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Connecticut remained the top dog in college basketball on Monday night, but Huskies head coach Dan Hurley reminded everyone that there’s more.
“For the last 25, 30 years, UConn’s been running college basketball, and I see all the former champs over there,” Hurley told CBS Sports after a 75-60 dispatch of Purdue in the NCAA Championship game. “We’ve been running college basketball the last 30 years. Let’s go.”
Both the men’s and women’s programs have seen a lion’s share of success since 1995 among all programs. The Huskies women’s team has dominated the sport with a record 11 national titles, and the men’s program is passing other blue bloods of late.
UConn Now in the Top 3 Among Blue Bloods
The UConn men’s program won its sixth national title since 1999 — more than anyone else in that span. Other blue bloods such as Duke and North Carolina have three titles.
The Huskies passed Duke for national titles on Monday night in Glendale, Arizona, and tied UNC for six titles — the third most ever. UConn only trails Kentucky‘s eight crowns and UCLA‘s 11 championships.
Kentucky has one title since 1999, and UCLA hasn’t won it all since 1995. UConn also joined the Wildcats and Bruins in an elite group of programs with back-to-back or consecutive titles.
Only seven programs have ever pulled it off with Florida as the last one in 2006 and 2007. The Huskies not only became the first in 17 years to do, but UConn “states a case for one of the best two-year runs in NCAA history” as ESPN’s Pete Thamel put it.
UConn won games in the 2024 NCAA Tournament by an average of 23.3 points, and the Huskies won by 20 points per game in 2023 for the tournament as Thamel points out. The Huskies finished 37-3 this season after a 31-8 mark the year before.
How UConn Became the Biggest Blue Blood Since 1999
It’s the latest of UConn’s dominant nearly 30-year run as Hurley described it. UConnn knocked on the door of the Final Four in the 1990s with four Elite Eight appearances as the fourth one worked out.
Former Huskies head coach Jim Calhoun led the charge of bringing the program back to national relevance from 1986 to 2012. Richard Hamilton put the Huskies over the top on the court in 1999 for the first title before his NBA career from 1999 to 2013.
UConn won it all again in 2004 and 2011 under Calhoun when he had stars such as Ben Gordon in 2004 and Kemba Walker in 2011. From Calhoun’s first title to his retirement in 2012, the Huskies won 20 or more games in all but one season and reached the Big Dance 11 times in that span.
Kevin Ollie took the torch as the head coach in 2012, and he kept the Huskies riding high with another title in 2014. That UConn squad had Shabazz Napier, DeAndre Daniels, and Ryan Boatright leading the way.
While UConn had a decade-long title drought until Monday night in Glendale, the Huskies remained strong on the national hoops map. UConn had seven winning seasons and five NCAA Tournament appearances in that span despite a two-year probation along the way.
Hurley took over as the head coach and led the program out of its slump. After a 16-17 season in his first year, the Huskies haven’t missed a beat from the program’s success since 1999.
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