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Ryan McGee
Multiple Authors
INDIANAPOLIS, IN — Before we get started, a question. Why do they even bother giving Dan Hurley a courtside stool? All the man needs is a tray. Really, all he needs is a paper clip. Because all that occupied the knee-high stool that had been so carefully placed alongside the UConn Huskies bench by the NCAA for Saturday’s Final Four semifinal matchup with Illinois was one lone leaf of white paper: the Huskies play sheet. And even that sat there only between every Hurley pickup — check, recheck, and recheck again — before it ended up half-crumpled and flung aside as Connecticut teetered on the brink of blowing a late lead to the Ilini.
When one’s assignment is to spend an entire game watching college basketball’s most animated, most demonstrative and — because of all the above — most divisive men’s basketball coach, one walks away from that assignment feeling like that sheet of paper: Worn out.
But Dan Hurley is also impossible not to watch.
For the record, his first f-bomb came at the 55-second mark. Not 55 seconds remaining — 55 seconds into the game. That’s when he looked at a member of the three-man officiating crew — worth noting here that Hurley made headlines one week earlier for “headbutting” a ref at the end of UConn’s Elite Eight win over Duke — and asked, very loudly, “What the f— was that?!”
From there, Hurley seemed to gently turn up the wick with the officials. The early focus was on Ron Groover, who worked four UConn games during the regular season…and three of those were among the team’s five losses. Hurley’s first real rant was pointed in Groover’s direction, disputing his team’s first foul of the game. Groover asked him to calm down. Hurley continued. Groover gave him a look. Hurley continued. Groover turned toward him. Hurley raised his hands in surrender and said, “Yeah, I know. Calm down.” And they both laughed.
The two-handed “calm down” is a theme when it comes to Hurley and those charged with keeping him in line. He yells. They give him the hand signal. He calms down. For a moment, anyway.
As the officials made their natural position rotations and took turns at the station directly in front of the UConn bench, the UConn coach rotated his focus to each of them.
To Marques Pettigrew: “Are you kidding me, Marques? That’s what we’re calling now?”
Calm down.
To Paul Szelc, the official who looks like he could be the twin brother of Groover, who gave Hurley a tug on the pants leg to let him know he had crossed over the midcourt line into Illinois territory. “Come on, Paul. I know where the line is!” Calm down. Then, after looking down at his feet. “Oh, s–t. Okay. Yeah, there it is.”
But check this plot twist. For every “calm down” the coach received from the officials, he distributed at least five times as many of them to his own team. Coming out of a timeout he grabbed guard Solo Ball, gave him the two-handed push signal, and said, “Calm down. This is your shot.” Ball immediately stroked a 3-pointer. Determined to out-slug Illinois in an old school half-court game, Hurley signaled “calm down” whenever scrambles began and the temptation rose to rush the gameplan — the one on that stool — instead of grinding it out as planned.
“I think people see the clips on the internet and think it’s all crazy all the time,” explained forward Alex Karaban, who pointed to a moment late in the first half where he got the two-handed signal, and immediately, yes, calmly, knocked down a 3 of his own. “But he does such a great job of keeping us in the moment. Run our plays and play our game.”
Hurley’s sideline game during UConn’s outings can also be broken down into plays. A one-sheet portfolio of go-to moves.
There’s The Thinker. Straight out of Rodin, with the chin on the hand. Though unlike the bronze sculpture, Hurley usually keeps his mouth open, always at the ready for some shouting.
There’s the Big Sniff, when he snorts a breath in through his nasal cavity, and the Big Huff, when he blows out of his mouth and nose simultaneously, like a brahma bull, as he did in the closing minutes to start a media timeout. He walked an entire lap around his huddling team and followed the Big Huff with an all-caps “F—!”
The Use The Force is his go-to body language gyration, as he attempts to force his physical will on the basketball universe — especially when his team is crashing the boards in search of a defensive rebound. He subtly herks and jerks his shoulders and face, complimented by a series of mini knee bends, like Luke Skywalker trying to magically retrieve an object from across the room using only the movements of his body.
