History on the line for UConn with back-to-back title chance
History will be on the line Monday evening at State Farm Stadium. Only seven men’s teams in NCAA history have ever won back-to-back championships, the last coming in 2006-07 when Florida did so under coach Billy Donovan. Before that, you have to go back to Duke and Mike Krzyzewski in 1992.
In the last 25 years, Connecticut has morphed into a certified blue-blood college basketball program. When listing off the great schools in the sport, UCLA and Kentucky are usually the first schools checked off. UConn is firmly on that list and now, the Huskies hope to etch their name in the annals of college basketball history.
The defending national champions face Purdue at 6:20 p.m. If the Huskies win, they not only complete the rare back-to-back, they also will tie North Carolina with six titles, third-most in history. UConn currently is tied at five with Duke and Indiana. UCLA has 11, Kentucky 8.
UConn coach Dan Hurley even reached out to Donovan for advice on this year’s team.
“I got talking to him immediately, really a week after the season ended last year,” Hurley said. “I kind of hit that emotional crash when it’s over and it doesn’t feel like maybe what you thought it would in terms of that sustained euphoria. Kind of disappeared quickly. We talked a lot about that, just the emotions of it all. Then the mindset with the team.”
But, as Hurley noted, his team is almost completely different than last season.
“Coach K and Billy Donovan, the last two coaches to do it, they returned pretty much intact an entire, dominant team,” Hurley said. “We’ve done this while losing five of our top seven, or whatever it was, scorers, and only taking one in the (transfer) portal. So (we’ve) doing it through player development, been doing it through trusting freshmen, strategic portal, it was different.”
One of these key freshmen is guard Stephon Castle, one of the country’s top
two-way players who scored 21 points and grabbed 5 rebounds in the 86-72 Final Four win against No. 4 Alabama on Saturday. He’s a projected NBA draft lottery pick.
The focus of the game will be on the front-court matchup between UConn’s 7-2 center Donovan Clingan and Purdue 7-4 center Zach Edey, who is the twotime men’s college basketball player of the year. It’s a battle of kaiju’s.
This season, Clingan has taken on players like St. John’s center Joel Soriano (6-11), Creighton center Ryan Kalkbrenner (7-1) and Kansas center Hunter Dickinson (7-2). But 7-4 is 7-4. Clingan is eager to take on Edey.
“Obviously, he’s a little bigger than the rest,” Clingan said. “But I just got to have a killer mindset going into this game. Just try to dominate every way I can. This is why I play this game. I love big battles.”
“I came to UConn to compete against the best of the best, challenge myself,” Clingan added. “I’m very excited for the matchup. He’s a real good player, a lot of respect for him. Just got to lock in and keep watching film.”
That film preparation started the moment the Huskies hopped on their bus to head back to their hotel Saturday
night, Hurley said. Not a moment to waste. There’s a lot at stake for UConn.
Sometimes in sports, coaches can be superstitious. A lot of them don’t like to talk hypotheticals, wary that some sports god will come down and curse them for thinking ahead.
It’s the whole “one game at a time” cliché that is rampant in press conferences.
Yet Hurley decided to approach the topic of winning back-to-back headon with his players. And why not? He’s got things covered with his own personal superstition: As he did last year in the tournament, Hurley is wearing the same lucky boxers for each game.
“We did talk about, like, reigning and defending more than I was told to,” Hurley said. “Actually, we talked a lot about with Tristen (Newton), Donovan and (Alex) Karaban, was like you have a chance to make history at a place that’s impossible to make history. That was probably what we leaned into a lot with that returning core that could have been complacent because been there, done that. Final Four, national championships, I did it already, why do I got to push so hard? You got a chance to make history at a place that’s impossible to make history.”