UConn is facing Duke with a Final Four on the line. It’s a battle of blue-blood programs – if such a thing still exists

By Dana O’Neil, CNN

Washington, DC (CNN) — Back when he first came to town – back when some of his Big East peers derided his school as the Northwestern of the conference and questioned why Dave Gavitt even let them in – Jim Calhoun tried to solve UConn’s identity crisis one misinformed person at a time.

“No, it’s UConn with a U,’’ he would explain, “Not Yukon with a Y. We’re not in Alaska.’’

It is near unfathomable to imagine such issues today. To confuse UConn with anything other than the University of Connecticut would be akin to assuming Duke was merely some nobleman in England. The Huskies have won six national championships, crafting the cow patch in Storrs into a modern-day blueblood. No school – not Duke, not North Carolina, not Kansas, not Kentucky – has hoisted as many banners in the last 30 years as UConn.

Yet the man currently in charge of the kingdom, the one who has added two championships of his own to the university coffers, is struggling with the old vocabulary in this very modern-day college athletics world.

A blue-blood, Dan Hurley argues, isn’t really a thing anymore.

“You can’t get by on your brand anymore,’’ Hurley said. “Players dreaming of having played here one day, none of these kids care about that anymore. None of the people close to them care about it because the majority of the people that are advising kids now are agents who are looking at it from a business perspective, or families that are not sentimental about any of this.’’

It is an interesting thought, particularly here at the NCAA tournament’s East Regional, where the Huskies are getting ready to face the Blue Devils with a trip to the Final Four on the line. This is not an unfamiliar tap dance. The two have used each other as steppingstones en route to building themselves into what we used to call bluebloods. Of their nine meetings, four have come in the NCAA Tournament – an Elite Eight (1990), Sweet 16 (1991), a national championship game (1999), and a national semifinal (2004).

As Duke rose under Mike Krzyzewski, the Blue Devils won the first two (with Hurley’s big brother, Bobby) on their way to becoming the stick by which most other programs – including UConn – measured themselves.

But by 1999, Calhoun and grown Yukon into UConn and that year, the Huskies and Blue Devils traded the top spots in the polls for the better part of the season.

Still, old labels die hard and in the title game in St. Petersburg, Florida, Duke waltzed in as a 9.5-point favorite. It was the perfect bulletin-board fodder for Calhoun, who was still trying to elbow his way in with the big dogs.

He convinced his 1-seed Huskies that they were, in fact, underdogs so much so that when Trajon Langdon tripped trying to split two defenders to seal UConn’s win, Husky guard Khalid El-Amin ran around the court screaming, ‘We shocked the world!’

Hyperbole in the moment, perhaps, but a fair evaluation considering just where the program had come from.

Since then, though, no one has seen the Huskies as world shockers. The standard in Storrs is only excellence. A slight dip in performance (not to mention an NCAA investigation) cost Kevin Ollie his job, and the mission for Hurley was hardly unclear when he took the job eight seasons ago.

UConn now is pushing for its third Final Four in four years and, were Alex Karaban to win a third title, he would be the first player since Kareem and his UCLA teammates in the 1970s to accomplish the feat.

Asked then, if his team wasn’t a blue-blood what was it, Hurley talked around his answer.

“We’re one of the biggest places you could play college basketball. Listen, I think all things being equal – meaning NIL is in the ballpark – players would still want to go and play in the biggest places, for the coaches that are going to help them become better players, give them the best chance to play deep into this tournament, develop their career, have an incredible experience,” Hurley said

Really this isn’t a semantics debate – the death of the concept of the blue-blood – as much as it is a philosophical one. Is growing greatness in today’s world easier than it was for Calhoun? That’s really the question. Can money, in fact, change your bloodlines? Florida went from irrelevance to national title on the jet stream of well-funded transfers.

But it is also accusing an entire generation of wanting nothing of substance. It is the old man on the front porch yelling “get off my lawn,” convinced that the whippersnappers don’t get it because they have it too easy. To listen to players in this NCAA tournament – to really listen to them and not hear what you think you hear – is to hear players say they want to be coached.

They want to learn. They want to get better. They want excellence. Just because they want cash doesn’t negate the rest.

And a handful of programs have earned the right to say that they offer it with regularity.

“I think a blue-blood is somebody that’s earned it over time,’’ said Michigan State coach Tom Izzo, who just finished his 28th consecutive NCAA tournament run. “What I’ve always looked for is consistency. If you can be consistent not over two years, four years, but 10 years, 15 years, I think you have the right to feel like that’s the difference.’’

Back when he first started, Calhoun used to give his players old, faded gray T-shirts on the first day of practice. The message was hardly subtle: They’d have to earn the good stuff.

The Huskies did. And so did UConn. Whether you want to call it a blue-blood or not.

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