UConn? Worried? Not as long as Auriemma is in charge
UNCASVILLE, CONN. — No, Geno Auriemma said with customary bluntness, he is not worried about the coronavirus outbreak. And he finds it a bit absurd that teams are being asked to refrain from postgame handshakes after sharing a germ-ridden basketball and sweating all over one another for two hours.
“I mean, come on,” he said.
Nor does Auriemma share conventional wisdom that the dynasty that is Connecticut women’s basketball might be in jeopardy in his 35th season as head coach. In fact, he has a new joke to deflate such thinking.
“You know how many religions there are in the world?” Auriemma said. “The one religion in women’s college basketball is praying that UConn loses.”
For the record, UConn defeated Cincinnati, 87-53, in the AAC tournament final Monday. The conference tournament was played at the Mohegan Sun casino complex in Uncasville, Connecticut, and, amid the jingle of slot machines and the spinning of roulette wheels, UConn success was hardly a gamble. The Huskies have played 139 games in the conference and have won them all. They will never lose, in fact, as they are set to return to the Big East next season.
But success in the NCAA Tournament is no longer such a sure bet. UConn has appeared in 12 consecutive Final Fours, yet no player on the current roster has won a national title. A 13th straight trip to the national semifinals this season seems uncertain after losses by double digits to the country’s three best teams: South Carolina, Oregon and Baylor. A 12th national title for Auriemma has remained elusive since 2016.
What does it mean? For starters, it means that UConn has set such an impossibly high standard that even the slightest leveling brings pre-written obituaries on the pending death of the Huskies’ dominance.
Does it mean anything else? Is this young team, which has lacked depth and the Huskies’ usual big-game swagger, a mere anomaly? Or are we witnessing an inevitable flattening out caused by a shift reflected by the arc of history, unsettling financial realities at UConn, the changing nature of recruiting and the continued broadening of the women’s game westward and southward?
First, a couple of caveats. UConn (29-3) has lost this season only to three surefire No. 1 seeds in the NCAA Tournament. Four current starters will return next year. And this year’s thin team will be buttressed next season by a highly regarded transfer and five freshmen, including the nation’s top recruit, Paige Bueckers, a 5-foot-11 inch guard from Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Already, her skill and temperament have drawn comparisons to former UConn star Diana Taurasi.
So no one is exactly pushing the panic button.
Still, there is history to consider. In the first 37 years of the men’s NCAA Tournament, which began in 1939, UCLA won 10 national titles. In the first 35 years of the women’s tournament, which began in 1982, UConn won 11 titles.
The men’s and women’s college game have developed at a nearly identical pace. But UCLA has won only one title since 1975, and it is now only a middling power in an age of increased parity. Can UConn, bucolic but isolated in Storrs, Connecticut, avoid a similar drift? Especially with an athletic department that ran a deficit of more than $40 million in fiscal 2019 and exists outside a Power Five conference, while women’s powers in the Southeastern, Pac-12 and Big 12 conferences offer verdant campuses and the security of football bounty? (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.) Check out the men’s rankings, Auriemma admonished when I brought up the issue. Seven of the top 16 teams — Gonzaga, Dayton and San Diego State among them — are not from Power Five conferences. Neither is Villanova, which won national titles in 2016 and in 2018.
“I can’t speak for after I leave, but as long as I’m coaching here, we won’t be hard to find,” Auriemma said. “We won’t be drifting away. You’ll know exactly where we are. And that’s not going to change one iota.”
Auriemma turns 66 this month. And he said he could see himself coaching another five years. UConn is in the hunt for the nation’s top projected recruit for 2021, Azzi Fudd, a 5-foot-11 guard from Washington, D.C., and a close friend of Bueckers, the incoming freshman star.
Recruits now often want something more personal than a coach-player relationship. Dawn Staley of South Carolina, the 2017 national champion, signed four of the top 13 high school players for the current season after her staff applied a fullcourt press “talking to every single person that’s involved in their lives.”
Auriemma prefers to be seen as an instructor, not a friend, to his players. To adjust, he now casts a wider net for talent. For next season, he has signed, among others, guards from Canada and Croatia. Evina Westbrook, a transfer guard from Tennessee sitting out this season, also will be eligible.
“I don’t think a 65-yearold guy should be best friends with a 17-year-old,” Auriemma said, adding that he has something else to offer: championship banners and a reputation for honing surpassing talents like Taurasi, Maya Moore and Breanna Stewart.
In many ways, though, this has been a trying season for Auriemma. Last month’s 74-56 defeat to Oregon was UConn’s worst home loss in 15 years. He missed a game after surgery for diverticulitis. The NCAA forced Westbrook to sit out a season after transferring. An assistant coach took a leave of absence for personal reasons. And the death of Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna, who had said she wanted to play for UConn, was a hard blow.
Yet on the court, renewed crispness in passing and cutting and sustained defensive intensity have put the Huskies in a familiar position — entering the NCAA Tournament with a chance to win it all.
“We’ve won so many championships, the rest of women’s basketball is in a state of euphoria that UConn might not be in the Final Four,” Auriemma said. “I get all that.”
But, he added, “until somebody knocks us out, we’re still in.”
“And as long as we’re in, we’ve got a shot,” he said.