We’ve spent a good portion of Ranked Week picking on our enemies, rating our friends and generally stoking controversy, but today we’re going to rededicate to our core mission: educating you dummies.
While many UConn alumni garner immediate memories of their time in Storrs (Ray Allen, Diana Taurasi, Alex Cohen), there are a host of Huskies that — while known to many — don’t evoke the same reaction.
Time to give them their due. To the slideshow machine!
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1. Meg Ryan
Before she was starring in blockbuster hits like Sleepless in Seattle, actress Meg Ryan was a journalism major in Storrs. Stop the presses!
2. Elena Kagan
Now one of the most powerful figures in the country, did you know Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan honed her legal skills at UConn? It’s hard to picture now, but during her senior year Justice Kagan would often lead the entire Fieldhouse in the “U-C-O-N-N” chant during sporting events. Wow!
3. Kemba Walker
Kemba Walker was too short to be a basketball man at UConn but his speed allowed him to excel at bussing tables in the dining hall. If we’d only known that he’d become the best busboy in the world!
4. Aaron Judge
Aaron Judge wowed the sports world last week with his highlight performance at the Dinger Expo. But only a few years earlier, Judge played catcher for the Dangerous Wiffle Boys, UConn’s infamous bad boy wiffleball/beatboxing consort.
5. Brandy
While the hit sitcom Moesha filmed in nearby Killingly, Connecticut, its titular star Brandy was enrolled at UConn, pursuing a degree in advanced walking. “The Boy is Mine,” is what UConn would say about Brandy if many of the details of their connection were different.
6. God
It’s one of those names you hear a lot, yet very few people know that God went to UConn. He lived in West and turned it into pillars of salt, although no one noticed the difference
7. Mick Cronin
Cincinnati assistant coach Mick Cronin attended UConn from 1961-65. He left without graduating to learn how to become a real boy, but later returned to finish his SNACKS degree in 2015.
8. Game of Thrones
By now you’re all caught up on the smash HBO series Game of Thrones (Sansa kills Arya), but did you know that before the battle for the Iron Seat commenced, Game of Thrones was a soft-spoken, bespectacled television program too nervous to try out for the UConn drama club?
9. Abraham Lincoln
Following an uneventful presidency, Abraham Lincoln enrolled in UConn to throw oranges at ducks and build Arjona. He was cool and had a car on campus as a freshman.
10. Chad UConn
Grandson of university founder Bartholomew UConn, Chad is actually still enrolled. He will never leave even though no one wants him around. It’s time to get it together, Chad. Is this really the life you want? Everyone, don’t even try to help Chad. Until he gets his own shit together, there’s nothing anyone else can do for Chad.
11. Forest Whitaker
Pithy text.
12. Donatello
Although he’s best known for his polyamorous relationship with sewer rats and other turtles, his UConn classmates remember Donatello more for his love of loudly reciting the Fraiser theme song.
13. Caligula
Caligula studied ornamental horticulture and turfgrass management at UConn. He served as a mentor for other Ratcliffe Hicks students. Lived in Towers all four years. Like all Towers residents, he either murdered, or had sex with, every member of his family.
