The March of UConn: Can Dan Hurley and the Huskies stand the smoke?

GLASTONBURY, Conn. — It’s mid-afternoon on a Sunday and, from the front of Dan Hurley’s house, you can turn around and look clear across Connecticut. Over Manchester, over South Windsor, over Enfield, all the way to Massachusetts. Hundreds of miles. In the distance, the horizon line is cut by national parks in Vermont. Hurley once told a recruit that the view reaches all the way to Canada. Dan Hurley says lots of things.

This house? It’s up there. For a state that isn’t all that topographically interesting, Minnechaug Mountain, roughly 10 miles east of Hartford, has an elevation of about 700 feet. On this particular weekend, the first of March, the sky is as blue as a robin’s egg, but it is still damn cold; cold right down to the marrow. And really windy.

The doorbell bongs. You wait. You wait a beat longer. You push it again.

Now, as a rule, no one wants to peer into someone else’s home. But sometimes there’s no other choice. So you press the edge of your palm upon the glass of an ornate front door, lean your forehead forward and glance around. Nice house. You can see straight through some cozy, inviting spaces, all the way to the backyard. And there he is. Dan Hurley, shuffling aimlessly, carrying a log. Feeling a buzz rumble from underneath, you watch as he removes a glove, reaches into the pocket of his UConn basketball parka and pulls out a phone.

“Where are you?” he answers.

“I’m here. I’m standing in front of your house.”

“Oh. I’m in the back just f—ing around. Come through the gate.”

It’s an off day, except for Hurley meeting early with his staff, reviewing film of the previous day’s win over Providence and, after Mass, watching film of the Huskies’ next opponent — Marquette. Hurley has the firepit going and acts as if it’s warming the air. In reality, the wind is so strong that this fire, and the many logs he’s throwing on it, produces nothing but smoke and ash. He sits in the exhaust.

“This weather sucks,” he says, “but what can you do about it?”

Going inside is an option, but that’d be the easy way. Why do that when you can be here, at the top, on the edge, and really uncomfortable?

UConn knows this well. None of this has gone as anyone thought, has it? All that talk about a three-peat. Hurley and the Huskies made it all sound like a matter of sheer will. They didn’t talk about trying for a third straight national title. They declared they’d do so. This team was the next one. The 2023 group, that was the physical manifestation of the coach — going from great expectations, to doubted and discounted, to kicking doors off hinges and winning it all. The 2024 team, that was the manifestation of the program — total domination on the way to a second straight title, the school’s sixth in 25 years, more than any other. The 2025 team? This would be the coup de grâce, the final act of dominion. No team has won three consecutive titles since John Wooden’s UCLA dynasty. This would be UConn’s dynasty.

Instead, it’s March in Storrs and the Huskies are 20-9, unranked, and trending toward a middling eighth or ninth seed in the NCAA Tournament.

The short-ish version of a long story: After a brutal winless trip to the Maui Invitational, Hurley said “the burden of wearing the uniform after back-to-backs looks like it’s weighing heavy on the group,” and that’s never particularly changed. Solid wins against Baylor, Texas and Gonzaga were followed by a seesaw Big East slate. Win, loss. Win, loss. Little gained, nothing sustained. A multitude of reasons. Poor coaching, according to Hurley, tops the list. Star freshman Liam McNeeley missed time with injury and is, even now, still catching up. Alex Karaban, a preseason All-Big East First Team selection, hasn’t played to such levels. Hassan Diarra has ridden a bum knee. Young guys have looked like young guys. The transfer portal wasn’t particularly fruitful. And the defense has been terrible. Oh, and, along the way, Hurley, a man already prone to caricature, decided to tell an official: “I’m the best coach in the f—ing sport,” setting off a fire hose of takes. Hurley gave his long, long line of critics everything they wanted, and he gave it to them on a platter. (Interestingly, his lengthy introspection with Hearst Media’s Mike Anthony soon thereafter, saying, “I’m embarrassed that I said that. It makes me feel like a real ass,” didn’t garner such attention.) The scrutiny placed on the coach has been inevitably shared by the program.

That’s life in the smoke.

“You know,” Hurley says, feet perched on the fire pit, “Sometimes you get deer; some deer will come by. Some other animals come by, too. It’s like total isolation up here.”

In reality, Hurley, and most others in and around the program can admit what’s obvious: That if not for the back-to-back titles, this particular UConn team would not have carried national title expectations. Final Four hopes? Sure, maybe. But no one would look at this roster — one that’s lost six NBA draft picks in two years — and say the only measure of success is to win it all. Yet, that’s the fatal tension in which every minute of every game and every moment of every practice has existed. If every day is a trust fall, eventually the arms will get tired.

The result is a team that’s occasionally very good, often frustratingly inadequate, and a lot of blame to go around.

The recipe for a reckoning.

If UConn is able to salvage something from this season — win the Big East Tournament, make a run to the Final Four in San Antonio, do the things that UConn has a knack for doing — the pivot point, Hurley says, will trace back to a day of hard truths. That’s what’s down the mountain, around the bends you take to get here, about 20 miles east, over in Storrs.

