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About UConn
Or “Connecticut,” to give the more formal name.
When people talk about “blue bloods” in college basketball, they talk about North Carolina, Kentucky and Duke in particular. If they’re not talking about Connecticut as well, they haven’t been paying attention.
National champions in 1999. And 2004. And 2011. And 2014. And last year.
Yes, if basketball champions hosted Saturday Night Live, UConn would have a Five-Timers Club jacket.
This year, they’ve made it this far with an old-school approach. Their two leading scorers in a balanced attack, Tristen Newton and Cam Spencer, aren’t flashy one-and-dones. They’re seniors.
The Huskies didn’t load up in the transfer portal, either. Spencer transferred in from Rutgers, and they have a solid freshman in Stephon Castle, but the rest of the team’s core returns from last season.
Connecticut’s coach is Dan Hurley, who hasn’t spent much of his career in the spotlight. When he played in college at Seton Hall, he was overshadowed by his brother Bobby, who led Duke to consecutive national championships. He coached high school basketball for a decade before taking over at Wagner in 2010 and moving to Rhode Island in 2012. Bobby was actually his assistant before embarking on his own coaching career at Buffalo and Arizona State.
The Hurley patriarch, Bob Hurley, is a legendary high school coach who spent several decades at St. Anthony’s in New Jersey.
Interesting question Bryan discusses below – who is the women’s college basketball GOAT?
You could make a case for Brittney Griner, who led a Baylor team featuring just one other eventual WNBA player (Odyssey Sims) to a 40-0 record in 2011-12. In her last three seasons, Baylor’s record was 108-5.
You could go back to the 80s and consider Cheryl Miller, who won the Wooden Award three straight years. But the college game was still relatively new at that point, with a dearth of schools devoting many resources …
What? The men’s game? Oh, right …
To be honest, the whole “women better than men now” trope is uninteresting. Why judge one against the other? Nothing wrong with seeing women’s basketball getting its due, thanks to a generational talent and other compelling stories. But the men deserve some attention as well.
What a weird sentence to write.
So please enjoy the next few hours as we follow along to see if Connecticut can become the first repeat men’s champion since Florida in 2006 and 2007 or if dominant big man Zach Edey (7-foot-4, or 2.24 meters) can lead Purdue to its first national championship.
Beau will be here shortly. In the meantime, here’s Bryan Graham on the growth of the women’s game:
After the curtain finally dropped on Caitlin Clark’s collegiate career and the last of the garnet and black confetti had fallen at Cleveland’s Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse on Sunday afternoon, the all-time scoring leader in major college basketball history could finally reflect on a season that has recalibrated all expectations for how women’s sports can be covered, commercialized and consumed.
Twice in the last week alone Clark’s games have set new television ratings records for women’s college basketball with a third for the title game almost certain when Sunday’s overnights are released. Even South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley, having just completed a perfect season for a second NCAA title in three years with a team who had graduated all five starters, probably her best piece of coaching work yet, couldn’t make it far into her victory speech before paying tribute to the woman of the moment, saying: “I want to personally thank Caitlin Clark for lifting up our sport.”
Whether Clark is the greatest college player to ever lace them up is subject to debate – it’s still Maya Moore for me – but there’s no question the Hawkeyes star has done more to attract mainstream attention to the women’s game than anyone before her. Since drawing a record 55,646 fans for an October preseason game in an outdoor football stadium, Clark and the Hawkeyes became appointment viewing. Iowa’s win over LSU in the Elite Eight drew 12.3m US television viewers, making it one of the most watched sporting events of the past year outside the NFL. Their Final Four contest with Connecticut on Saturday night bested it, averaging 14.2m viewers and peaking at 17m, better than every World Series and NBA finals game last year.
You can read the full article below:
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