BIG BEASTS

Hurley’s Huskies echo dominance of ’85 Hoyas OPEN MIKE

IT’S BEEN a rough week for the Big East as a whole. The NCAA Tournament committee invited just three of the 11 teams to the Dance, an absurd display of disrespect that was as stunning as it was galling.

If that was supposed to be some kind of subliminal message that the Big East isn’t what it once was, though, it didn’t take. All three teams that did make it feel like genuine threats to make the Sweet 16, if not further. That’s the hallmark of the Big East as we remember it, after all: beating up each other for three months, then unleashing its wrath on the rest of the country. It’s like Dan Hurley said right around this time last year:

“Once we stop playing Big East schools,” he said, “we feel we can make a run.”

In that way, it actually does conjure 1985, especially if Creighton and Marquette can keep pace in their respective regionals the way UConn seems intent on.

More important, and more relevant, is this:

In Connecticut, the Big East finally has a team that conjures the memory of the great Georgetown teams that defined the league in its infancy and adolescence.

Mind you, the league has had plenty of terrific teams in the years since. UConn itself has won multiple titles. Syracuse won once, went to multiple Final Fours. There have been plenty of great teams.

But if you remember the heart of Georgetown’s dominance, you remember that the Hoyas were on a different plane from “great.” They were dominant. They were intimidating. They were coached by a man whose personality made him an eternal source of conversation — and sometimes consternation. They had a passionate fan base. And an equally fervent mass of fans who rooted against them.

UConn, like ’85 Georgetown, is the defending national champion, and that alone will generate a slew of detractors — especially in an event like the NCAA Tournament in which underdogs are the darlings and upsets the featured attraction. For two years those Hoyas grimly dispatched foe after foe in the NCAA (and probably would have finished the job in ’85 if they’d drawn anyone other than a fellow Big East rival, Villanova, in the championship game). Last year’s joyride through the brackets for UConn felt especially familiar. They barely broke a sweat in rolling over team after team. And this year’s run has been even more systematic. It took about six minutes Friday in their tournament opener in Brooklyn to determine Stetson wasn’t going to be any kind of hindrance. They are good everywhere — frontcourt, backcourt, bench, same as Georgetown was, when in ’84 they became the first team to regularly use 10 and 11 players and win a title.

Mostly, though, for the first time, in Dan Hurley, there is a coach with the profile to approach, if not quite match, John Thompson.

Yes, the Big East has had a parade of big-time coaches for years, too many to count. But Thompson was unique. Everything he said and did in those days was cast through a microscope. Every move he made was interpreted and analyzed. None of those things would have mattered if he also wasn’t excellent at his job, and if his team wasn’t the standard of excellence for multiple years. It’s the same with Hurley — who was a star from the moment he walked onto the Wagner campus 14 years ago, who brought Rhode Island to a rarefied place of prominence and who has fulfilled every best-case wish during his time in Storrs. His teams are relentlessly enjoyable to watch and just plain relentless, too. But Hurley, like Thompson before him, is also a lightning rod for opponents. He is the same feisty personality that made him an overachieving player at Seton Hall. He doesn’t back down from anything, or anybody, so that makes him an easy target. Some of it is unfair. Some of it he brings on himself. All of it makes for a basketball experience unlike any other in the sport. And unlike anything we’ve seen in the Big East since the Hoyas ruled the land, even on those nights when they might not win the game. Infrequent as they were.