Everyone already wrote their “now they’re officially a blue blood” story a year ago, so there’s no point in rehashing that. Although the urge is understandable. Extracting new narratives from periods of sustained dominance is difficult.
No, this year’s storyline feels much simpler: The 2023-24 Connecticut Huskies are one of the greatest men’s college basketball teams of all-time. Any debate to the contrary would be made in bad faith.
The 2022-23 Huskies were a March juggernaut, becoming the first team in the history of the NCAA tournament to win six games by 13 points or more. If that weren’t enough, UConn also became the first national champion in history to win all six of its games by double figures while also holding all six of its opponents to 65 points or fewer.
A year later, Danny Hurley’s team was an even larger postseason juggernaut, winning the Big East tournament this go-round and then going on the most statistically dominant run to a national championship in the history of March Madness.
One of the best teams in history. This is absolutely ludicrous after losing NBA players and five of the top eight scorers. pic.twitter.com/piwtg5gEmb
— Matt Norlander (@MattNorlander) April 9, 2024
“What can you say?” Hurley said after Monday night’s 75-60 win over Purdue. “We won. By a lot. Again.”
You can make the case fairly easily that there hasn’t been a two-year run in college basketball like this since UCLA went consecutive season without a loss in 1971-72 and 1972-73. Of course back-to-back titles (or in the Bruins’ case, back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back titles) were more of a common occurrence back then. UConn just became the sport’s first program to pull off a repeat in 17 years.
The difference between Hurley’s second national championship squad and his first is that this one, despite losing its two leading scorers from the year before, was also a November juggernaut. And a December juggernaut. And a January juggernaut. And a February juggernaut.
From the opening tip of this season, a UConn team that was picked to finish third in its own conference in October has looked heads and shoulders better than the rest of the sport. When they were finally faced with the team that had the most valid claim of being within shouting distance of the reigning champs, the Huskies kept them at arm’s length in a fashion pretty much identical to the one they’d displayed over the preceding three weeks.
Connecticut fell just three times this season. All three losses came on the road, and all three featured their opponents giving an abnormally exquisite performance on offense.
On Dec. 1, UConn lost by four at preseason No. 1 Kansas. The Jayhawks shot 64.3 percent from three.
On Dec. 20, UConn lost its first Big East road game of the season, a defeat at Seton Hall. Donovan Clingan played just 14 minutes because of an injury, which played a part in the Pirates shooting 51. 8 percent from the field.
Ob Feb. 20, UConn — playing its third game in seven days — was blitzed at Creighton in a game where the Bluejays hit 14-of-28 from beyond the arc and shot 54.7 percent from the field.
The other 37 games? All Husky victories, with 30 of those coming by double figures.
Florida made a similar jump from “incredibly impressive March run” to “dominant from start to finish” in their back-to-back title run, but that was easier to explain. What Billy Donovan had going for him at Florida 17 years ago is a near impossibility in today’s college game. His top five scorers from the 2006 national title team — Joakim Noah, Taurean Green, Corey Brewer, Al Horford, Lee Humphrey, Chris Richard and Walter Hodge — all decided to run it back for another year in Gainesville.
So how did UConn make repeating look even easier almost two decades later?
Tristen Newton went from the biggest question mark on the 2023 champions to a First Team All-American in 2024.
Donovan Clingan went from Adama Sanogo’s promising backup to one of the most dominant big men in the country and perhaps the most important player on UConn’s team.
Cam Spencer arrived from Rutgers as the outside shooting replacement for the departed Jordan Hawkins. He tossed in some elite craftiness and top-tier shit talking for good measure.
In his second season as a full-time starter, Alex Karaban improved his numbers in virtually every major statistical category there is.
And then there’s Stephon Castle, the only true freshman starter on any of the teams at this year’s Final Four. Despite knowing that he was the only surefire lottery pick on this Husky team, Castle had no problem playing his part. It was a part that called for him to rank fifth on the team in scoring, but still demanded him to showcase his potential for stardom at the next level when the situation called for it.
As for Hurley, few things in sports have aged better since the pandemic than his “people better get us now” declaration in January of 2020.
On the podium immediately after putting the finishing touches on the most dominant two-year tournament run in the sport’s history, Hurley made a declaration.
“For the last 25-30 years, UConn’s been running college basketball,” Hurley said. “I see all the former champs over there. We’ve been running college basketball the last 30 years.”
In one sense, sure. UConn has won all six of its national championships since 1999. No one else has won more than three over that time span.
But if the Huskies have been “running the sport,” they’ve certainly been doing it in an unorthodox manner.
Seven times in the last 15 years, Connecticut hasn’t even made the NCAA tournament. In five consecutive seasons from 2016-17 through 2020-21, the Huskies failed to win more than 19 games. They finished with a losing overall record in the first three of those seasons.
Before this March, UConn had not been a No. 1 or a No. 2 seed in the Big Dance since all the way back in 2009. They are the only program to win a national championship as a non-top 2 seed since third-seeded Florida captured the 2006 national title … and they’ve accomplished that feat three times.
And about those three championships: They’ve all come against super bizarre fellow national finalists.
In 2011, UConn took down 8th-seeded Butler in a game where the Bulldogs shot the lowest percentage of any team in NCAA tournament history — not just national championship game history, but any game in the history of the NCAA tournament. Three years later, the 7th-seeded Huskies took care of 8th-seeded Kentucky in a super strange clash of the not-so-titans. Then there was last year, where Hurley’s team kept San Diego State from becoming the first 5-seed national champion ever, and the first non-power conference champion since 1990.
But there was nothing bizarre about 2023-24, and there’s nothing uncertain about UConn’s current standing within the sport.
In a college basketball world still very much in a state of flux thanks to the changes brought forth by not just NIL and the transfer portal, but also the cluster of retirements from Hall of Famers like Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Jim Boeheim and Jay Wright, there are two very clear realities at this moment:
Danny Hurley is the new face of the college basketball coaching world, and the Connecticut Huskies are the sport’s current top dog.
