Hurley told TSN. “He encompasses everything you need in a coach. He’s old school, and he’s got some modern schemes. So he hits everything.”
One astonishing element of Hurley’s dominance is how rapidly it developed. He was building an impressive coaching career with his work at St. Benedict’s prep school in New Jersey, followed by excellent work at Wagner and Rhode Island as he climbed the coaching ladder. When Connecticut became intrigued by his potential to elevate their program in 2018, they were able to fight off Pitt to hire him. And he immediately made the Huskies better: from 14 wins the year before he arrived to 16, and then from 16 to 19, and then from 19 to the NCAA Tournament.
But the championship-level excellence came so suddenly during the latter part of the 2022-23 season. They had gone through a miserable January in which they dropped five of six games and fell from 14-0 to 15-5, and then they discovered the dominance that has continued to now.
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They’ve won 12 consecutive March Madness games, all by at least 13 points. No one’s ever approached such a streak. What a performance Hurley has delivered over these two years.
“I think it's up there in terms of the greatest two-year runs that a program maybe has ever had just because -- I can't say anything about Duke because I'm going to tick my brother off,” Dan Hurley said. “But I guess I can say stuff about Florida. But I love Billy Donovan. So I'm in a bad spot.
“I just think it's the best two-year run I think in a very, very long time just because of everything we lost from last year's team. To lose that much and, again, to do what we did again, it's got to be as impressive a two-year run as a program's had since prior to whoever did it before Duke. To me it is more impressive than what Florida and Duke did because they brought back their entire teams. We lost some major players.”
They didn’t lose the most important player, though. Dan Hurley made no shots, but he called all the right ones.