How UConn became college basketball’s unlikeliest modern Camelot (2024)

GLENDALE, Ariz. —That this started, or restarted, with a then-75-year-old Jim Calhoun nearly kicking Dan Hurley’s ass is so perfectly Connecticut that the scene should replace the state flag. It was early spring of 2018. Hurley was the recently named UConn head coach and Calhoun was the retired patriarch of the program, one whose endorsem*nt helped secure Hurley’s hiring.

Hurley’s first practice with his inherited team was an abomination. He’d left a job he loved at Rhode Island because UConn is a premier brand in college basketball, a place that, at the time, had won four national titles in the prior two decades. But what Hurley saw didn’t look like anything he was expecting. It was so bad Hurley called his agent to ask about backing out of the deal and seeing if Rhode Island might take him back. The agent explained to Hurley that the buyout in his contract made such a move impossible, so Hurley had to accept that he might’ve made a mistake.

The situation was so dire that Hurley eventually walked into Calhoun’s on-campus office, where he worked while assisting the school as a quasi-statesman. As Hurley remembers it, the conversation began with him telling Calhoun something like: “This is bullsh–. Nothing is in place. This is UConn. Where’s the infrastructure? What’s been going on here?”

Calhoun looked at the co*cky 45-year-old. Then, never one to suffer timidity, he introduced Hurley to the real UConn Basketball.

“He said, ‘Are you sh—ing me? Maybe you’re not the person we should’ve hired. If you ever come in here like this again, I’ll never talk to you,’” Hurley said late Monday night, remembering back. “I mean, he ripped me.”

Hurley told the story from a hallway in the bowels of State Farm Stadium. It was about 90 minutes after another one —another UConn men’s basketball national championship — and Hurley could only smirk. That sly, self-satisfied grin that’s a little arrogant, a little affectionate, and wholly his own. His Huskies beat yet another quality team into total submission, this time the second-best team in the country. Purdue was great this year. Zach Edey was so great. And the Boilers were worn down just like everyone else who’s run into this freight train. The 75-60 beating brought the Huskies’ average margin of victory in the 2024 NCAA Tournament to 23.3 points. In the last three weeks, they trailed for 6 minutes and 22 seconds. Total. In six games.

“We won,” Hurley deadpanned in Monday’s postgame news conference, “by a lot, again.”

Last year it was a 20-point average margin of victory over six games.

How can this possibly be put in context? UConn’s back-to-back national titles have come at a time when mass parity is flattening the landscape of college basketball. That the place was dormant only a few years ago is impressive, but also typical. While so many awaited the Huskies’ demise in recent years, they somehow only grow stronger.

The real feat here? Six titles won by six radically different teams by three different coaches playing out of two different leagues in 25 years. Six titles that come on top of the women’s program’s 11 national titles since 1995.

Connecticut’s six-pack of men’s banners has passed Duke and Indiana and now stands even with North Carolina. The only remaining programs with more titles are Kentucky with eight and UCLA with 11. The difference? Kentucky has won one in the time that UConn has piled up its entire share and UCLA has zero. The Bruins’ last title came in 1995, when Dan Hurley was a junior guard at Seton Hall.

In the last 25 years, as those old blue bloods, along with Indiana, have faded (at least as far as national titles go) a variety of alternatives have arisen, nudging onto a stage shared by the likes of Duke and North Carolina and Kansas. Florida flirted. Villanova, too. But those only proved how hard it is to have staying power. It’s hard to tell if those nets were cut down by the programs or by some very specific epochal head coaches.

The only place that’s fully proven it most belongs is Connecticut, a one-time regional program with some marginal success back in the day, one that also went from 1968 to 1989 with only two NCAA Tournament appearances.

UConn is in a club of its own. When Hurley yelled into a microphone at State Farm Center on Monday that Connecticut has “been running college basketball the last 30 years!” it wasn’t some hyperbolic lark.

Say it for what it is —UConn isn’t only the current best program in college basketball, it is a standalone string theory of modern college basketball.

Think about this. In 1961, a youngish coach named Dee Rowe needed an assistant on his bench at Worcester (Mass.) Academy. He listened to a recommendation from legendary New England basketball coach Joe Mullaney, who suggested a young man named Dave Gavitt.

Gavitt had played at Dartmouth from 1956 to 1959 before moving to Washington D.C. for a job with AT&T. The college basketball world would later be fundamentally changed because Gavitt hated everything about working in the real world. He needed basketball and joined Rowe at Worcester. The two quickly formed what would become a lifelong bond.

Gavitt left two years later for an assistant job at Providence College, before climbing to a head coaching job at Dartmouth in 1967, and then to the head job at Providence in 1969. That same March, Rowe left Worcester for UConn, despite heavy speculation that he might fill the head-coach opening at Boston College to replace a retiring Bob Cousy. (BC instead hired a 39-year-old Duke assistant named Chuck Daly.) Rowe and Gavitt were now rival coaches, but the closest of friends.

