New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Bruno’s respect for Geno goes beyond wins
STORRS — DePaul coach Doug Bruno has 727 career wins, among the top 30 women’s college coaches across all divisions of the NCAA and NAIA. He has none against Geno Auriemma.
Bruno is not alone on that count.
“When I look at Geno’s numbers, you know the number I look at all the time?” Bruno said after his No. 18 Blue Demons fell to No. 4 UConn, 75-52, Tuesday night at Gampel Pavilion. “The percentage number and how close it is to 90 percent. I know how hard it is to win one college basketball game. I know how hard it is to grovel up the food chain to try to win 70 percent of your games. And here’s this program is winning 90 percent of their games.”
At 1097-142, Auriemma’s winning percentage of .885 is unparalleled.
Here’s another way of looking at it: Auriemma lost 78 games in his first eight seasons. He has lost 64 in the past 28 seasons.
“Everybody made a big deal about their (139) games in a row in the American,” Bruno said,
“but if you go back and look at what the numbers were in the Big East before the reconfiguration, his numbers were off the charts in that league as well.”
We know Bruno best in Connecticut as Geno Auriemma’s friend, sidekick and most-willing opponent. He assisted Auriemma on two USA Olympic gold medal teams. They see the game in a similar way. He is a disciple of the legendary Ray Meyer. Bruno is a Chicago guy, part of the fabric of Chicago sports. He played guard for Meyer, the Father of DePaul basketball, who won 724 games at the school, and Bruno would go on to become the Blue Demons women’s coach.
A couple of weeks ago, DePaul beat No. 9 Kentucky for Bruno’s 725th victory. It was a historic day, for Meyer’s time at the school dates to coaching George Mikan, basketball’s first superstar in the 1940s. We’re talking serious sports history here.
With his victory, Auriemma pulls within one of Pat Summitt’s 1,098 career victories, the lofty standard in the women’s game before Tara VanDerveer of Stanford broke it recently. Auriemma has been unable to find a team to schedule before Jan. 7, so UConn’s next game is at No. 7 Baylor. That game, along with a Feb. 8 home game against South Carolina figure to be the Huskies two most difficult of the season.
With COVID, with games changing almost daily, Auriemma was almost somber when asked about No. 1,098.
“I hope it’s this season,” he said. “I hope there’s another game. I hope there’s another win in my future, whenever it is, it is. I had to ask when the season starts after someone contacted me about the same topic. I had no idea where we stood with that. It’s not something I’ve been circling on the calendar or pointing toward. I know Tara VanDerveer just broke the record.
“When you think about how many coaches don’t get to coach that many years, coach that many games to do that, it takes a lot of hard work, a lot of luck.”
Auriemma said he was walking around the locker room before the game and was counting how many multiple-year All-Americans he has had at UConn. He came up with 17.
“When you have that kind of roster, those kind of players on your team, stuff like this is possible,” Auriemma said.
“Geno came to Storrs and started the program from the ground up,” Bruno said. “My respect for what he has done goes back to how he started the program from nothing. With Dave Leitao (DePaul’s men coach and former Jim Calhoun assistant), you get the inside stories on what it was like before Gampel was built and what it was like trying to build both the men’s and women’s programs here from the bottom. I have an unbelievable amount of respect for what he has done to make this happen.”
Bruno said Auriemma did exactly what he was supposed to do. He took that first national title and turned it into multiple national titles. But who would have guessed it
would turn into 11 and
1,097 wins.
John Wooden had 10 national titles at UCLA. Summitt had eight at Tennessee. Coach K has the most wins (1,160) in the men’s game.
“Believe me,” Bruno said. “I have all the respect in the world for coach Summitt, coach Wooden, coach Tara, all these great coaches who have put together these programs that are in that speaking-point of which one is the top five. I’m one of the only people old enough to remember coach Wooden’s team, watched coach Wooden’s teams, watched them in person. I’ll put Geno’s teams ahead of coach Wooden’s teams, because of who he has had to play and the amount of Top 25 competition he has had to compete against in both the old Big East and also his nonconference schedule. That’s why I unabashedly say it’s the best program in the history of college basketball, men or women.”
Some of the numbers Auriemma has against schools are scary. 23-0 against Cincinnati. 32-0 against USF. 49-2 against
Seton Hall. 16-0 against Temple. 43-3 against Georgetown. 18-2 against Louisville. 24-0 against West Virginia. 38-6 against Syracuse. 41-4 against Pittsburgh.
He was 13-9 against Summitt, (14-9 overall against Tennessee).
He’s 11-7 vs. VanDerveer, including 4-2 in the NCAA Tournament. Stanford, however, also has ended UConn winning streaks of 47 and 90.
He is 17-0 against Bruno. Yet when others might bob and weave around the calendar, Bruno kept on pushing to play UConn every year for seven years after the Huskies left the Big East. His reasoning was simple. You want to be the best? Beat the best.
And even if the Huskies win the league titles, they will lift the caliber of play in the Big East.
“We love to challenge ourselves and play great people,” Bruno, 70, said. “And that’s why we took on Louisville (a loss) and Kentucky (a win) to prepare for UConn in our league. Nobody wanted UConn back in our league more than I do.”
With UConn, he reasoned, you know you have a team that can win the national title. As he pointed out when their move was confirmed, there was no one individually with more to lose than him. After all, DePaul won five of the seven league titles after UConn left.
And COVID willing, we all know how it’s likely to end this March in the Big East Tournament at Mohegan Sun.
“I say it, I say it, I’m going to keep saying it, because I don’t know if people want to believe me,” Bruno said. “But I know I’m right and I know I tell the truth. They’re the best program in the history of college basketball men or women. And if anybody wants to argue, I can pull out the facts.”
He smiled.
On Tuesday, the Big East announced the UConn game at DePaul on Jan. 1 will be the first-ever women’s basketball broadcast nationally on Fox.
“It’s huge,” Bruno said. “Val Ackerman, our commissioner, has just been nominated for the Naismith (Hall of Fame) and is so deserving. This is another aspect of what Val does.
For Fox to identify that women’s basketball deserves to be on the big station, I consider it an honor to be part of it. At the same time I’m not delusional about why. It’s because of UConn and what Geno has done to make it a national brand. It’s also about an entire league and what Mike Tranghese and Dave Gavitt did before that.”
“After they watch tonight’s game, they might change their mind,” Auriemma said. “Does Fox show cartoons. I mean, other than some of their news.”
That’s another of Doug Bruno’s assets. He puts up with Geno’s humor.