For basketball, UCONN is where they need to be. Their football program is going to die with this move unless some P5 takes pity on them or they drop it in the MAC.
But this isn't true. The only old rivals they're back with are St. John's, Providence, Villanova, and Georgetown. They complained about having to make a trip to Tulsa to play basketball...well no they're back to going to Milwaukee in the dead of winter and Omaha. Those 2 cities make people who live there in winter cringe. Their fans will be elated until they start getting whacked by Creighton and Villanova by 20+ pts every time out.
I did too. Lived about 20 minutes from Providence and every PC game was on local TV (Pitino the coach, Billy Donovan, Pops Lewis, Delray Brooks, Marty Conlan, and Jacek Duda were the starters). This was the height of the Big East's dominance in college bastketball. St. John's, Georgetown, and Syracuse were final four contenders for 4-5 straight years, Villanova and PC were a couple of upstarts, BC had Dana Barros who was a bloody monster...and Calhoun was still coaching at Northeastern (Reggie Lewis) before moving to UCONN. Oh, and you had the most colorful collection of college coaches I think I've ever seen....John Thompson, Boeheim, Carnesseca, Massimino, Pitino, PJ Carlissimo, Gary Williams (BC).If everyone could stop looking at this through the eyes of a boyfriend/girlfriend who got dumped for someone else I think you would understand.......I grew up in the middle of it, it all makes sense to me.
My griping about them and taking joy when they take an L to a lesser team is more about them and their constant complaints and blaming TU for their woes vs the fact they hired a coach who couldn't coach himself out of a paper bag. Memphis and UCONN both hired former star players with NBA pedigrees who both felt they didn't need to actually coach but just recruit. Sure they had plenty of star recruits on their teams...where'd it get them? If UCONN had simply said they needed to be back in an east coast primarily conference, then fine...but they had a couple coaches and administrators mention us as the blame "it's hard to recruit kids to play games in Tulsa".
And Bouknight is out for a while. He had surgery last week on his elbow. Conservative estimates are he's back in 4 weeks. They're about to be big time hurting again...and the questions will flow again about Hurley's ability to coach them.
Hard to say that when Aresco was pretty open about building the AAC around them despite them really only ever being relevant in basketball. And if I recall the AAC formation talks, UCONN tried to leverage themselves somewhat like Texas did in the Big XII that drive Nebraksa, Colorado, and A&M away. There really wasn't anyone in the conference who could really leverage anything. UCONN and Cincinnati wanted to be elsewhere but no one wanted them. Houston and UCF try to leverage themselves now but the sub-par academics those schools have really hurt their chances of getting into a P5 conference (and those conferences have some academic dogs in them but those were also original members). UCONN is about to feel a world of budget hurt when they're not getting any $$$ from the networks for football and the $ from basketball contracts is a pittance compared to what they would have received by remaining in the AAC.
So did Larry Coker but in the end it is what that coach does building talent, winning and keeping the players and school out of trouble.
Their merchandising contract is up soon too. That was a ten year deal with Calhoun iirc. I could be wrong. But yeah. Cupboard is gonna be bare up there soon. Makes you wonder how they can maintain expectations from the Olympics and the women’s sports .
Geno could negotiate his own apparel deal for the women's team. His recruiting class this year was excellent and they're in line to land a couple top 10 recruits for next year.
I did acknowledge that...and we all saw 1st hand what happened to Ollie when the Calhoun players started leaving and graduating.
Gold - yes I remember but a number of former players were not among those cheerleading for his return.
