NEW YORK — In a matter of a week, the UConn men’s basketball team lost two titles.
Key word: lost.
That’s not to say St. John’s, the first program to repeat as both regular-season Big East champions and winners of the same season’s conference tournament, didn’t earn its way back to being the new league standard under Rick Pitino. The Johnnies and their physical brand of basketball overwhelmed the Huskies in a 72–52 blowout at Madison Square Garden, winning the season’s rubber match between the two rival programs fewer than three weeks after losing by 32 points to the same team in Hartford, Conn.
The moment St. John’s won back-to-back Big East titles 👏 pic.twitter.com/kOyYzoheqq
— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) March 15, 2026
But UConn didn’t do itself any favors, stumbling over itself for the second time in seven days—an ominous sign on the eve of Selection Sunday. And perhaps more worrying, a sign that this Dan Hurley team isn’t prepared to overcome the loss of two championships in order to chase after the most important one.
The first meltdown came last Saturday in the regular-season finale at Marquette. Dragged into a standard Big East bar fight, the Huskies led 45–41 with fewer than 15 minutes to play, within touching distance of the program’s first league title since the 2023–24 national championship season. Then the mistakes started—and they didn’t stop.
Over the next five minutes, UConn coughed up six turnovers and scored just two points. The lead evaporated, as Marquette went up eight points, and then 12, as part of a 20–4 Golden Eagles run. A last gasp in the final minutes wasn’t enough for the Huskies, but it was enough to send Hurley, who’s developed somewhat of a reputation for his dealings with officiating crews, over the edge. He got within inches of official John Gaffney, though he later denied making contact with him, earned himself two technical fouls and was ejected as UConn’s regular-season title hopes went up in flames.
The Huskies might’ve let one championship slip away, but when Hurley & Co. arrived Thursday in New York, the Marquette loss seemed like it was behind them. After a 25-point rout of quarterfinal opponent Xavier, Hurley and his players told tales of the past Sunday’s film session, winking at the attitude of their head coach.
“I was a little bit more sad,” Hurley said, looking to veterans Solo Ball and Tarris Reed Jr. for confirmation, or perhaps approval. “I think they were waiting for angry, mad Dan, and I did not give that to ’em.”
Though Ball said there wasn’t much to distinguish between “Sad Dan” and “Angry Dan” and Reed called the session “uncomfortable,” the players echoed much of the same sentiment. Hurley reminded them that this had been a top-five team all season—true enough from a rankings standpoint, though metrics may suggest otherwise. And though the team didn’t have any hardware to show for it, its coach had a simple message: “Don’t forget who we are.”
“So we understood the job, we understood the mission, we understood what we had a hand in,” Reed said. “Coming into this tournament, we knew we couldn’t do that again.”
And for two rounds, it looked like UConn wouldn’t repeat the catastrophe at Marquette. After Xavier, the Huskies cruised to another double-digit win over a Georgetown team that had momentum after upsets of DePaul and Providence. The second victory set up the Big East tournament final that just about everyone wanted to see: against Pitino’s Johnnies, with a title on the line.
Within the first three minutes, St. John’s raced out to a 10–0 lead, instantly igniting the hometown fan base that has been reinvigorated the past two years at the Garden, for this event in particular. Hurley said later that the poor start “spooked” the group. And the hits kept coming for the Huskies.
By halftime, UConn trailed by 13, and once again, a familiar weakness cropped up: turnovers. The Huskies had 11 in the first half and the Red Storm scored 15 points off the takeaways. Coupled with a tepid shooting start, UConn dug itself a hole and wasn’t able to claw its way out. The Huskies cut the lead to as small as seven points with 12:34 remaining, but a savvy Pitino timeout clipped the UConn momentum.
In the next few possessions, St. John’s star center Zuby Ejiofor took over. A three from the top of the arc, a putback hook shot and a layup-erasing block on Huskies guard Silas Demary Jr., for the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player put the game on ice. UConn would never get back within single digits again.
Hurley, who was given a technical foul in the first half but reined in his work on the officials struggled to pinpoint what exactly went wrong on Saturday night, other than, well, all of it. The 17 turnovers were top of mind, and a 3-of-19 performance from beyond the arc didn’t help matters, but even still, there was an air of uncertainty.
Dan Hurley earns a technical foul early in the Big East tournament final vs. St. John’s pic.twitter.com/w5L1M41Z3s
— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) March 14, 2026
“I don’t know how much of tonight was us getting punked and being soft, or, you know, they just played great and we just missed shots,” he said. “I don’t want to probably comment too much on that until I get a chance to see the film.”
Redshirt senior Alex Karaban summed it up even better, when asked what he wished he would’ve done differently: “The whole 40 minutes.”
Gone was a second championship. For the second time in the same week.
The message Saturday night was the same as it was coming off the Marquette loss: flush it. Move on. But gone were the reminders of the team’s season résumé. Hurley focused instead on the unit’s deficiencies, the potential weaknesses as it heads into single-elimination games during March Madness.
“This team has definitely shown a level of fragility that some of our best teams haven’t,” Hurley says. “I’m concerned about some of the shotmaking. I’m concerned that some guys are pressing on the perimeter right now that are getting really good looks at threes and about the ball security. Those are the things that are very worrisome.”
It’s difficult not to think back to Hurley’s 2022–23 team when looking at what this UConn program will have to replicate. That season, the Huskies finished fourth in a loaded Big East and were bounced in the semifinals of the conference tournament by Marquette. And yet that group became a juggernaut in the NCAA tournament, a well-oiled machine that peaked at the right time and won each of its six games by 15 points or more.
But this is a much different team than the one that was hoisted the national championship trophy in 2023. Karaban is the lone holdover from that unit, one that featured stars like Final Four Most Outstanding Player Adama Sanogo, Jordan Hawkins and Tristen Newton. This group, apart from Karaban, is without the championship experience, or DNA, that the back-to-back title teams had.
Still, the one benefit Hurley will have is a direct comparison of a team to point to, and it’s his own.
“We’ll do what we did in 2023. We’ll leave it here,” he says of the Big East tournament loss. “We know that we play our best basketball in the NCAA tournament and vs. nonconference teams. Our group knows that. This is a really, really physical league. That was a really, really, really physical game, and we’re excited to play in the NCAA tournament that doesn’t get played like that.”
That doesn’t mean this loss won’t sting, just as much as the Marquette one did the week prior. Speaking on Thursday of Big East tournament week, Hurley reflected on his meltdown in the regular-season finale. Always one to wear his results heavily, and oftentimes openly, the two-time champion coach detailed how he takes losses like the one at Marquette—and the one on Saturday night in New York City.
“Losing is a deathlike experience. You can’t breathe, there’s no oxygen. And you can’t stop replaying the play that caused the loss. For us we lost the [regular-season] championship that we were working for since June 1. So I mean that’s Chernobyl,” Hurley says. “My Chernobyl at the end of the game as it was ending was just incredible frustration and rage from having lost something that we’ve been striving for since June.”
Now Hurley has experienced two nuclear-level events, by his standards, this season. And barring another magical run, like the one the same UConn program made just a few years ago, a third one will be awaiting in the NCAA tournament.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as UConn’s Week of Collapses Raises March Madness Questions.
