Has Uconn become the ‘villain’? If so, Hurley doesn’t mind
NEW YORK— As the final seconds ticked off the clock at Amica Mutual Pavilion last Saturday, the Uconn men’s basketball team made sure to bid the hostile Providence crowd good riddance. Players waved, some danced, and their head coach was sure to remind those who hounded and heckled him of the national championship ring he won a year ago.
Dan Hurley was escorted by a pair of security guards and a police officer as he pointed out a specific spectator, “Look at this guy,” he said. “Come here, you’ll get hurt.” It wasn’t Hurley’s first testy exchange with opposing fans this season, or his second. There was a similar heckler at Butler, and, of course, the fan leaning over the railing at Creighton.
Sports “villains” are born from years of sustained success, consistency in dominance. This year, it feels, Uconn’s bid for back-to-back national titles has put the program closer to that status than ever before. It begs the question:
Is Uconn becoming the team people love to hate?
“I think teams that tend to have a lot of success in terms of winning, and then you add in some fiery personalities… Yeah, you become the heel. You become the bad guy, the villain. And then I think that people in general are more aggressive, I think people are very aggressive on social media, I think fans have tended to get more aggressive at games,” Hurley said.
“The temperature’s been turned up across the board.”
Uconn doesn’t have the same villain arc as the ‘old money’ blue bloods, the ones that established themselves decades before Jim Calhoun built Uconn up to crash the party.
With apologies to UCLA – which is held up in similar regard to Uconn’s women’s basketball program, with reverence for its role in building the sport – any list of villains, especially in college basketball, will include Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky, Kansas and Indiana.
Minds immediately race to the likes of Christian Laettner or Bobby Knight, Tyler Hansbrough or John Calipari.
Uconn, now tied in national titles (5) with Duke and Indiana, behind only UCLA (11), Kentucky (8) and North
Carolina (6), has started to accumulate some characters of its own. Now the fist pumps and the celebrations and their “in-your-face” style has put the Huskies in that category with the rest of the blue bloods, the New York Yankees, New England Patriots and now, to some, the Kansas City Chiefs — winners that every other fanbase loves to see lose.
“Uconn has become the villain, and I mean that in the most complimentary of ways,” FOX Sports broadcaster and national basketball reporter John Fanta told The Courant. “When you set a Big East record with 18 wins and you have a charismatic coach like Dan and you're the reigning national champions, you're not going to be liked. So are they the villain? Yes. That's life when you're like the great New York Yankees, when you're like those terrific teams that win championships, because life's tough being the hunted.
“I think what's different about this that's resulted in them being a villain is Uconn has a fighting mentality. They're not afraid of anybody, and they're not gonna back down to people.”
On the court, Hurley is an antagonist. He has his sideline antics and arguments with referees, which— ask Rick Pitino— can get under the skin of an opponent and its fans. He leaves starters in the game sometimes until the final minute, whether he's up two or 20, and he'll hype up the home crowd, and get into it with fans on the road.
But off the court, Hurley's old-school mentality of toughness and hard work is coupled with a willingness to express his emotions, to not shy away from his personal experiences with things like mental health and spirituality.
“Dan Hurley is not going to take (expletive) from anybody,” Fanta said. “Dan Hurley is himself, and the reason why his teams are successful is because he doesn't try to be somebody else. Some coaches try to be somebody that they're not. Dan Hurley is him. He is only him. He is himself every time he steps on those sidelines, he's energetic, he's passionate — does he teeter with the line? Yeah. That's the stuff of winners. That's how he does it. His passion is reflected on the court by how hard his teams play, and if he wasn't that way, his team would not have won a national championship and would not have a chance to repeat as champions.”
Hurley is back in the building where, just last year, he struck plenty of nerves with comments claiming ownership of Madison Square Garden before losing in the Big East semifinal for the third year in a row. This time, his top-seeded team is back and it may be better.
So too is the opposition.
“If your fanbase loves you, loves you, loves you, and the people you're competing against really despise you,” Hurley said, shortly after accepting his Big East Coach of the Year Award. “You're probably doing pretty good.”