HOUSTON — There was a short list of believers in the potential of a rebuilt University of Connecticut men’s basketball roster before the season started.
It was made up mostly of the UConn players and coaches themselves.
The team that was among “others receiving votes” in the first AP Top 25 poll of the season ended up cutting down the nets after the last game — as sure a sign as any that in the new college sports landscape reconstituted by the transfer portal, immediate eligibility for new players, and name, image and likeness deals, anything is possible.
For anyone.
The Huskies not only won the national championship, the program’s fifth, they cruised to the title in one of most dominating runs in NCAA tournament history. Even as March Madness lived up to its name in a major way elsewhere in the 85-team bracket, with none of the four No. 1 seeds advancing as far as the Elite Eight, the fourth-seeded Huskies kept calmly winning and making it look easy.
The margin of victory in their six tourney games was 20 points, and they closed it out Monday night with a 76-59 pasting of San Diego State. UConn finished with a 31-8 record — six of those losses came in an eight-game span from Dec. 31 to Jan. 25 — while the Aztecs wound up 32-7.
“We came into the season unranked,” Huskies coach Dan Hurley said. “So we had an edge to us to start the year to prove people wrong.”
Nobody could really blame fans and pundits for overlooking UConn, just as it might have been hard to blame observers for pumping up North Carolina, which was bringing back the core of its roster from last year’s NCAA runner-up team.
UConn won the title. The Tar Heels? They didn’t even make the tournament.
It’s a testament to how quickly things can change in an era that looks more like free agency in professional sports than anything college athletics has ever experienced.
Hurley said he went back to work the day after the Huskies lost to New Mexico State in the first round of the NCAA tournament last year and started looking at retooling his roster. The goal was to add more options from the perimeter. So he got four new players, including Joey Calcaterra, who had spent four years at the University of San Diego, and Tristen Newton, who had spent three years at East Carolina.
Big East coaches still picked UConn to finish fourth in the conference. Even if the talent is there, it’s hard to gauge how it might all come together.
The UConn story played out in different ways at different places all across the sport this season, and had a lot to do with a Final Four that included three underdog programs that had never made it to the Final Four: San Diego State and fellow No. 5 seed Miami, plus No. 9 seed Florida Atlantic.
San Diego State had two new players this season joining two others who transferred to the Aztecs the year before.
Elsewhere, Kansas State was picked last in the Big 12 and ended up three points shy of making the Final Four, doing so with the help of Keyontae Johnson, a transfer from Florida who was named a third-team AP All-American. Creighton, which beat UConn in a Big East regular-season matchup in February, made its own run to the Elite Eight with big help from South Dakota State transfer Baylor Scheierman, who was also getting looks from Duke and other blue blood programs.
Texas withstood the midseason firing of its coach and made the Elite Eight with two players acquired through the portal: Tyrese Hunter from Iowa State and Sir’Jabari Rice from New Mexico State. Arkansas made its third straight Sweet 16 with a partially rebuilt roster, eliminating 2022 NCAA champion Kansas, the West Region’s No. 1 seed, in the second round before losing to UConn.
“I promise I wouldn’t be sitting here if it wasn’t for the transfer portal,” Arkansas coach Eric Musselman said earlier in the tournament. “Really interesting, because eight years ago, when somebody was transferring, the process was a lot different.”
Instead of having to sit out a year, players can now go freely from one school to another. Some coaches find it too destabilizing, too transactional. No longer, however, is it a matter of faith that veteran teams that stick together — say, as recently as Villanova’s 2018 championship team that crushed everyone on the way to the title — have a better chance of winning.
And even though FanDuel Sportsbook is listing UConn (11-1 odds) and Duke (13-1 odds) as the early favorites to win it all next season, there’s little reason to put much stock in any “way too early” looks at next year’s top teams.
“We don’t really know rosters, or how different players are going to fit in,” ESPN analyst Jay Bilas said. “Will they blossom, will they not? And preseason polls are done for fan interest and nothing else. You can’t really predict anything based on those.”
Certainly, nobody was picking Florida Atlantic, Miami or San Diego State to make the Final Four back in October. And UConn, with all those new players, to win it all? Nobody saw that coming either.
Well, almost nobody.
“We knew we were the best team in the tournament going in,” Hurley said. “We just had to play to our level.”