It was Feb. 24, a cloudy Monday morning, about a week and a half ago. Hurley walked into a team meeting and looked around. No one was sure what to expect, not after what happened the prior day. A trip to Madison Square Garden. A total and complete ass-kicking by St. John’s. A second loss to Rick Pitino’s team in as many weeks. A submissive bequeathing of Big East supremacy to a team and a coach the Huskies love to loathe.

This conversation was a long time coming. UConn was, at the time, 6-6 in its prior 12 league games and starting to slip-slide toward the “B” word. The mere possibility of missing the NCAA Tournament was unthinkable. Could you imagine? After Hurley’s waltz with the Lakers last summer? After ranking No. 3 in the preseason poll? After acting like the season schedule should include a third parade? Other Big East schools might print shirts to mark the occasion. This was a team in need of a pickup.

“They thought I was going to come in like Al Pacino in ‘Any Given Sunday,’” Hurley says.

Either we heal as a team, or we’re going to crumble, inch by inch, play by play, till we’re finished …

We’re in hell right now, gentlemen, believe me. And we can stay here, get the s— kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light. …

Dan Hurley did not, in fact, give the Al Pacino speech. Instead, he grinned, sort of. “Not a smile,” he recalls, “but whatever a madman does when he’s trying to fake smile.”

Hurley told his team that he’s happy. Happy to no longer feel any entitlement. Happy to see actions still have consequences. Happy to take the blame. Happy that “there’s still some fairness somewhere in this world and we’re getting what we f—ing deserve.”

He told them they didn’t deserve to win because he hasn’t coached well, and the staff hasn’t coached well. And then he went around the room. One by one. Every player was told why he doesn’t deserve to win.

Do you think gods have aligned against us? No. We’ve done all this to ourselves.

It was a change in message and everyone heard it. While Hurley is incapable of being anything other than himself, even if that includes grabbing a power cord off a scorers table during practice and mock-choking himself after a bad play, he has been, internally, far more, uh, let’s say, tender with this team. He realized such was required after the disastrous Maui trip. So, while he never backed off a three-peat as the goal, he throttled back coaching them to such standards. He says now: “You can’t let your players think anything differently, especially the ones that have played for you. But, on the flip side, I had to give this team more grace. Post-loss video sessions, things like that. I’ve not coached them as hard as I’ve coached my other teams.”

That all apparently ended that Monday morning. How the message was received was up to each individual.

Karaban apparently listened. This was supposed to be a season the junior wing solidified himself as a first-round NBA Draft pick. Instead, his shooting numbers and usage rates are down across the board. Hurley didn’t hold back. In past years the offense cooked up open shots for him, but this year he needed to get off shots quicker into tighter windows, the same shots Jordan Hawkins and Cam Spencer made. Did he do everything he needed to get his shot off quicker in every rep of every drill? Did he do everything required in the weight room to add muscle? Is he doing everything possible right now to be the guy he’s supposed to be?

These are things that get distilled when said out loud.

This past week, after scoring 17 points in the win at Providence, Karaban spoke to a pack of UConn beat writers about some of his struggles this season, offering a mea culpa. Most fans and onlookers will think first of two late missed free throws in a botch-job at Villanova. Karaban pointed to everything else.

“For myself, whether that’s offensive variety, defensively, strength-wise — I was able to control that this summer and I didn’t do enough work for that, and now I’m facing the consequence of it,” he said. “But it’s not too late to change how the season is going and not too late to change how I’m playing.”

Later, before heading to the team bus, Karaban was pulled aside and asked what he meant by that. It’s not every day you hear a star upperclassman say, essentially, that he didn’t work hard in the offseason. Could he clarify?

“No, I put in the work. I worked my ass off,” he explained. “The thing is, I’m just reflecting on what could’ve been different. Like I admit, there are moments out there when I look weak on the court. So maybe I could’ve gone harder in the weight room. Coach Hurley is doing the same thing. He’s reflecting on what he could’ve done better. We all are. And we’re gonna fix it.”

These are, of course, just words, and UConn is what its record says it is. The best teams in college basketball: Duke, Auburn, Houston, right on down the line (including, yes, St. John’s), know who they are at this point in the season. Hurley and his assistants, meanwhile, are still “tinkering” with the rotation, wondering from game to game who will do what. Transfer center Tarris Reed Jr., whose minutes fluctuated wildly in January and February, is suddenly wrecking games from the post and has, as far as efficiency stats go, been the team’s most valuable player in three of the last four games. McNeeley is now seven games removed from his return from injury and showing flashes of the lottery pick he’s projected to be. Karaban is, perhaps, trending. Solo Ball’s defensive struggles are cumbersome, but he’s among the elite shooters in the country. Diarra and Samson Johnson have championship DNA.

Maybe this can all still come together.

Maybe it was never supposed to be easy.

Hurley gets up to throw another log on the fire. When you ask what he would be doing this afternoon if still alone, he cocks an eyebrow from behind his sunglasses, and says, “What do you mean? I’d be here. Doing exactly this.”

The pool is covered. The trees are still bare. The chicken coop he and wife Andrea inherited from the previous owner in 2018 is empty because, shockingly, the North Jersey pair had no idea how to raise chickens. But this is Hurley’s spot. Where he and his program are most comfortable. A single billow of smoke from the top.

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photos:Joe Buglewicz, M. Anthony Nesmith / Icon Sportswire / Getty Images)