The UConn basketball team just won the national title for a second straight season, and they couldn't have been more dominant this season. The Huskies won it all last year as well, but they came into the NCAA Tournament as a four seed and flew under the radar a bit. This year, they were a well-oiled machine and most people expected them to win it all. UConn head coach Dan Hurley did a great job coaching his group, and he recently revealed where he got some motivation for their offense.
UConn basketball was dominant on both sides of the floor this season as they had the best offense in the country and a top-five defense. They were all around the best team in basketball, and it wasn't particularly close. That offense was tough to slow down, and Dan Hurley got some inspiration from Kyle Shanahan and the San Francisco 49ers.
“I think the inspiration the last two years, especially this year, is like watching college football now or Shanahan from the NFL, how they'll have like these formations, obviously the pace and the tempo, of their cuts and their actions,” Hurley said during an appearance on The Old Man and the Three. “But like how they'll have trips out of shotgun, with two in the back field, and out of that formation there's like seven or eight different things they do out of. There's a sweep, a play action, you know, a deep post right, all these different things. so I think going into this year, me and Luke Murray, we got together and we're like ‘you know we want to have like, you know, 10 different formations.'”
One thing is for sure, the plan that Hurley and his staff devised worked. UConn was dominant all year long on offense and it helped them cruise to a national title. You wouldn't think that football is what inspired Hurley's offense, but he is a creative coach.
Dan Hurley and UConn basketball want to three-peat
With this year's national title, UConn basketball became the first team since 2006-07 Florida to win the national title two years in a row. Now, the Huskies want to become just the second team ever to win three in a row. It will be difficult for them to ever reach the absurd record of seven straight that UCLA got back in the 60s and 70s, but three would be an incredible accomplishment.
After national title number two, some other college programs did their best to get Dan Hurley to leave UConn and come coach their school. Kentucky lost their head coach, John Calipari, to Arkansas, and tried hard to sway Hurley into leaving the Huskies to be the next head coach of the Wildcats. Hurley turned it down. He loves coaching at UConn, and it doesn't sound like he has any interest in leaving any time soon.
Right now, Hurley is focused on getting another team ready to compete for a championship. Getting the three-peat will be difficult, but the Huskies should once again be one of the best college basketball teams in the nation next season.
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