GLENDALE, Ariz. — Both had difficult journeys to arrive here, the UConn women’s basketball team on the court, the men on the runway.
This isn’t the first time both have made it to the Final Four, the biggest stage for college basketball, in the same year. It’s the fifth occurrence. UConn is the sole school to win both championships in the same year, 2004 and 2014 — notice a pattern there? But in 2024, the historic roles are reversed. The men’s field has always been deeper with true contenders, a minefield of upsets, and UConn has made its way through it as an underdog, a No. 7 seed in ’14, a No. 4 seed in 2023. The women, winners of 11 titles, have typically breezed through the field as overwhelming favorites and delivered.
Final-Four-bound UConn men encountered long travel delay, arrived in Phoenix in the wee hours
This season? The men were the No. 1 overall seed in the field of 68 for the first time and won their first four NCAA Tournament games, played close to home in Brooklyn and Boston, by an average of 27 points. The women, a No. 3 seed, their lowest in 19 years, were banished to the West Coast for their third- and fourth-round games and won nail-biters over Duke and Southern California. The men arrive in Arizona for what is expected to be a coronation. The women arrive in Cleveland as the team least expected to win of the four.
But they have Connecticut’s attention even more than usual this week, the men’s journey exhilarating, the women’s captivating, and they have the nation’s attention, too. One thing Dan Hurley and Geno Auriemma agree on, and there are several points, is that UConn’s self-billing as the “Basketball Capital of the World” last October was appropriate.
And their teams have backed it up. In a big way.
The men, despite access to a private plane provided by the NCAA, had a travel nightmare, stuck waiting nearly eight hours until leaving Hartford after 1 a.m. Thursday and arriving in Phoenix in the wee hours of the morning. The women, after upsetting top-seeded USC Monday night with a bench depleted by injuries, six of 14 players out for the season, hardly needed a plane to get from Portland to Cleveland.
“You see them in the building, you walk by the training room and they’ve got a top-five team in the country hurt and not playing,” Hurley said Thursday, upon his team’s arrival at State Farm Stadium. “That’s why Geno is one of the best coaches of his generation. Obviously Paige (Bueckers) and her crew, it’s special, to do what they’ve done with everything they’ve dealt with the last two years. It’s incredible. It speaks to the level of Geno and his staff and UConn women’s basketball, in my opinion the premier program in the country.”
In what may be the best job of coaching Auriemma has done in his 39 years, he has put a huge dent in the trendy ideas that the UConn dynasty was in decline and, in this era where the growth of the women’s game has made the field deeper with elite individual players and legitimate championship contenders, he was not as effective as when UConn had the overwhelming edge in talent. Working around foul trouble that might have meant running out of players if the game went into overtime, Auriemma cajoled and nudged the Huskies past one of those elite stars, JuJu Watkins, and the top-seeded Trojans in the Elite Eight.
Now, he faces another No. 1 seed, Iowa, and Caitlin Clark, who has become the face of the sport, its all-time leading scorer, while Bueckers, who held that title before knee injuries cost her most of two seasons, will put her all-around abilities on display in the semifinals Friday night.
Dom Amore: In triumph of coaching and spirit, UConn women return to Final Four
It’s a matchup that will have the sports world locked in, and it figures to smash the viewership records set Monday night, when more than 12.5 million tuned in to watch Iowa knock off defending champ LSU.
“You know, one thing that I’ve noticed over the years that’s happened,” Auriemma told reporters in Cleveland on Thursday, “When people see us play for the very first time, two things happen. One, they fall in love with all of my players because of the way they play and the way they conduct themselves. And they go, yeah, he really is a (jerk). So those two things will still be true on Friday. And that’s just my family.”
If Auriemma has a big personality, what’s to be made of Hurley? A reporter in Boston, asking players to sum up Hurley in one word, suggested his own to start: “lunatic.”
Ah, this may be the Land of Steady Habits, but he is Connecticut’s lunatic. The men’s program, in Hurley’s sixth season, is becoming the Yankees of college basketball, a team outsiders are starting to love to hate. Hurley is brash, he’s in-your-face, he’s Jersey City. He never leaves a slight, real, perceived or irrelevant, unanswered. He said this week, if he has to misquote an opposing coach to motivate his team, so be it. His methods, his madness work in March.
Dom Amore: Sorry Larry David, there is just no curbing these Final Four-bound UConn men
For the UConn men, the fashionable notion is that Hurley has found the formula for his sport’s current landscape. He agrees with this, by the way. The right mix of carefully chosen transfers, with high school players developing and enough name-image-likeness opportunities to make it work. His starting lineup includes two 19-year-olds and two 24-year-olds.
If the Huskies beat Alabama in their semifinal Saturday, and Purdue defeats NC State, which got here with a string of upsets, the championship game would pit the two teams that were No. 1 in the polls for most of the year. Auriemma fought off tears after his Elite Eight win, thinking about how tenaciously his shorthanded team fought. Hurley said he fought back tears before his team left its hotel to play Illinois in the Elite Eight game last Saturday, thinking about how much the players who weren’t on the team a year ago, like Stephon Castle and Cam Spencer, deserved to go to the Final Four. For them, and only for them, he feels pressure to repeat as champions, though he boldly promised, during last April’s fifth championship parade, to have the Huskies “in the mix for No. 6.”
After all, history has proven this all to be business as usual at the BCW (Basketball Capital of the World), where standards keep getting higher.
“You’ve got a chance to make history,” Hurley told his players all season, “in a place where it is impossible to make history.”
Dom Amore: Sorry Larry David, there is just no curbing these Final Four-bound UConn men
