In an 80-78 overtime victory against Butler on Jan. 21, UConn men’s basketball coach Dan Hurley attracted national attention not for something his team did, but something he said.
At a stoppage in the game, television cameras cut to the Huskies coach berating a referee over what he believed to be a missed call.
“Don’t turn your back on me,” Hurley said to the official, who had started to walk away while Hurley was speaking to him. “I’m the best coach in the f—ing sport.”
As it turns out, he may not even be the best coach in his own conference.
On Sunday, Hurley’s UConn team fell to Rick Pitino and No. 9 St. John’s 89-75 at Madison Square Garden in New York, giving the Red Storm a regular-season sweep of the two-time reigning national champion. With the loss, the Huskies are 4.5 games behind St. John’s for first place in the Big East, effectively eliminating them from the regular-season conference championship race.
Few, if any, people doubt Hurley’s accomplishments and his abilities as a coach.
The 52 year old has won at every stop of his career, from Wagner to Rhode Island to UConn. He took over a reeling Huskies program and transformed it into a juggernaut that won each of the past two NCAA championships. UConn not only won the 2023 and 2024 titles, but it was dominant in doing so, compiling a 68-11 record over those two seasons and winning each of its 12 NCAA tournament games across those runs by at least 13 points.
Since famously asserting that he was the best coach in the sport, though, his team hasn’t quite lived up to that standard.
In the eight games since that narrow win against Butler, the Huskies are just 4-4. Prior to that comment, UConn had been 13-5.
The recent rut has included a loss at Xavier, which is widely projected to miss the NCAA tournament cut, and, more concerningly, Seton Hall, which is in last place in the Big East and was just 6-18 before toppling the Huskies. The victory against UConn is Seton Hall’s only win in its past 11 games, a stretch that goes all the way back to Jan. 9.
‘I just wish they’d put the camera on the other coach more,’ Hurley said after the Butler game. ‘…I just wish they would show these other coaches losing their minds at the officials in other Big East games that I’m coaching where I look going into a timeout where I’m not talking to officials. I see these coaches as demonstrative as I am.’
There’s no shame in losing to Pitino, a Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famer who has won national championships with two different programs and could very well lead St. John’s to the Final Four, which would be the fourth different program he had guided to the national semifinals. Hurley’s team hadn’t been playing well even the Butler game, either, having lost two of its previous three after a 12-3 start to the season.
But whether it’s hubris or his reconstructed team continuing to come up short of the lofty benchmark the program had set the previous two seasons, Hurley’s loud claim, true as it may be, hasn’t aged particularly well.