STORRS – Dan Hurley turned the corner into the lobby of the Werth Basketball Center and saw a large gathering of reporters and news cameras huddled around the spot near the wall where he was meant to stand and speak. He was going to wrap up the 2024-25 UConn men’s basketball season and give a look into what’s ahead. “Oh wow, I’m not retiring,” he quipped when he saw the size of the crowd.
UConn has been one of the top stories in college basketball since Sunday’s second-round exit at the hands of No. 1 seed Florida. But rather than the program’s historic run being at the center of the conversation, it was Hurley’s passion and emotion boiling over on the way off the court that dominated online chatter.
The video of Hurley yelling to the Baylor team before it took the court for its game against Duke, saying, “I hope they don’t (expletive) you like they (expletive) us,” had been viewed more than 1.3 million times by Wednesday afternoon. And the cycle of talking heads psychoanalyzing the Huskies’ head coach started all over again.
“Those are three great officials on that game, so, although I said something in the heat of the moment, in an area of the arena that in pretty much every game I’ve ever coached in college has been media-free. Past the tunnel, by the locker rooms, in the hallway where the coaches go, that’s for the combatants, that’s for the competitors. That’s not for camera phones,” he said.
“Just relative to that, those were thre.
