Dan Hurley Staking Claim as Best Active Men’s College Basketball Coach with 2nd Natty | News, Scores, Highlights, Stats, and Rumors: BR

GLENDALE — The night before the Connecticut Huskies put the finishing touches on the most impressive, dominant—Dare we say, dynastic?—two-year run in at least the past three decades of men’s college basketball, it was already abundantly clear that UConn head coach Dan Hurley had been chiseled into the Mount Rushmore of active coaches.

In a 24-hour news cycle that was hijacked by John Calipari’s reported decision to leave Kentucky for Arkansas, the big question immediately became: Who takes that job in Lexington?

Alabama’s Nate Oats, Auburn’s Bruce Pearl, Baylor’s Scott Drew, former Kentucky coach Rick Pitino and—per usual for every big college opening over the past decade—Billy Donovan were all thrown out there as viable candidates.

But Hurley leaving UConn for UK?

That was immediately dismissed as laughably unrealistic, both by the vast majority of those of us in the media, as well as by Hurley himself, when someone in the postgame presser had the audacity to ask him 75 minutes after winning his second consecutive national championship if he would be back with UConn next season.

“I don’t think that’s a concern,” Hurley said after laughing for a bit. “My wife, you should have her answer that.”

After all, why would he leave the wagon he has so meticulously constructed over the past six years?

“We’re kind of getting used to this up here,” Hurley told Ernie Johnson after the game on the championship podium. “For the last 25-30 years, UConn’s been running college basketball.”

When Hurley first took the UConn job in 2018, the Huskies were a program in disarray.

Sure, now we’re talking about the fact that they’ve won six of the last 25 national championships, as if they’ve been consistently good for a quarter century. But that simply isn’t the case.

They had missed the NCAA tournament in each of their final two sub-.500 seasons under Kevin Ollie, and they went through a nasty breakup when they terminated him, resulting in a lawsuit against the university which Ollie won.

Moreover, they were stuck in a conference (AAC) their basketball program never wanted to be a part of in the first place. It wasn’t until they returned to the Big East for the 2020-21 campaign that a return to anything resembling a dynastic run felt plausible again.

Even when they won their third and fourth national championships in 2011 and 2014, respectively, those were sort of one-off hot streaks for a program that struggled to generate sustained success, earning a No. 6 seed or better in the NCAA tournament just once in the span of nine years before hiring Hurley.

Long story short, UConn was a far cry from the annual juggernaut it has become today.

Building something out of nothing, though?

That’s just what Hurley does.

You might love him. You might hate him.

You might view his antics on the sideline as the petulant outbursts of an overgrown toddler, or as the maniacal motivation that drives his teams toward greatness.

But, either way, it works, and you have to respect the results.

His teams just keep getting better and better.

In each of his two seasons at Wagner, the Seahawks were better than the previous year.

Only once during his six years with Rhode Island did the Rams post a worse record than the year prior.

And now in six years with UConn, he has once again worked his magic, increasing their winning percentage in each season at the helm, and making an even more relentless run through the NCAA tournament than last year, now winning 12 consecutive tournament games by double digits.

Can’t say he didn’t warn us, though.

“You better get us now, because it’s coming.”

At the time, we all kind of laughed it off as unwarranted bravado. It was a classic spot to use that Jennifer Lawrence sarcastic “yeah, ok” thumbs-up gif, as Hurley was 26-24 in his first 50 games with the Huskies, leaving many to wonder if he was the right man for the job.

Hard to believe that was only four years ago, right?

Because now—with two national championships on his mantle and all of the positive momentum/recency bias in the world—you could make the case that Hurley is the greatest active men’s basketball coach.