Is Dan Hurley the Best College Basketball Coach Alive?

Coach walks across the court at the start of practice like he does, what—two hundred times a year? More? His players are in their prepractice shootaround. Balls clang off the rims and swish through the nets and bounce off the floor in percussion all around him. He walks past Alex Karaban, the bearded, baby-faced junior who played on the back-to-back championship teams in 2023 and 2024. Liam McNeeley jogs to the three-point line and throws up a brick—he’s a nineteen-year-old superstar who in a few weeks will be named Big East Freshman of the Year, a certain lottery pick in the NBA draft this June—one and done.

In gyms all over the country right now, on a wintry Friday afternoon, some version of this scene is happening, just with different people—varsity idols on high school courts, underclassmen and ponytailed girls peering through the gym doors at them; millionaire pros in empty NBA arenas, getting loose hours before tonight’s games; rec-league fifth graders at the Y, one kid’s dad—the coach—rushing in late, straight from the office. They’re all grabbing basketballs from duffel bags or off rolling racks, getting their shots in, balls caroming everywhere, the familiar, beautiful rhythm of warm-ups.

Coach walks across the court here in this particular gym in Storrs, Connecticut, only he doesn’t look like you might have thought he would. First of all, dude is wearing sunglasses. Dan Hurley was the coach of those historic championship teams, and he’s the coach of this one, which isn’t looking historic so far, but not bad—a month from now, they will lose to top-seeded Florida in the second round of the NCAA tournament, a game in which the coach was displeased with the officiating, and a reporter will catch him in the tunnel to the locker room saying to the players from Baylor, on their way out to play a game against Duke, “I hope they don’t fuck you like they fucked us,” and the reporter, who was in a part of the tunnel where Hurley thought that reporters weren't even allowed, will broadcast the video across the unforgiving Internet.

Hurley drags the heels of his lustrous white Nikes across the parquet floor and rocks his hips and his shoulders a little with each step. His arms swing at his sides. It’s like a saunter, maybe even a strut. He’s got his AirPods in, and he’s mouthing the words to a song only he can hear. His chin dips a bit. He shuffle-glides through the chaos around him, unhurried. Wearing sunglasses.

Dan Hurley walks like a punk, is how he walks. A punk-ass, Jersey City, gym-rat punk.

This is nothing new, the saunter. You could even see it back when he played point guard for Seton Hall in the early nineties. He’d whip off a laser pass down low, firing it like a howitzer, and the second the ball left his hands, his long arms would drop to his sides again, swinging like he could give a shit.

He did, though. Give a shit.

You never saw the mighty Mike Krzyzewski walk into a practice like this. No sir. Nor the great Dean Smith, nor the great Roy Williams, nor the great Nolan Richardson, nor any other championship-winning coach you can name, and definitely no multiple-championship-winning coach. Not the great, gruff Jim Calhoun, who won three here at UConn, who the damn street outside this arena is named after—Jim Calhoun Way. He didn’t wear sunglasses inside. He didn’t saunter.

There are only two possible explanations for Hurley’s punk walk and all that goes along with it.

All that goes with it? It’s a lot. There are the spectacular and often profane verbal assaults he levies at referees, perhaps the most famous of which was when he shouted at a ref this season, “Don’t you turn your back on me! I’m the best coach in the fucking sport!” There is the jumping up and down on the sideline until you think his head might pop right off his neck. There are the murderous eyes when he doesn’t like a call or a play—the veteran coach and CBS announcer Bill Raftery said during the first game of the NCAA tournament this year, “Look at those eyeballs. Jack Nicholson eyeballs.” There is the taunting of opposing crowds, as when, after a road victory over Creighton this season, the crowd was chanting “Fuck Dan Hurley,” and Hurley held up two fingers and mouthed, “Two rings!”

The first explanation is that he can’t help himself because he grew up in the double-dark shadows of a successful father (Bob, Hall of Fame winner of a zillion high school championship teams as a coach in Jersey City) and brother (Bobby, who won two titles at Duke and played six years in the NBA) while Danny averaged nine points a game at Seton Hall. He went on to coach high school ball, driving the cheese bus to gyms all over the state and teaching history, too. He hated feeling like the runt, the other Hurley, the nonfamous one, so he developed arrogance as both a weapon and a shield.

The second explanation is that Dan Hurley knows exactly what he’s doing, all the time. He understands that his job is mostly about motivating young men with still-growing frontal lobes to play their hearts out, and with the yelling and the jumping and the eyes and this…this walk, he’s showing the guys that at this level, unless you believe to your core that you’re the best, you don’t stand a chance.

Sweater by Giorgio Armani; Rings, Hurley’s own.

Ten minutes into practice, McNeeley flubs a play, coming off a screen and throwing a pass that gets picked off by a kid who’s not even on the team, who just helps out running drills.

