A few months later, sharpshooter Jordan Hawkins did the same. The following spring, big man Adama Sanogo chose UConn after a recruiting battle with Seton Hall and Maryland that got sweaty at the end. That was three months after Connecticut’s administration made the decision that its jewel of a men’s basketball program couldn’t stay in the AAC any longer and joined the new Big East. This guy, a former top-50 recruit, committed to the Huskies on Oct. It doesn't mean it won’t work for other people, but it wasn’t working for us.”Īs the UConn starters exited for the final time Monday in the final minute of a 76-59 national championship victory over San Diego State, Hurley pointed at Andre Jackson, Jr., turned to his team's fan section at NRG Stadium and yelled, “This guy! This guy!” And we had to be successful recruiting against the Big East and the ACC, and we were in the AAC and it just wasn’t working. “It’s a very competitive league, but in the northeast and particular in New England and the Tri-State area, that league did not resonate. “You have to be able to recruit,” Connecticut athletics director David Benedict said. It’s not that the AAC was a bad conference, especially with some quality basketball schools like Houston, Memphis and Cincinnati. With no interest from the Big Ten or ACC, UConn was suddenly stuck in a league with no geographic attachments and no historic rivals. ![]() ![]() From its once proud place in the original Big East, duking it out with Georgetown and Villanova and Providence and Seton Hall in a league where basketball mattered more than anything, here the Huskies were taking January road trips to Tulsa and Central Florida.Īnd they were doing it because football ambitions had led them to the American Athletic Conference, the landing spot for the remnants of the Big East after the so-called “Catholic Seven” decided they needed to control their own destiny and stop being disrupted by a sport they didn’t care about. When Dan Hurley arrived as the Huskies’ basketball coach in 2018, UConn had arguably been the biggest loser of the decade in conference realignment. And at the most crucial time in the history of college sports to be relevant in football, UConn was bad at it. ![]() HOUSTON - For all the grandeur of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, football is the engine of college athletics.
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