Facing Michigan’s ‘Monstars,’ UConn finds itself in the unlikely position of underdog

By Dana O’Neil, CNN

Indianapolis (CNN) — In 1999, a Boston Southie with daddy issues fueling an insatiable need to prove himself laid the cornerstone of Connecticut basketball greatness.

When he was 15, Jim Calhoun lost his father to a heart attack and for a time, shelved his own basketball dreams to work as a gravedigger, stone cutter and scrap yard worker to care for the family. But his passion for the sport eventually led back to the hardwood, where Calhoun channeled his loss and his pain into the gym, eventually building an uninspiring state school in the farmland of Storrs into a national champion and perennial powerhouse.

When the Huskies beat Duke for the ‘99 title, they were a 1-seed who had swapped spots atop the polls with the Blue Devils the entire season. Nonetheless, Vegas oddsmakers tagged Duke as 9.5-point favorites, making UConn the biggest title-game underdog since 1985, when 9-seed Villanova tried to tackle Georgetown and Patrick Ewing.

Calhoun so deeply planted the seed that his team was being disregarded that when Connecticut won the game, Khalid El-Amin dashed around the court screaming, ‘We just shocked the world.’’

Twenty-seven years later, a New Jersey kid with daddy issues fueling an insatiable need to prove himself is trying to take UConn to a place unmatched in modern college basketball history.

The son of a Hall of Fame high school coach, Dan Hurley has chased his own unreachable measuring stick, creating foils and demons even where they don’t exist. His unquenchable desire to achieve has taken UConn to the brink of becoming the first team since the UCLA dynasty to win three national championships in a four-year span.

Yet here again, on the precipice of a greatness not realized in four decades, the Huskies are underdogs. The same team that is 18-1 against the spread in four years of NCAA games under Hurley (the lone miss, ironically, came against Furman in the first-round this year when they failed to cover the 20.5 margin) is either a 6.5- or 7.5-point dog to Michigan in the championship game, depending on your source.

Vegas, of course, doesn’t do sentiment and what the Huskies have done before has little to no bearing on what they are predicted to do now. Meantime, what Michigan has done lately – cruised on a murderous March march that humbled Arizona into submission into the national semifinal – does matter.

“Monstars,’’ Hurley called the Wolverines, kicking it back old school to 1996 version of “Space Jam.”

He downplayed the spread when asked about it.

“These are all one-game, Game 7, single-game elimination,’’ Hurley said. “There’s been plenty of times in the history of this tournament where the best team hasn’t won it.’’

But it is worth remembering that, a day earlier, he brought up without prompting how surprised he was that the Illini were favored in the national semifinal – despite UConn’s 13-point win against Illinois earlier in the season.

Nothing makes the man more uncomfortable than comfort. In fact, you could even make a case that this shot at history suits him better than the one he faced in 2024.

Those Huskies, trying to become the first team to win back-to-back titles since Florida, felt more like Thanos, so inevitable that not even the towering oak of Zach Edey stood a chance. They won their first five games by an average of 25 points and were set as the 7.5-point favorites against Purdue. They wound up winning by 15.

But that came with a whole different kind of pressure, one that didn’t feed into Hurley’s psyche as the chronic Dom Quixote in search of another windmill to smack around.

“There is a certain level of pressure that comes when you get to the Final Four and you know you have the best team,’’ he said. “It was different. It was just different.’’

In truth, this team suits him more.

“Resilient, tough, not perfect. Definitely not perfect,’’ that’s the identity Hurley gave UConn when asked by CNN Sports while riding on a golf cart back to the locker room on Sunday morning. He could have been talking about himself.

“That toughness that we have with this team, that’s part of our identity but that’s because it’s coach’s mentality,’’ said assistant coach Mike Nardi.

Aside from Braylon Mullins, a consensus top-25 talent and Indiana’s Mr. Basketball, none were headline-grabbing recruits. Their spirit animal, Alex Karaban, is a college basketball dinosaur – a four-year, plant-your-feet-in-one-place-and-stay senior. And their best March player, Tarris Reed, spent lonely time in his dorm room journaling out his own inner conflict about staying or leaving UConn after he and Hurley did not initially see eye-to-eye on what a revving motor looked like.

They bumped and hiccuped their way to March, blowing a chance to claim a share of the Big East regular season in a blowout loss to Marquette so ugly that Hurley got tossed and hit with a $25,000 fine for bumping an official. They closed out their home season by inducting Karaban into the ring of honor and losing to a lousy Creighton team and got stomped by St. John’s in the conference tournament final.

They labored their way through a first-round game against Furman, nearly gave back all of a 19-point advantage in the Sweet 16 against Michigan State and needed a 19-point rally and a Mullins miracle against Duke to make the Final Four.

“We haven’t had the most smooth year, right?” said assistant coach Luke Murray, who will on Tuesday become the head coach at Boston College. “We’ve had these bumps along the way, but the makeup of this team is so competitive and so tough, and we look at these games as a chance to really lay it all out on the line.’’

Yet the caveat: The Huskies won every single one of those NCAA games. In 1999, Calhoun was asked about his team’s status against Duke. After heaping praise on the Blue Devils and Mike Krzyzewski, he cut to the chase.

“We’ve been pragmatic at times. We’ve survived at times, but we won when we needed to win,” he said.

Now the underdog program that Calhoun took to its first title has a chance to draw a very hard line in the sand between Connecticut and everyone else. So much has changed in between – most notably five more titles – but one thing hasn’t.

How UConn thinks about basketball.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s an ugly win or a nice-looking one, right?” Reed said. “Just find a way to win.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.