Hurley slaps a table, then hops up and down once, pursing his lips tight, barely containing his anger. He shouts:

“Liam!”

He never uses a whistle. He shouts.

“Liam!”

The star looks up and across the floor at his coach.

“Liam! Are you shittin’ me?”

“A sore loser,” the ESPN talking head Jay Williams opined after the Florida game, when Hurley said the thing to the Baylor players.

Hurley lacked “maturity,” Jay Bilas said on The Dan Patrick Show.

From the spineless and balls-less masses who thumb-type their slobbering, giddy quips from safely behind the shield of social media: “Crybaby.” “Classless.” “Lunatic.”

Nah.

He’s not a win-at-all costs coach, because he does not and will not mistreat his players. Not like Bob Knight, the Indiana legend who eventually got fired when the school couldn’t countenance his violence anymore. Not even like Calhoun, whom I saw verbally reduce players to dirt.

“We love it as players,” says Karaban, who averaged fourteen points and five rebounds a game this year as a redshirt junior and who, at the time of this writing, was deciding whether to enter the NBA draft. “He gives off a passion and such a competitive spirit that you don’t see often anymore in today’s college basketball. We build off his energy, and we build off his passion, because we see how much he cares.”

I asked McNeeley whether Hurley ever goes too far. He smiled.

“I’m sure Coach has probably done some things he wishes he hadn’t,” McNeeley said. “But I’m riding with Coach every day of the week.” He paused, still smiling. “I’m riding with Coach no matter what.”

We know that his life has been measured in wins and losses. His famous dad. His famous brother. Dan? He was coaching high school ball, driving the cheese bus to games, and teaching history, too.

After the back-to-back titles, in 2024 Hurley famously turned down an offer to coach the Los Angeles Lakers of the NBA. “I know I did the right thing,” he says now. “They got someone in JJ [Redick] that fits them better. I would not have been a good fit in that situation, and I knew it. And when their idiot fans tweet at me or direct-message me about how big of a mistake I made? How this season ends for us or for them will not determine whether I made a mistake or not. I never even think about it anymore. Well—you know what? Sometimes at night I’ll be done with whatever game I’ve prepared for, and maybe I’ll flip on an NBA game, and it’ll be Lakers–Clippers, and I’ll imagine to myself, what would that be like? Coaching the Lakers. That would be pretty cool. But it’s a thought that’s in and out quickly.”

He is a college coach, in the business of inspiring young men. And that is not the job of the head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers.

“I think that we’ve diminished coaches, and it’s bad for sports,” he says. “I think at some level we’ve put the pro athlete above the pro coach, where in a lot of instances now, the athletes are deciding how much they want to practice, how hard they want to play, when they want to play. And I think that is a bad direction for sports to go. I think devaluing coaches hurts all sports. Because everyone needs a coach.”

After Hurley walks into practice, the first action he takes—after removing his sunglasses and unplugging the AirPods from his ears—is to make his way around the gym and high-five every player on the team. (The music, incidentally, is whatever is inspiring him that week. It could be the Big Daddy Kane or LL Cool J he and Bobby grew up blasting out of their car in Jersey City. It could be, and often is, Pearl Jam. Earlier this season, for a few days, it was Sheryl Crow. He heard her interviewed on Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast, thought she was “cool as hell” and listened to nothing but Sheryl Crow. Then UConn lost to Seton Hall. No more Sheryl Crow.)

He yells for the next three hours, from beginning to end. At everyone. Even at his fiercely loyal assistant coach Luke Murray and his associate head coach, Kimani Young.

“Deny the guy the fucking ball!”

“I’m tired of coaching a soft team!”

“Liam! Keep talking! Say something!”

Clap clap clap clap: “You’re giving me no energy, Alex!”

“What the fuck is wrong with you! It’s almost March, Jaylin! You’re basically a junior!”

He throws a handful of index cards up in the air like confetti, in frustration.

“Liam! You’re not the victim! You’re not the victim!”

“You gotta—you gotta get into the guy and be physical! It’s the fucking Big East! Holy shit!”

“Tarris! That’s wasn’t the plan! Now you’re limping, like a puppy with a tucked tail.”

Karaban smiles when I read him these quotes weeks later, after the season is over.

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s definitely not fun in the moment—but it’s from a place of love. If he wasn’t yelling at you, you wouldn’t want that, because it’s showing how much he cares about you. If he wasn’t yelling at you, he might have stopped believing in you. So he makes practices way harder than games.”

But man, he rides these guys hard.

Jacket, shirt, and trousers by Ralph Lauren Purple Label; Nike sneakers, Hurley’s own.

“That’s the whole reason I chose to go to UConn,” McNeeley tells me. “To be pushed like that. He’s been very hard on me. And I’m grateful.”

