"I owe it to the people": Dan Hurley expresses his "pathological, sick, obsessive" need to three-peat
UConn coach Dan Hurley is on a mission to lead the Huskies to their third consecutive national title this coming season. They claimed their second championship in a row last season, and they are the first team to achieve the feat since Florida in 2006-07.
They now have a bigger goal this season: to three-peat. If they do, they will join John Wooden's UCLA teams in the elite group of college basketball teams that have achieved this.
Now, with an eye toward claiming a third straight NCAA crown, Dan Hurley opened up about the drive and fire that fuels his unrelenting quest for hoops glory during Big East Media Day on Wednesday.
"I probably mentioned it in the recruiting process to the transfers. "The season that we’re going to embark on is going to be rare in terms of what we can accomplish to join those UCLA teams from a historical opportunity and how you can’t give everything that you absolutely have to reach that level in sport," Hurley said.
"I owe it to the people that invest in me and invest in these players to literally drive the people around to you places that they don’t think they can get to in such a pathological, sick, obsessive way that you’re just pursuing championships so friggin hard," he added.
Dan Hurley's UConn went 37-3 overall last campaign, winning every tournament they played in, including the Big East championship and Empire Classic title.
The question now is whether they can continue their dominance after losing key players in Stephon Castle, Donovan Clingan, and Cam Spencer to the NBA this summer.
Dan Hurley gives his pick for the "best conference" in the country
Dan Hurley also shared his views on which conference he believes is the best, and he chose the Big East.
"I think [Big East] is the best roster of coaches in college basketball and it’s the best conference in the country," Hurley said on Media Day.
"And people that lay clam to being the best basketball conference in the country without championship trophy evidence of natties, I don’t know how you can stake claim to that when we’ve got four in the last eight years and back-to-back."
Half of the national championship trophies in the last ten years have been won by Big East schools, with Connecticut winning three and Villanova claiming two. The conference has a storied history, and Hurley's UConn can add to that this season.