Will UConn Huskies Keep Making Dog (Blank) Of Everyone, Including Purdue-Do?

Connecticut coach Dan Hurley arrived in Phoenix this weekend with some cool shades that made him look like the national champion he is and maybe about to become again, or ready for either that eclipse on Monday or the Kentucky job on Tuesday.

He also looked as relaxed and together as someone going to a work-some, play-more convention. And that's what the Final Four is - a national coaching convention for every coach but the four coaches.

Of course, this is also a man who has won his last 11 NCAA Tournament games by an average of 22 points. In a 77-52 win over Illinois last week to get to the Final Four, Hurley enjoyed a 30-0 run that started late in the first half and continued for nearly eight minutes into the second. The Huskies are the first team in history to win 11 straight NCAA Tournament games by double digits.

Hurley appears very presidential and hireable for Kentucky, which just lost John Calipari.

Purdue 7-foot-4 center Zach Edey has towered over college basketball this season, but will he be able to handle defending national champ UConn? (Getty Images)

Will Hurley's latest extended run continue Monday when defending national champion and No. 1 seed UConn (36-3) meets No. 1 seed Purdue (34-4) for the national championship (9:20 p.m., TBS)? Will the Huskies keep making dog (blank) out of everyone? Purdue-Do would be next. Will UConn win easy over 7-foot-4 Zach Edey, too?

It might be close for a while. Last year's title win for UConn was a blowout.

UConn Is Becoming UCLA Before Our Eyes

UConn won its first four NCAA Tournament games this season by 111 points. That broke the previous mark of UCLA in 1968 when it won its fourth of 10 national titles under John Wooden from 1964-75 and made it look easy.

"We've made an incredibly hard tournament to advance in look easy," Hurley said Friday. "Probably a lot easier than it really is."

Just ask Calipari, who fled the most elite and bluest of the blue blood jobs in college basketball for northwest Arkansas, because he was 1-3 in the NCAA Tournament since reaching the Elite Eight in 2019. They say you can't even fly non-stop from Lexington to Fayetteville on a private jet.

Will UConn coach Dan Hurley be Kentucky's next coach? (Getty Images)

Hurley, a rough and tumble Jersey City native who coached at Wagner and Rhode Island, does things much more Old School than the slick, big city Calipari, who coached UMass, the New Jersey Nets and Memphis before Kentucky Blue. But Hurley could look good in Blue. He is blue collar for sure and would remind Kentucky fans of Billy Donovan, a former Kentucky player under Rick Pitino, and the Kentucky Nation used to very much want Donovan as he won back-to-back national titles at Florida in 2006 and '07.

Hurley could be the first coach to do that Monday since Donovan. I can see Kentucky fans loving that note.

Calipari could learn something from watching Hurley, if they get TBS in Fayetteville. Whereas Calipari tends to focus on recruiting high schools and the portal and acquiring the best of talent, Hurley seems to keep winning the old-fashioned way and doesn't much like the portal and NIL, though he obviously uses it.

RELATED: Dan Hurley Has Cool Take On NIL

"I mean, No. 1, my biggest motivation really for the last two, three weeks is I just don't want to deal with the portal crap," Hurley said with a smile. "That's why we're trying to win so hard right now. I'm seeing what other people are doing (in the portal), and it's chaos. I can hide behind, ‘Hey, my season’s still going on.'"

Meanwhile, Calipari had early starts to his off-season recruiting in two of the last three years with first round March Madness losses to such brand names as Oakland this year and Saint Peter's in 2022.

Hurley has that tough talking Pitino thing going for him, but I'm wondering how he'd like the too often typical, cool Kentucky player.

"We don't kiss the kids' ass during recruiting," he said. "We don't kiss it while they're on campus. We bring tremendous value to our players because we're old school, and we push 'em to get better."

Kentucky Could Make Dan Hurley Even Richer

Hurley makes $5 million as UConn's coach. Kentucky could easily double that. 

If UConn wins in typical, double-digit fashion, it is not a reach to say that Hurley, 51, will never be hotter coming off his second straight doggedly dominant national title. So if Kentucky wants him, he will likely take it.

"Somebody is going to have to rip this out of our hands," Hurley said. "We used that a lot this season. ‘Everyone’s trying to get us. We're the champs.'"

How much will UConn make Kentucky try to rip Dan Hurley from its hands? That's the question. 

Or one of them.

The other one is this. Do the Hurleys really want to keep waking up in Storrs, Connecticut, which is not even Fayetteville, Arkansas?

"Got one of the biggest brands in college basketball," Hurley said.

But even if UConn wins its sixth national championship in its seventh Final Four, it's still a pickup truck. Kentucky has won eight through 17 Final Fours and can be the Cadillac of cool.

Dan Hurley's future is so bright, he has to wear shades.