There’s the Too Hot, when the coach pulls his lips back to expose his teeth as if he just bit into a ghost pepper. There’s arms folded in front. Hands clasped behind the back. A two-thumb test of his belt loops. His hands in his pockets with a look of disbelief. His hands in his pockets with a restricted shrug toward one of his players. Let’s call that the “Really, dude?” There is also a hands-in-pockets hop.
And considering what we have recently learned about his affinity for the same thread-bare lucky winning suit that he wears on the sideline in the name of superstition, all that belt loop and pocket play feels like flirting with wardrobe malfunction disaster.
“Yeah,” Hurley admitted after the game, having swapped out his dress shirt for a Huskies t-shirt, “I’m going to have to find a tailor here in Indianapolis.”
During one amazing stretch in the middle of the second half, Hurley managed to cram a real-time on-the-clock two minutes with 96 steps, one mini-leap, six one-finger points, a pair of two-handed calm-downs, seven looks at the play sheet, and a 30-second crouch next to his stool, during which he drank from two cups of water and took seven looks at the sheet. When he finally stood up he did it with such force that he nearly launched himself backwards off the floor into the sunken bench area.
“We all keep an eye on him with this raised floor,” freshman guard Braylon Mullins said, chuckling.
Early in the second half, Mullins missed an ill-advised one-hander off the baseline. His coach reacted with a move we’ll call the Final Straw. A two-handed exasperated rub of his very bald head. Mullins, who scored 15 points but struggled from the field throughout the second stanza, elicited the Final Straw a few times. With 6:36 remaining in the game, Illinois having cut the lead to six and the very orange crowd taking over the energy in the stadium, Mullins missed on another ugly shot, followed by a would-be UConn break that ended in a turnover, followed by a terrible layup miss by Ball.
And that’s when the Final Straw hands moved off the head to sling the play sheet into that nether region between his unused stool and the Huskies bench. But like the water cups next to the stool that always magically refilled and his glasses that were always magically returned to the stool, so returned the sheet of paper.
(Side note: About those glasses. They look like readers. And he is 53 years old, so needing readers would make sense. But when he looked at the play sheet, he didn’t use the glasses, and whenever he looked down court, he did use the glasses, but sometimes he wouldn’t use the glasses to look far away and sometimes he did use the glasses to read the sheet, so … huh?)
He only had to be restrained by his staff once. For Hurley that’s a good night. It came with 12 minutes remaining, when center Eric Reibe checked in for UConn and immediately picked up his third foul on an illegal screen.
“HOW CAN THAN EVEN BE POSSIBLE RIGHT NOW?” Hurley bellowed.
“Coach,” his staff said, as do the officials. “Calm down.”
The final 43 seconds contained a blend of everything we had witnessed from Hurley all night long. A sniff. A snort. A herky jerk. The hands. A warning to his team to calm down that included “No fouls!” on repeat. He made a point to, ahem, point at each one of them individually.
With 14.5 seconds remaining, he once again felt a little tug on his lucky suit. The game ends the way it began. An exchange with Groover, who is stealthily clinging to the tail of the coach’s jacket to keep him from wandering off again. Hurley wound up to overreact but instead looked down at his feet and then over to the official.
“Thanks, Ron.”
A steal by forward Jacob Ross as the clock wound down iced the win and UConn’s third trip to the national title game in four years. Even before that clock hit all zeroes, Hurley was embracing Illinois head coach Brad Underwood (who, for the record, used his stool a lot). Hurley then hugged every Illinois player, taking time to speak eye-to-eye with each one.
The head coach strutted to the other side of the floor, waving to the Connecticut fans, pausing from chomping on his gum to stick his tongue out for a CBS camera … wait, he had gum in his mouth this whole time?!
Finally, he seized up Mullins and — wait for it — rubbed heads with him just like he did the referee after Mullins’ game winner against Duke one week earlier. Thus began the boos. So many boos. And thus began the smiles.
“Are they booing the headbutt?” Hurley asked, knowing full well he was being broadcast live on the Lucas Oil Stadium big screen. “I don’t know what they’re booing.”
Yeah, he did. They were booing him. And after the TV cameras were done, before jogging over to hug it out with the parents of his players sitting behind the bench, he turned to those doing the booing.
What did he say? You know exactly what he said.
“Oh, calm down.”
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