The clinically overbearing college basketball coach used to be one of the sport’s overarching memes and central characters, but no longer. They’re still out there, but they’ve become minor players thanks to the revolution that followed players winning the right to get paid and transfer from program to program—only a nonagenarian or certified delusional still refers to them as "schools" in this context—until they get the fit or payday they want. In this new order, the general managers and athletic directors who make sure those payments come on time have taken over the top of the perception food chain; for every Tom Izzo, Rick Barnes, or Matt Painter, there is an army of younger, more mobile, and less martinet-ish new guys who lead with the smooth for the new generation of employees—less coaches than managers.
Fortunately, though, there is still Dan Hurley to corner the tantrum market.
The UConn coach, who was aggressively obnoxious in victory over the past two seasons, reminded us Sunday how defeat removes the veneer of permissible disagreeableness and still somehow enshrines it. As he walked off the floor in the wake of the Huskies' 77-75 loss to Florida, Hurley offered a word of advice to the Baylor team waiting in the tunnel before their upcoming game against Duke; whether that advice qualifies as pithy depends upon how much pith you can find in a furious adult saying, “I hope they don’t fuck you like they fucked us, Baylor.” Shortly after that, Hurley would fight back tears in a postgame interview in which he said that "there's honor in the way we went out." A little while after that, when video of Hurley's meltdown made its way online, UConn's Director of Communications Bobby Mullen reportedly confronted the College Sports Live reporter who'd recorded the video, demanding that he take it down and threatening to "ruin his life."
The Bears went on to get blown out by Duke, but that loss wasn't for lack of trying from them or from Hurley, who is indeed trying even in the best of times. Hurley has been more or less this out of pocket all year long, as a compendium of his hyperbehavioral snaps this season curated by Yahoo's Jason Owens demonstrates. During his months-long journey to the outer edges of our tolerance, Hurley has managed to target both fans and officials in the most decisively GRA (gaping rectal aperture) manner imaginable. The best of these probably was when Hurley screamed at an official, "Don't you turn your back on me! I'm the best coach in the fucking sport!" That happened in a game UConn led by 10. In the first half. Against a team that finished 14-19. Asked about it after the fact, Hurley admitted that he was going to look "like an asshole" in the postgame presser; he also managed to complain that Butler coach Thad Matta was out of the coaching box.
Most people would find this sort of behavior unbecoming of someone at the top of their profession, but these are college basketball coaches we're speaking of here. This is part of the bit, even still; acting like the kind of person you wouldn't accept a car from if the person next to him was offering a breath mint instead is, for Hurley, finally just a matter of honoring the shtick. This kind of glowering vaudeville act is endangered, but not yet extinct: Think of watching John Calipari and Rick Pitino pretending not to hate each other in Arkansas' 75-66 win over St. John's as a bit of a period piece between two men who wear their petulance as the ID badge they need to get past security. Even then, though, those antediluvians titans didn't bring the Hurley. Hurley remains one of the very few coaches who consistently brings the Hurley. Being loud and pissy and out of pocket is brand management.
The men's college basketball game is changing, you see. The game is now almost entirely south of Ann Arbor and east of Lubbock, and the coaches have to be more oleaginous and less overtly bullying. Every public opportunity is an audition beamed into the transfer portal; every pitched fit is a potential parent being bummed out or put off. Money can make a lot of that go away, of course, but there too the coach is less important than the AD or GM, or for that matter the agent. Izzo may be the last of the recognizable one-school lifers on the top tier of the sport, and nine of the 16 coaches in the second weekend of the tournament have been hired since 2021. Of those same 16, only two, Izzo and Painter, have been at their current outposts for more than a decade.
But Hurley is the one we think of most now, even as his Huskies capped a frustrating season by crapping out at the top 32. We think of him because he never misses an opportunity to blow out his flanges somewhere that a videographer can catch it, and him. When he says he wishes the cameras would be aimed at the other coach as often as it is at him, he is almost certainly lying through both forks of his tongue. He'd offer to strangle a too-slow-on-the-trigger timekeeper while wearing a propeller beanie and flower-print overalls if it got him noticed. He is, in that cringeworthy way, absolutely presidential material.
And cringeworthiness is an eye-of-the-beholder cryptocurrency. Hurley, two decades younger than Izzo in age and job experience, nevertheless feels like an escapee from a time when coaching behavior was measured by chairs thrown for distance and accuracy, and when petulance in defeat was just petulance in victory only with the score reversed. One thrills to imagine how he would have handled winning that Florida game, knowing that he would be facing Maryland this Thursday and their coach Kevin Willard, who cheerfully described himself to The Athletic's Lindsay Schnell this way: “I’m anal and I’m an A-hole. If I see something I want fixed and done better, I’m going to say it. … I grew up in New York City and spent the last 15 years in New York and New Jersey. Unfortunately, I have no filter.”
So maybe Hurley isn't part of a dying breed after all, but just a bridge to the next generation of GRAs. Long may they drop trou in an attempt to win the cheap off-ball foul or charging call that will validate themselves as the maximally gluteal human beings they aspire to be, whether the opponent is Florida or, gasp, merely Butler.