After practice, Hurley walks alone up through the stands of Gampel Pavilion, the Huskies’ on-campus home since 1990, on his way to the video room to review tape for Sunday’s game against Big East rival St. John’s. He is dragging, his voice hoarse. No one is watching him, and he is not walking like a punk. I ask him if he rides McNeeley particularly hard because he knows the NBA will be tough. Karaban, too.

He takes the steps one at a time.

“Alex can handle it, and Liam can handle it, and that’s why I do it,” he says quietly. “It’s gonna help them.”

Two questions for Dan Hurley. That ends up being all I really need. The first is, what’s the worst thing that ever happened to you that had nothing to do with basketball?

This is the first question because it seems that everything that has ever happened to Dan Hurley, good or bad, is connected in some way to the sport of basketball. We know this, that his life has been measured in wins and losses. His dad. His brother. Dan? Where did Danny come from? He was a high school star and played his college ball in the Big East, but his career as a player was never what it perhaps could have been. After St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark, he coached at small programs—Wagner, University of Rhode Island. Then, in 2018, he got the job at UConn. A powerhouse. Four national titles in fifteen years under his predecessors. Turns out he’s a hell of a coach. In seven years, he’s lapped Bob and Bobby both, winning back-to-back national championships, winning Naismith Coach of the Year, winning, winning, winning.

He’s in his office at the practice facility in Storrs, slathered with trophies and victory nets and the pair of lucky underwear he wore as a talisman through the 2023 NCAA tournament, framed on the wall.

What’s the worst thing?

It’s quiet in the office as he thinks. Weirdly quiet.

“Holy shit,” he says, a whisper. “It’s crazy that it’s taking me this long, huh? When your whole life is this”—he waves a hand at the walls and shelves and shrines to basketball, basketball, basketball, all around him—“you…”

He rubs his chin.

“We had a…”

He cocks his head, looks right at me.

“The death of my—we had a younger brother, who was born after me and before my youngest sister, Melissa. Sean, who died very young. The third Hurley brother, who didn’t make it. I was little. But I remember. Probably five years old, I mighta been.” He thinks. “Because we were living on Ferncliff.”

The silence sits.

“It’s crazy it took so long to think of that,” he says. “As soon as you asked that, I thought, What was the last fucking loss? Because at this time of the year, that’s all you’re thinking about. ‘Oh, okay, Seton Hall, let’s relive that one.’”

He smiles, as if the Seton Hall game—heartbreaking and shocking though it was—would have qualified as the worst thing.

“But yeah, that would be it,” Hurley says, so quietly you almost can’t hear it.

“I’m going to do everything humanly possible to win every single game, bordering on making myself look like an ass at times—that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

He’s all or nothing, Dan Hurley. He watched his father, growing up—watched him the way all boys watch their dads. He saw Bob not just sweat the losses, not just be upset. He saw something much worse than that in his idol.

“Shame,” he says. “When you lose, you feel embarrassment that who you are failed. It may seem strange, but this is my life’s work. You pour everything you have into this—building your style of play, developing the players, the skills, the mindset, putting together this team that’s going to be able to achieve and defeat others and win championships. And then when it doesn’t come together like that—it hurts. It’s shame.”

And Hurley will do almost anything to avoid it.

The “I’m the best coach in the fucking sport!” moment came in the first half of a game against unranked Butler, when Hurley disagreed with a call and chased a ref onto the floor, shouting it at the top of his practiced lungs.

“Shouldn’t have said it,” Hurley tells me, shaking his head. Maybe. But: First, he may well be the best coach in the fucking sport. Second, even if he isn’t, don’t you kind of have to tell yourself that? To compete?

“Yeah, I think you do, with how hard it is to win anything at this level,” he says. “If you don’t have that mindset, if you’re not that type of competitor when the game starts, then you’re probably in the wrong business. My shareholders here—the fans, the people at UConn—deserve life-or-death desperation from their head basketball coach, for the amount of money they’re paying me. I’m going to do everything humanly possible to win every single game for them, bordering on making myself look like an ass at times—that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

Hurley’s wife, Andrea, whom he calls Freddie and whom he met at Seton Hall and married as soon as possible, pops her head into his office. She says she might pick up cheeseburgers for tonight.

“Okay,” he says. “I love you, buddy.”

I ask him the second question: What’s the best thing that ever happened to you that had nothing to do with basketball?

His response is instant—zero chin-rubbing, no silence while he ponders.

He points his thumb to the door his wife just exited.

“Best thing that’s ever happened to me including basketball. Best thing that could ever happen to me, including if I won twelve of these things”—he motions to the championship trophies. “That lady right there changed my life. I was so lost and self-absorbed and not knowing how to love people. I come from a tough family, a tough place. But my wife gave me the most beautiful thing—a family, and knowing how to love someone else more than you love yourself. Two boys. A collection of people you love more than yourself, that you love more than basketball, that you love more than your pursuit of whatever you’re trying to do next—that’s the best thing.”

