The Connecticut Huskies are the champions of men’s college basketball. Yes, again.
The UConn men are a singular entity in college basketball. While the school’s women’s team is the first program almost anyone thinks of when asked to name the dominant force in their sport, the men’s team doesn’t get the same treatment. (Granted, the women’s program is exceptional.) Ask someone to tick off the most prestigious, elite, competitive programs in the men’s game, and you’ll get a lot of similar names. Duke, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Kansas will be included. Maybe UCLA, too, given that the Bruins had the greatest dynasty in college sports history. Maybe Indiana will show up on a list, too.
The Huskies will miss most, though, including all the ones I found amid unscientific Googling on Monday night, while I was watching UConn gradually squeeze the life out of San Diego State, 76-59, to win the school’s fifth national championship in 25 years. (It briefly got close in the second half, with SDSU cutting its deficit to six, but was never in serious doubt.) The list on the NCAA’s official website, which explains the origin of the nebulous term “blue-blood,” had no UConn. The first one I found on Reddit didn’t have UConn either. A USA Today column from earlier in the tournament, asking “What the heck happened to the men’s college basketball blue bloods?” made no mention of UConn. Ask your friend for the same list, and there’s a great chance UConn will be absent.
Time to adjust our posture. The Huskies are as premium a product as men’s college basketball has, and that was probably true even before this latest title. The manner of the fifth title in a quarter-century should extinguish any counterarguments. UConn dismantled Miami in a 13-point national semifinal win on Sunday and had comparably little trouble with SDSU and its excellent defense. The focus of a lot of pre-Final Four punditry was on how this Final Four lacked a big, bad bully to counter the refreshing stories of SDSU and Florida Atlantic. But the field had a juggernaut all along, albeit one sitting on the No. 4 seed line. The 2023 Huskies are both the best team and the champion, and they’ve established their program as a historic power beyond doubting. Their five titles matches Duke. This century, nobody is better.
The Huskies had a formula under their head coach, Dan Hurley, whom they hired away from Rhode Island five years ago. They operated at a deliberate pace in their half-court offense, worked the ball around, took a lot of three-pointers, and had the inside muscle to ensure defenses couldn’t overcommit to the three. On defense, they were a suffocating, shot-blocking force. In an era where small ball and spacing are en vogue, the Huskies played huge. Junior center Adama Sanogo was the star, and 7-foot-2 freshman backup Donovan Clingan spelled him for around a third of most games. UConn got big-time shooting from freshman power forward Alex Karaban and sophomore guard Jordan Hawkins. Junior captain Andre Jackson couldn’t make many shots but brought leadership and rebounding. Different strengths, different classes, and different paths to the school—UConn recruited most of its players out of high school, but several rotation players came via transfers, including point guard Tristen Newton from East Carolina.
No opponent was close to being a match. UConn won every tournament game by double-digits. Gonzaga, with the country’s No. 1 offense by Ken Pomeroy’s adjusted efficiency, lost by 28 in the Elite Eight. San Diego State, with the No. 3 defense by the same measure, lost by 17. The Huskies finished No. 1 in overall adjusted efficiency, a case where a stat explains a team sufficiently. Hurley had a ruthless machine, and nobody the Huskies saw in March or April was even in their stratosphere.
That was 2023’s recipe. Sometimes UConn does it differently. Previous titles in 2011 and 2014 relied heavily on elite guards, Kemba Walker and then Shabazz Napier, who felt like they were carrying the Huskies to victories with sporadic help from their supporting casts. (That’s not entirely fair to their teammates.) This year’s team had a different construction and existed in a much different college sports moment, where roster-building is a different task.
It also had a different leader, which tends to be how it goes at UConn. Jim Calhoun, who arrived in 1986, built the program into a power and won the first three national titles in 1999, 2004, and 2011. The 2014 title came under Kevin Ollie, a former Calhoun player who burned hot and quickly in the job. Ollie won a title in his second year and was fired after his sixth, then got caught up in a legal fight with the school (which he later won) over a withheld $11 million buyout. Now Hurley will hang his own banner. In similar fashion to UConn’s No. 7 seed national champ in 2014, this team had problems over the course of the year and had to fix them before becoming a terror in the tournament. The Huskies lost six of eight games between New Year’s Eve and Jan. 25. They were 15-2 after that.
The program has now spread five championships across three conferences, another area in which they seem impervious to the forces around them. They won their first three in the old version of the Big East, then won a fourth during a stopover in the American Athletic Conference. That league wasn’t right for a basketball school with a putrid football program, and UConn went home a few years ago to a reconstituted Big East that serves the school’s hoops programs better. And now here the Huskies are again.
A hallmark of being an elite college sports program is winning so much that the management and environment start to feel interchangeable. The surest sign of LSU’s place among college football’s blue-bloods isn’t that the gumbo at tailgates tastes so good, but that three head coaches in a row (Nick Saban, Les Miles, and Ed Orgeron) have won national championships in the job. Only one of them, Saban, has had similar (or better) success elsewhere. Some schools have the infrastructure and brand power to win in varying circumstances, and UConn basketball is among them.
UConn is still improving that scaffolding, by the way. Part of UConn’s lack of recognition as a mega-elite program is that the Huskies do not sign five-star prospects and NBA lottery picks at the clip of a Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, or UNC. This season’s high school recruiting class was just one four-star center, Clingan, from in-state, plus three transfers. But Hurley recruited the No. 7 class the year before that, and he’s got the No. 4 class for 2023 behind Kentucky, Duke, and Michigan State. Even the last reasonable argument against the Huskies’ status atop the sport looks on the verge of disappearing.
