The leaves are turning and falling from the trees. The weather has become crisp and cool. This can only mean one thing: college basketball season is upon us.
But while most years this would be a moment for joy or at least unreasonable optimism, when we convince ourselves that, yes, this year our team will be good, I’m feeling very conflicted about my expectations for this team, with its new coach.
It’s a strange dichotomy: wanting to feel hopeful and optimistic about what on its face seems to be a positive trajectory and also the feeling of utter terror at the idea of allowing hope to creep in.
Because let’s face it, it’s been a long damn time since anything good has happened for UConn fans.
We lost our conference, the Big East Tournament and a regular season schedule that was filled with teams we actually cared about instead of Tulsa and ECU. We lost our Hall of Fame coach, and his home-grown successor, whom we all had the highest of hopes for, especially after he won us a national championship, turned out not to be that good at coaching after all.
We brought in Bob Diaco, the shiny, handsome, big-deal coordinator from Notre Dame. And after initially appearing to be competent and beating an undefeated Houston team at home, it became very, very clear that he was not actually a good coach, but was, in fact, an abysmal recruiter and a noted crazy person. We brought back our old friend Randy Edsall, and while he is doing the best he can, there’s only so much anyone can do when you can’t convince good players to come to your school because the program is in the basement and the conference is a joke.
Hell, even our ever-excellent women’s basketball team, after four consecutive national championships, took undefeated records into the Final Four and lost two years in a row in the National Semifinal on heartbreaking last second shots. One more blow for the fanbase.
We went from the highest heights, often the best basketball team in the best basketball conference in the country, to being utter garbage in a garbage conference. It’s been hard to take. And the last two seasons have only made it worse. Watching a team that I have loved since literally infancy play hideous, boring, uninspired basketball, watching them give up and not care, watching them not run anything resembling a discernible offense, all of it has taken a toll on everyone in UConn Nation. People checked out.
And firing Kevin Ollie, while certainly the right move, just made me sad. I take no pleasure in the downfall of a member of the family, and it breaks my heart that this battle has been as ugly and as public as it’s been. The NCAA violations are just one final kick in the gut, one final stain on the reputation of a man I never wanted to see go down like this.
But hiring Dan Hurley has been the one bright spot on the horizon. Here’s a guy who could have had any number of prime jobs. Pitt, a P5 school, was just throwing money at Hurley, and he chose to come to Storrs because he believes in the UConn brand. He believes in our history and our future.
But we all felt optimistic when Diaco was hired, and we know how that turned out. Now, Hurley is no Diaco. He has a proven track record as a head coach, and specifically at turning programs from bad to good, quickly, and with far fewer resources than he is afforded at UConn. Every piece out now – and there have been many, a testament to a new openness from a program that had been making every effort to shut the media out – has given glowing praise to Hurley’s toughness, his high expectations, the players’ reactions and Hurley’s recruiting efforts.
And to be fair, Hurley has already shown that he excels at planning and strategy in recruiting. Hiring head-coach caliber assistants with deep recruiting ties in the northeast – an area UConn can and should be owning in recruiting – and executing a plan to go after players who are both high quality and willing to come to our school. Too many times we saw Ollie invest all his resources in players who were ultimately going to choose a Kentucky or a Kansas, and by the time the losses were evident, he was left to shop in the clearance bin to fill out his roster. Hurley, on the other hand, while initially targeting high profile recruits like Rocket Watts and Isaiah Wong, changed course when it became clear that neither were likely gets, and locked in on James Bouknight and Jalen Gaffney, well-regarded recruits with high upsides who committed to UConn this fall. It’s been positively heartening.
The cupboard isn’t totally bare for Hurley. He’s still got Jalen Adams, Christian Vital and a supposedly mashed-potato-free Alterique Gilbert ready to go. Sid Wilson finally gets to suit up, and Hurley managed to bring his URI recruit Brendan Adams with him, and after showing off his athleticism in the dunk contest at First Night, he has me intrigued.
But what are our expectations for this team? It’s essentially the same roster that was below .500 two years in a row. So the question is, how much of that was due to a lack of talent and how much was due to a lack of caring or a lack of coaching? And, frankly, I don’t have an answer yet.
Hurley said his expectations are higher than those of the most delusional UConn fans. Well, Coach, challenge accepted. Speaking as someone who has picked UConn to win in every bracket I have ever done when they are in the tournament, with absolutely no regard for whether the team might actually win it all, I live for delusional optimism. But it’s been really hard to have any optimism about this team for the last few years and I’m feeling downright skittish now.
I want to be excited about this team. I want to believe that Hurley is the miracle worker coach he’s being presented as. I want to believe that with hard work and direction he can make them play better and harder and smarter. I’m sincerely looking forward to seeing what he can do with Jalen Adams and Vital. I want them to be the players I believe they are capable of being.
But hope is scary when, every time you’ve let it creep in, the world came tumbling down around you. Here in UConn Nation it seems like nothing good can happen ever again, and our native Yankee pessimism is hard to shake. We haven’t been given much reason to hope in a long time.
Maybe Hurley’s hire will mark the turning point in UConn’s history. Maybe we wake up a year from now, excited to see what our top-ten recruiting class will bring to a team that won 20 games the year before. Maybe things are going to be alright. There’s a glimmer of hope in Connecticut today. But it’s up to Hurley and his players to turn that glimmer into a beacon. I hope they can.