There’s a time before every game when Hurley finds himself alone in the locker room. Most people don’t know this, or think about it. The coach comes out last. The players are already out there, running their layup drills. The assistants are out there. The expectant fans, finding their seats, setting beers on the floor. And for just a couple of minutes, Dan Hurley is by himself, surrounded by empty lockers and crumpled towels and water bottles, hearing only the distant, double-bass thrum of the building crowd.

All the work he can possibly do has already been done.

And he’s crying.

Jacket, blazer, and trousers by Canali; T-shirt by Zanone.

The fatigue of the season. The knowledge that this will all end, and then begin again, and then end again. The love for this group of young men he has assembled, which is different from the love for last year’s group of young men, and it will feel different next year, but right now it consumes him, and he wants more than anything for them to feel that feeling of confetti in their hair, that feeling of climbing the ladder and cutting down the championship net, and looking out and seeing the people cheering, and there are tears coming down his cheeks and he says to himself, a whisper inside his head:

Man, this fucking team.

I love this team.

If we don’t win this game, it’s going to haunt us forever.

We’re an incredible team.

To compete at this level, you have to believe this. All of it.

He’s saying this in his office in the practice facility, two days before the game with St. John’s in New York. He is explaining a problem, the way he might have back in his office at St. Benedict’s Prep, to one of his history students, trying to make him understand.

“Sometimes the emotion manifests itself in a way where I wanna fight,” he says. “I wanna fight. I don’t always see that in the players. Where’s the fucking fight? I think that’s the byproduct of NIL”—the so called “name, image, likeness” rule that allows college players to earn money through product endorsements—“and portal”—the off-season transfer portal through which players can easily transfer to other schools without losing eligibility—“and the new culture of college basketball. There are fewer and fewer players who are competitive in that way—every game they lose is not as soul-crushing as it is for me, or as it was for some of the recent players we’ve had. That’s where you’ll see the intensity that I’ll bring. The frustration of my playing career not being what I wanted it to be. The frustration from having had to coach my way up to this level, when a lot of people I’m coaching against did not have to take that same path. Some of that manifests itself in rage and anger, both in healthy and unhealthy manners.”

Madison Square Garden. Two days later.

The end of the season, almost. Weeks before the NCAA round-of-32 Baylor “they fucked us” tunnel debacle. Just a coach coaching his way through a grueling season. But he’s still who he is.

“Fuck Dan Hurley!”

The chant from the St. John’s crowd starts with UConn’s first possession of the game.

“Fuck Dan Hurley!”

He’s hopping from the get-go. Not three minutes into the game, Coach Murray is holding him back.

He folds his hands at his belt and shakes his head—this is his most upset position. The hands at the belt.

He stomps. He pleads. He runs ten feet out onto the floor to protest a foul call, screaming like an overtired kid whose been told for the third time he has to go to bed while the older kids stay up.

And with every one of his players who comes out for a sub, he slaps hands. He slaps their backs. He says good job.

His players watch him. They see what he’s doing, and he knows exactly what he’s doing.

At halftime, UConn is down by eighteen.

“Fuck Dan Hurley!”

He walks toward the tunnel, hands in his pockets, rocking his hips and his shoulders a little, like a punk.

Second half. Sixteen minutes left. UConn needs this win, which they will not get, and he probably knows it, even if he doesn’t believe it, which is a big difference.

Solo Ball, a sophomore stud, air-balls a three-pointer on a fast break.

McNeeley grabs the rebound, but before he can get a shot off, a St. John’s player strips the ball right out of his hands.

Timeout.

The assistants and the helpers scramble to set up folding chairs in a circle for the timeout. The players gather. McNeeley, his signature white headband soaked, walks over, a dejected look on his face, that combination of sadness and anger only an athlete knows.

Hurley, in a hurry, walks to intercept his star before he gets to the huddle. Hurley is six-foot-two, McNeeley is six-seven. Hurley grabs him, cups his hands around McNeeley’s head, embracing the boy’s noggin and holding it close to his own, so that their cheeks are touching and he’s close enough to whisper. He holds McNeeley’s head for a good fifteen seconds, which is a long time, while he talks. McNeeley’s arms dangle at his side as he listens to his coach, listens to this man who is the reason he came to UConn, listens to the man he would ride with to the end.

“I love you,” Hurley says, his mouth nearly touching McNeeley’s ear. “But we need that ball.”

Opening image: Jacket, blazer, and trousers by Canali; T-shirt by Zanone.

Photographed by Aaron RichterStyling by Alfonso Fernández Navas Grooming by Devra Kinery VP of Video: Jason IkelerDirectors of Video: Amanda Kabbabe, Kathryn Rice Senior Director of Social Video: Mia Lardiere Cinematographer: Thomas ArnellEditor: Sam Miller

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