UConn's dominance continues right into championship game

By Michael Cohen
Updated Apr 2, 2023 1:23 am ET

HOUSTON — As the final seconds melted in a game that was long since decided, Connecticut head coach Dan Hurley turned to the crowd and beckoned their roars. He encouraged them to climb to their feet — though everyone in the Huskies' cheering section was already standing — and then he spun back to the court where UConn was nearly finished dismantling Miami to hug his son, walk-on Andrew Hurley, in a representation of how secure this Final Four victory really was.

Fourth-seeded Connecticut stormed through the Hurricanes the same way it's dismantled everyone in this year's NCAA Tournament, an overwhelming combination of size and speed and strength and shooting that has forced five consecutive opponents into submission. On this night, against fifth-seeded Miami, the Huskies never trailed in a wire-to-wire, 72-59 victory that leaves them one win shy of a fifth national championship since 1999 — a number that is potentially two more than any other school can claim. San Diego State, the fifth seed from the South Region, is the only team standing in their way.

"There's a lot of teams that want to play Monday," center Adama Sanogo said. "It means a lot to us. It means everything we work for, the work has paid off. Still going and keep working and be able to go Monday night."

They advanced to the national title game despite what could have been crippling foul trouble for star playmaker Andre Jackson Jr., who sat for the final 15:46 of the first half, long before he scored a point or tallied his first assist. They advanced despite the lingering stomach issues of net-ripping shooting guard Jordan Hawkins, who was placed in isolation the day before the game and stayed in the hotel as the team held its final practice. They advanced despite intermittent bouts of sloppiness that resulted in UConn finishing with six more turnovers than Miami.

And, in all honesty, they still won rather easily.

Sanogo scored a game-high 21 points on 9-for-11 shooting. Hawkins, Sanogo and Alex Karaban combined for the same number of 3-pointers — seven — as Miami's entire team. And a group known for its ruggedly rapacious defense smothered the Hurricanes, who entered with the fifth-best offense in the country this season, into a 32.3% shooting performance.

"We were just all over our identity today," Hurley said. "Plus-9 on the glass. Obviously, the turnovers at times got a little bit sloppy, but we were sitting on that 20-plus assist number. We were hurting them on the inside. Hurting them from the perimeter. Obviously, the defense was the key, though. The effort that these guys gave defensively was unbelievable. What Adama did in his matchup with one of the most physical interior guys we've faced. What Tristen [Newton] was able to do in terms of his floor game, in his first half, in particular. And this guy next to me [Hawkins] who has felt like death the last two days, to be able to give us what he gave us, obviously these performances are why we're moving on."

That UConn's run through the West Regional coincided with Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim calendar, thrust Sanogo into the spotlight for another reason besides his high-level post moves. Sanogo is a practicing Muslim. He's observed Ramadan since high school, and the decision to continue abiding by the customs of his faith meant navigating the NCAA Tournament without eating or drinking from sunrise to sundown. It's a challenge Sanogo first experienced on the AAU circuit in high school.

On Thursday, when the Huskies met with the media for the first time, Sanogo outlined his plan for the late tipoff against Miami. He knew the sun was scheduled to set around 7:40 p.m. local time in Houston, and the game was slated to begin at 7:49 p.m. At that point, Sanogo said, he would break his fast with some coconut water and an orange.

A drawn-out second half between San Diego State and Florida Atlantic in the first semifinal — a game that ended on a wonderful buzzer-beater by Aztecs' guard Lamont Butler — pushed the start of UConn's game well beyond the sunset. Sanogo was already out on the court for warmups at 7:40 p.m., swapping passes with fellow big man Donovan Clingan. By 7:41 p.m., a member of Connecticut's support staff approached Sanogo to tell him the time. Sanogo jogged over to his team's bench, downed a few quick swigs from a blue NCAA cup and then loped directly into a post-up drill with his teammates. There was still plenty of time for a pregame snack in the locker room. 

Refreshed and ready, Sanogo imprinted himself on this game from the outset. He swished a pair of 3-pointers from the top of the key as Miami's starting center, Norchad Omier, sagged in the paint defensively. And on the sets when Sanogo occupied his more traditional position on the low block, a keen ability to seal defenders and finish through contact produced a flurry of easy buckets. He entered halftime with a game-high 13 points.

"You couldn't tell?" Miami head coach Jim Larranaga said when asked about his team's game plan for defending Sanogo. "Obviously what we tried to do not only didn't work, I couldn't even recognize it. I think, again, offensively we were out of sync, but defensively we were, too. Everybody was playing so hard to guard their man, there was no help like we intended. So they threw it over the top. He got a layup. They ran a ball screen. He rolled. He scored in that situation. He got offensive rebounds. He was blocking us out. So he's a terrific player. I think he earned all of his points. But I think we could have done a significantly better job on him if we could have executed our game plan."

