The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Trick or Treat?
While excited to bring UConn back to the Big East, some are already having nightmares about facing the Huskies
How do Big East women’s basketball coaches feel about UConn returning?
Some are downright giddy to welcome back the game’s preeminent program, knowing the Huskies bring a cachet that can’t be found elsewhere.
Others are cautiously enthusiastic.
And then there’s Creighton’s Jim Flanery who, well, is already having nightmares about taking on Geno Auriemma’s Huskies.
“I actually had a dream early in the pandemic, probably April, and we were in a preseason tournament in Cancun, the Bahamas, or somewhere. We were supposed to play UConn in a non-con game,” Flanery said Thursday on a Zoom call for Big East media day. “We played our first game and I didn’t know when our second game was. I knew we were playing UConn, but I didn’t know what day or where it was.
And I’m wandering around the island and I run into Geno and Chris Dailey and boy, Geno was like 6-4 and he was built like a linebacker.
“Long story short, I was too chicken to ask him when we were supposed to play each other.”
Playing UConn tends to be an exercise in humility and appreciation. Flanery, who’s been at the helm for 18 seasons, got his first taste in a 96-60 shellacking at Gampel Pavilion in 2014.
“You’re going to find out that one, they have really great players, and two, they play the right way,” Flanery said. “They play really hard; they make you uncomfortable. There’s nothing that you don’t admire about the way that they play.”
DePaul’s Doug Bruno has fared worse than Flanery. He’s winless in 17 tries against his good friend, Auriemma, dating to 2006. Yet he continued scheduling UConn after the breakup of the old Big East because he believed there was a value in challenging the best.
Moving forward, that’s something that Bruno and others will get to do twice a year as the conference moves to a 20-game schedule.
“The other Power Five conferences all play each other usually only once,” Seton Hall coach Tony Bozzella said. “We play each other twice, a lot of times three times … That makes our league so much tougher. Now you’re adding UConn to play twice.”
It’s a lot to digest. That said, there’s an understanding that bringing the 11-time national champions into the mix will only elevate the conference and its profile. A conference that, mind you, was already pretty good. The Big East ranked sixth in conference RPI last year and had seven teams finish in the top 101 of the RPI.
“We were a strong conference without them,” Xavier coach Mel Moore said. “Now we add them, why can’t we be the best conference in the nation?”
Long ago, it was. The original Big East, born in 1979, grew into one of the most powerful conferences ever assembled. Though it collapsed some years ago under the weight of realignment, big-money football and TV greed, it managed to keep part of its fabric intact.
“Unlike all the other leagues that are primarily college football leagues — let’s not kid ourselves, they’re college football leagues — there’s tremendous number of college basketball schools. This is a basketball league,” Auriemma said. “So whatever success they’ve already had, which has been significant since we’ve been gone — DePaul has been really good, St. John’s has been an NCAA Tournament team, so has Seton Hall, so has Marquette, so has Creighton, and Villanova’s been always good — it’s not like we’re entering a league that doesn’t know anything about success.”
He continued: “At a lot of other places, don’t get me wrong, they just don’t care about women’s basketball. I don’t care what the ADs say, I don’t care what the presidents say. I’ve seen it first-hand, they just don’t care. I truly believe in my heart, in this conference, basketball is a passion of the ADs, of the presidents, it’s the DNA of the schools in this league. It’s why it’s so great to be in this league.”