Rowe was a good college coach, but ran himself ragged, and eventually transitioned to a fundraising role at UConn. His old pal Gavitt, meanwhile, ended up having great success at Providence, but wanted to better position the school for the future. Gavitt had the idea of creating a new basketball-centric league of like-minded schools. Soon, membership began —St. John’s, Georgetown, Syracuse, Seton Hall and Boston College, so on. Holy Cross declined, twice, so Gavitt called his old friend

“Thick as thieves,” says Dan Gavitt of his father and Rowe.

Perhaps no heist was greater than making Connecticut basketball relevant. The Huskies were then members of the Yankee Conference, side-by-side with Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and Boston University. As Dan Gavitt puts it: “A collection of very small New England state universities that weren’t really good at basketball. Not a lot of history or tradition. UConn was one of them.” The Huskies had won or shared the league’s regular-season title 18 times between 1947 and 1976 but was overtaken by UMass as the conference’s top hoops schools in the early-to-mid ’70s.

The newly forming Big East was primarily composed of private schools in major cities. And then there was UConn, a state school in the woods.

You’ve heard of parochial cities. Well, Connecticut is a parochial state. Today its 3.5 million acres (8 percent of the total land area of New England) and 3.5 million residents are rationed out to 169 individual towns. There are the bigger dots on the map. New Haven, Stamford, Bridgeport. And the medium. Stonington. Bethel. Rocky Hill. And the minuscule. Bozrah. Lyme. Union. In the ’70s, Storrs was a cow pasture with a college. But Gavitt saw potential and his relationship with Rowe carried weight.

UConn was in and it all unfolded. The Big East went on to become one of the league’s preeminent leagues. Gavitt went on to serve as NCAA Tournament Committee chairman overseeing the tournament’s 1985 expansion to 64 teams. Rowe went on to become a transformative figure at UConn, assisting in hiring Calhoun and Geno Auriemma, and raising the money to build Gampel Pavilion, ultimately shaping the contours for the dominant program of the last quarter century. Gavitt’s son, Dan, meanwhile, is now the NCAA’s senior vice president overseeing men’s basketball, and the closest thing today the sport has to a defined leader.

All this history comes as a means of answering the question everyone remains perpetually stuck with. UConn? Why? How? Of all places, this program has played in roughly a quarter of the national title games since 1999 and is 6-0 in those appearances. 6-0!

“It doesn’t seem to make sense,” said Randy LaVigne, a star of the late ’70s, who remembers practicing on a court surrounded by a curtain while the school’s track team ran laps around the court at UConn’s old Field House. “But I guess it just kind of snowballed. I think it’s because each individual group of players leaves it better for the next.”

Indeed, the list stacks up with any other program in college basketball. Donyell Marshall, Ray Allen, Richard Hamilton, Caron Butler, Emeka Okafor, Hasheem Thabeet, Kemba Walker, Shabazz Napier. On and on. The omissions here are offensive. Calhoun created a funnel of talent to UConn that spilled over the brim and never stopped.

The court in Glendale was filled with it. Hurley’s roster is loaded. Tristen Newton, Donovan Clingan, Cam Spencer, Alex Karaban and Stephon Castle all average double figures and have long professional careers ahead of them.

“They have the greatest amount of trust that I’ve seen from a team, ever, in college,” said Allen, whose teams went 89-13 in his three years, but didn’t claim a title of their own. “Everyone did their job.”

Allen was in a pack of ex-players celebrating with the national championship trophy, posing for pictures with Khalid El-Amin, a hero of the ‘99 Huskies that beat Duke as a double-digit underdog to win the program’s first title.

The common saying around UConn is that its success is attributable to its isolation; that players can only focus on basketball when they live in Storrs. In truth, the sentiment can probably be reversed; that not only can UConn recruit elite players, but it gets elite players who are willing to live in modest isolation in order to win. It’s probably not a coincidence that those are the ones who run through walls, or shut down a 7-foot-4 colossus on one end, while making 24 of 30 2-point baskets over top of him on the other end.

The thing about UConn is, everyone sees themselves in each other, and it starts at the top.

“You have to be a little bit crazy,” said El-Amin. “We all know Coach Calhoun was a little crazy at times. But Dan Hurley is the same way. He always has to prove himself. He’s feisty. He cares. And you’re gonna do it until you do it right.”

Sound familiar?

“To this day, Calhoun is so insecure that he needs to remind you that he’s won national championships and is in the Hall of Fame, and it’s like, right, yes, we all know,” Dan Gavitt said, laughing. “But that’s what drove him. He always had that thing —that he wasn’t respected enough, that Connecticut wasn’t respected enough. That place needed a personality like that. The fans embrace it.”

That’s how college basketball’s most unlikely modern Camelot came to be. LaVigne says when he played, the team’s goal was to be the best team in New England. Today, the UConn men’s and women’s programs have a combined 17 national titles, while, other than Cousy and Holy Cross in 1947, no other New England college has ever won a title in either.

There’s no single explanation.

Only wins.

And banners.

And recent history.

(Photo: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)