College basketball finally has a new villain

This Thanksgiving, Dan Hurley is bringing the whine

Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we breakdown the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Jacob leads off this week…

When Dan Hurley goes ballistic, the NCAA wins. 

On Monday, the UConn coach cost his team a chance at victory with an overtime technical foul in a 99-97 loss to Memphis. A night later, he had to be restrained by his assistants at the end of a 73-72 loss to Colorado when a similar call went against the Huskies.¹ 

After each game, Hurley has defended his behavior. It wasn’t his tech that cost UConn, he said, “it was the shitty calls.” UConn lost a third straight game (they lost three games all of last season) on Wednesday night. All Hurley could do was hold his head in his hands.

In response, the college hoops chattering class has come alive. 

Dan Hurley has “gotta grow up,” Jeff Goodman said. He “lost his mind, cost his team,” Dan Patrick said. “Dan Hurley seems like the worst,” more than one social media user pointed out.

And yet, for college basketball, he’s a gift. Every TV executive and conference beancounter ought to be calling him today and encouraging him—don’t let those big bad refs keep you down, Dan!

Men’s college basketball is in a perilous place at the moment, with top programs jumping conferences on the whims of their football-playing siblings. March Madness continues to dominate attention, but the sport struggles to break through from April to February, and last year, the women’s final outdrew the dudes. 

Coaches have long been the sport’s centers of conversation, especially nowadays when players rarely seem to spend more than a year or two on any campus. And villains have been the game’s most valuable among them.

There are 352 Division I basketball schools, which means your favorite team is very likely not playing in any given game. But build up enough grudges and you can have a reason to root in every contest, especially come Tourney Time. Bracket busters are infinitely sweeter when they knock out a blue blood.

The NCAA has lost a generation of hateable winners, though, with the departures of Jim Boehim, Mike Krzyzewski, Bob Huggins, Roy Williams, and so on.

Enter Hurley. Love him or not, the man knows how to make a headline, whether he’s joking about his superstitions² or pillorying college basketball leadership. He’s eschewed the quiet, CEO-like demeanor other coaches pretend to have. And most importantly, he’s won, infuriating his detractors even more. 

There’s a good chance you won’t think much more about college basketball for months. But if you do, there’s an even better chance it’s because Coach Hurley has forced you to.

Eben’s Take: UGH. Jacob's probably right that this is somehow good for college basketball, but only in the way that Jake Paul is "good" for boxing. I've watched about 30 minutes of UConn this season and my only conclusion is that Dan Hurley's sideline demeanor might be the sport's single most obnoxious characteristic. The rest of the NCAA can root for this guy, fine, but this is going to impact the young men who play for him, whether they admit it or not, and if it continues, it will reflect poorly on the program. For the rest of the year I'm hoping the angry man loses.

P.S. We’re now on Bluesky, tracking Dan Hurley’s blow-ups

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Folks, we’re hosting our first Club Sportico members event in New York City next week!! Join us on Thursday, Dec. 5 in PMC’s ground floor studio on 5th ave. We’ll have a live Sporticast recording, a live Business Behind the Game with a former athlete (TBA), plus some games and contests.

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Now turning it over to Eben for a Thanksgiving-themed series of thoughts on World Series rings, basketball courts, bad PR, and more for our favorite people, Club Sportico’s paid members…

The Turkey Leg Story of the Week 🍗: I’m fascinated by the long, sordid--and murky--history of Rudy Giuliani’s four Yankees World Series rings. It’s unclear when he got them, what he paid, and whether he broke the law by taking them. He lost them to his ex-wife, then got them back in divorce proceedings. He claims to have gifted them to his son in a late-night ceremony, and now his family is fighting to keep them from the two Georgia women that Giuliani defamed after the 2020 election. We wrote about the whole saga here.

The Mashed Potato Non-Sportico Story of the Week 🥔: Washington Post reporter Ben Strauss wrote a perfect business story this week about Ohio State fans fed up with all the 12 PM ET kickoffs that the No. 2 Buckeyes have had to endure this season. It has great context about why the Big Ten’s current media deal is perhaps the most complex in sports history, but also quotes like this from an OSU student named Lauren: “It’s killing my body to be drinking this early every week… I’ve had an ear infection for two weeks!”

The Collared Greens Laugh of the Week 🥬: This photo 👇 from Oregon State’s basketball court perfectly captures the absurdity of college sports right now. What conference is this team in?