For the second straight year, UConn basketball sits atop the college basketball world after winning the NCAA championship on Monday with a 75-60 win over Purdue. But that should come as little surprise to those who listened to Huskies head coach Dan Hurley back in 2020.
Following a 61-55 defeat against Villanova in January 2020, Hurley, then in his second season as UConn basketball coach, gave a prophetic warning to the rest of the nation.
“I just think we're in year two of a rebuild, man. This isn't the way UConn's looked. We're on our way back,” Hurley said. “We got exciting young players. We got an older group of guys that are gonna get enough wins this year that they'll feel good about the way their career ends. We got some exciting young players that are gonna help lead us back. We're gonna continue to recruit and develop and bring in the type of players that will bring UConn back. People better get us now, that's all. You better get us now, 'cause it's coming.”
Dan Hurley rebuilt UConn into a powerhouse
After the retirement of Jim Calhoun in 2012, UConn hired Kevin Ollie to lead its men's basketball program. Ollie had played for Calhoun at UConn in the 1990s and became a Huskies assistant in 2010 after a lengthy pro career. The hire of Ollie turned out to be both very good and very bad.
In his first season, during which the team was banned from postseason play as a result of academic issues at the end of the Calhoun era, Ollie went 20-10. The next year, UConn began the season 9-0, rising as high as No. 10 in the AP polls before losing three of five games and dropping out of the top 25. The Huskies would recover, though, and finish the regular season having won 13 of their final 17 games. UConn reached the Big East tournament by defeating Memphis and the conference tourney's top seed, Cincinnati, before a 10-point defeat against Lousiville.
UConn slotted into the No. 7 seed in the East region of the 2014 NCAA tournament, in which it defeated St. Joe's, Villanova, Iowa State, and Michigan State en route to the Final Four. In the national semifinal, UConn overcame No. 1 seed Florida 63-53 and then took down Kentucky 60-54 to win the fourth national championship in program history.
The rest of Ollie's tenure did not go so well, however. The Huskies did not make the NCAA tournament the following year and failed to reach the Sweet Sixteen in 2016. In Ollie's fifth season, the Huskies went 16-17, which was the program's first losing record since 1986-87. Ollie would ultimately be fired just following his sixth season at the helm, a 14-18 campaign that included an NCAA investigation into recruiting violations. All of the wins from that season were vacated in 2019.
By then, Dan Hurley had taken the job, determined to rebuild UConn into one of the nation's best teams. After a 16-17 first season, Hurley lead the Huskies to their first winning record in three years, although the season was upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020-21, UConn returned to the NCAA tournament for the first time in five years, and the following season, the team qualified for the tournament once again despite back-to-back round of 64 exits.
In 2022-23, Hurley's fifth in Storrs, UConn finally broke through. The Huskies went 31-8 and won the fifth national title in program history, defeating Miami and San Diego State each by double-digits in the national semifinal and championship game, respectively. The story proved to be much of the same this season, as UConn won 37 of its 40 games and dominated the NCAA tournament, including a 15-point victory to cap off its back-to-back titles.
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