What Sanogo gave Connecticut on the offensive end was supplemented by his gargantuan running mate, Clingan, the 7-foot-2 freshman who could have played for nearly any program he wanted but decided to stay home instead. Clingan starred at the same Bristol Central High School where his mother, Stacey Porrini Clingan, garnered more than 65 scholarship offers as a dominant 6-foot-4 center. Porrini Clingan reached the NCAA Tournament three times at Maine but died of breast cancer on March 27, 2018, and never had the chance to see her son do the same at Connecticut.

Clingan, who was the No. 56 overall prospect in the 2022 recruiting cycle, has spoken openly about the pressure he felt to join what Hurley was building with the in-state power. And then he experienced pressure of another kind to make an instant impact for a team with goals of winning the national championship. He was toughened and educated by the powerfully pirouetting Sanogo, the preseason Big East Player of the Year whose footwork is pristine. He willingly accepted a role as Sanogo's backup and averaged just 13.2 minutes per game ahead of the Final Four, a modicum of what he might have gotten at other schools given the poise and prowess he flashed on both ends of the floor.

Clingan transformed into a defensive forcefield against a guard-dominated Miami squad anchored by an undersized center and a supporting cast of lengthily-frail wings. He deterred and destroyed the Hurricane guards that ventured toward the hoop in an opening half the Huskies led by as many as 13, swatting his first blocked shot into the stands and then spiking an attempted lob to Omier well beyond the rows of UConn cheerleaders. When shooting guard Isaiah Wong knifed beyond the Huskies' first wave of defense, there stood Clingan to induce the kind of acrobatic contortions that almost never end the way an offensive player intends. Omier became so overwhelmed by Clingan's hulking frame that he whipped a pass into press row instead of attacking from a favorable location in the paint.

"I'd just say UConn, they're a very good team," said Wong, who finished with 15 points on 4-for-10 shooting. "They're a tall team. They have length on their side. And we struggled a little bit."

Ensuring Clingan never escaped Connecticut represented a huge win for Hurley, the fifth-year head coach who'd lost his first two NCAA Tournament games at a school where opening-round losses generally aren't tolerated. There were segments of UConn's fan base that ridiculed Hurley for an early string of losses in close games, for his comment in 2020 that opposing teams "better get us now" before he'd won anything of substance, for his sideline tantrums that — by his own admission — resulted in him spending too much time on the phone with the Big East's head of officiating earlier this year and not enough time coaching his team. They questioned his standing in a league filled with great head coaches when a 14-0 start to the season devolved into a sub-.500 record through UConn's opening nine games in conference play.  

Hurley has shouldered larger psychological burdens, too. Not only was his playing career at Seton Hall far less decorated than that of his elder brother, Bobby Hurley, who won two national championships at Duke and was a consensus All-American in 1993, but the man who introduced both boys to the sport that would dominate their lives is one of the greatest high school basketball coaches in history with four national titles and 26 state championships. The patriarch of the family, Bob Hurley, was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2010 and is so popular that fans asked him to pose for photos in the front row of UConn's cheering section before the game.

And then there's the Jim Calhoun factor, another Hall of Fame presence that will forever resonate in Storrs. The architect of this program, Calhoun took a modestly-sized state school in a remote corner of Connecticut and turned it into a national power. He won national championships in 1999, 2004 and 2011 before ceding the program to one of his former players, Kevin Ollie, who added another title in 2014. Hurley is, and forever will be, the first post-Calhoun coach from outside the UConn family.

Members of that family were strewn throughout the arena on Saturday as former Huskies from one generation to another descended on Houston for a weekend they hope will end with the program's fifth national championship in the last 25 years. Ray Allen, Richard Hamilton and Kemba Walker all were seated within a few feet of each other behind the Connecticut bench. Their pregame handshakes and embraces felt like a history lesson come to life. Even Walker's mother was in attendance wearing the same gray No. 15 jersey she sported during her son's iconic run through the 2011 Big East Tournament and NCAA Tournament that ended, poetically enough, with him cutting down the nets in this very building.

What unfolded Saturday felt like the precursor to another coronation, another national title, another line on the resume that, if turned from pencil to pen, should put an end to discussions about whether Connecticut is a college basketball blue blood. The Huskies tore through Miami the same way they shredded Iona, Saint Mary's, Arkansas and Gonzaga before them, and extended their combined margin of victory in this year's tournament to 103 points in five games.

"I think what we're doing when we're playing harder than the other team," Hurley said, "which is our calling card — going like plus-9 on the glass, playing elite defense and having a lot of answers on offense — there's nowhere where we're weak as a team, and we're deep. So we're able to kind of body blow our opponent and continue to just put together quality possessions at both ends and on the backboard, and it has a cumulative effect. It's been able to break opponents."

That kind of domination is what Hurley wanted fans to applaud.  

Michael Cohen covers college football and basketball for FOX Sports with an emphasis on the Big Ten. Follow him on Twitter @Michael_Cohen13. 

Read more: