Think about the recent history of UConn basketball.
Start around the early 1990s, when Jim Calhoun’s hard work as the Huskies’ new, young coach began to show. UConn was on the cusp of a Final Four appearance almost every season, and the Huskies were a legitimate contender in the Big East Conference.
Since 1999, three national championships in four trips to the Final Four have brought pride to a state that does not have a lot of athletic achievement to boast about outside of the basketball excellence in Storrs.
The weird thing about those three championships is that only one of them was expected at the beginning of the season.
In 1999, the Huskies truly shocked the world. A lineup of Khalid El-Amin, Rip Hamilton, Kevin Freeman, Jake Voskhul and Souleymane Wane with guys like Rashmael Jones and Edmund Saunders on the bench was bound to be in the national title talk. But against a team in Duke – the team that had dominated its way to Florida with one of the greatest teams in recent memory – no one expected them to win.
In 2004, the story was different. UConn was supposed to be the dominant force in college basketball. Even an early loss to Georgia Tech didn’t dissuade many people, and the Huskies got revenge in the title game.
In November 2010, I remember sitting by a fire with Pat and a few of our friends. I looked down at my phone. “Hey dude,” I said, “we beat Michigan State!”
At that moment, we knew the team could be special. The next day, led by Kemba Walker, the Huskies beat Kentucky to win the Maui Invitational.
A few months later, they won five games in five days to win the Big East Tournament.
A few weeks after that, I saw a piano burn outside my dorm room after winning the national championship.
Anything can happen in college basketball. The top team to start the year or in the tournament doesn’t always win, see UConn of 2006, 2009 and 2012.
The Huskies are right where they should be, right in their comfort zone – No. 18 in the Associated Press Poll with two conference opponents ahead of them and picked second in the American Athletic Conference Preseason Coaches’ Poll.
This is where UConn likes to play. No one is talking about them much outside of Connecticut. Everything is Kentucky this and Andrew Wiggins that. In the AAC, they are playing in the shadow of the defending national champion, a team that returns Chane Behanan, Montrezl Harrell and the man that ESPN: The Magazine referred to this week as “Russdiculous.”
That is fine. Rankings are arbitrary. Preseason predictions are arbitrary. Analysis is sometimes arbitrary. What matters is that come mid-April, one team will stand on the podium in Dallas. One team will receive the national championship trophy from Mark Emmert.
That team could easily be UConn.
There is no denying the talent of Kentucky, Louisville, Kansas, Michigan State, Duke and Oklahoma State, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. College basketball is loaded this season. There is talent from top to nearly the bottom in every conference, including the newly-formed American.
So why not UConn? Why not a team that despite a postseason ban last season went 20-10? Why not a team that returns all of its core players? Why not a team that only got better with the addition of three talented freshmen and a transfer 1,000-point scorer? Why not a team whose coach captivated an entire fanbase by keeping to his word that his team wouldn’t take the escalator because it’s for cowards?
The 2004 Red Sox were a good team, but no one thought they were good enough to win the World Series. Throughout their run at history, pitcher Curt Schilling would ask, “Why not us?”
That is a question that will be asked across UConn Country over the next seven months.
Why not us? Why not UConn?
Well, it just might be us. After all, the men need to start putting some more banners up before the women start hogging all the rafter space.
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