There are lots of ways to illustrate how well Dan Hurley is running UConn’s program — but perhaps the best is to highlight how he took a team that was unranked last preseason, won the national championship with it, lost three of his top six scorers, replaced them with transfers and freshmen and just secured the outright Big East title with a week left in the regular season despite the conference having two other top-15 teams.
Incredible.
The list of CBS Sports National Coach of the Year candidates is filled with awesome names — names like Matt Painter (Purdue), Kelvin Sampson (Houston), Danny Sprinkle (Utah State), Lamont Paris (South Carolina) and Kyle Smith (Washington State). But with all due respect to those men, my COY ballot, if submitted today, would likely start with Dan Hurley for all of the reasons stated above. He’s 26-3 this season following Sunday’s 91-61 victory over Seton Hall that secured UConn’s first outright Big East title since 1999.
“The hardest thing to do,” Hurley said afterward, “is to be excellent over the course of three, four months in a brutal, hard league.”
UConn remains No. 2 in Monday morning’s updated CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings, where Purdue is No. 1 for the 13th consecutive day based on my opinion that Purdue has the sport’s best body of work. The Boilermakers own eight wins over schools ranked in the top 25 of the NET. Nobody can match that. They’re also No. 1 in strength of record. (I rest my case.)
But even if I do prefer Purdue’s body of work to everybody else’s, I can still acknowledge that there is very little difference between Purdue’s resume, UConn’s resume and Houston’s resume.
It’s close.
But the more-important thing to understand is that there’s A LOT of difference between the resumes belonging to Purdue, UConn and Houston — and the resumes belonging to everybody else. Simply put, at this point, it’s hard to imagine a 68-team bracket that doesn’t have Purdue, UConn and Houston as No. 1 seeds on Selection Sunday. They’re all 10-3 in Quadrant 1 with zero losses outside of Q1. They’re all great. Any of them could still end up as the No. 1 overall seed — but all of them will be No. 1 seeds in the 2024 NCAA Tournament barring a late collapse that seems wildly unlikely.
Monday’s Top 25 And 1 rankings
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