I know people will not take kindly to my saying this, but you can't take issue with Jeff Hathaway and not give at least a bit of the blame to Jim Calhoun, at least if you want to be honest about it. In 1999, indeed thoughout the 1990s, UConn was one of the darlings of college basketball, then with the 2nd title in 2004 it became a borderline blueblood. Had likeable players...even people who hated el Amin loved him, if you know what I mean. Okafor was the prime example of a true college student athlete...honors student, all American, graduated in 3 years. Likeable. You couldn't have gotten a guy from central casting to play the role better. Then it all fell apart. 2006 team started with laptopgate and ended with George Mason and while you can argue all you want that Williams was treated the same as any other student who had committed a comparable crime, that wasn't the perception in the world north of Suffield and west of Danbury. Follow that up with the 2007 squad that liked to brag and then didn't deliver and Calhoun's unfortunate post season comments about changes that sounded like an NBA GM rather than a college coach....then Wiggins, and Nate Miles, and Dyson and Stanley Robinson qutting school then returning and playing as news reports came out that he hadn't passed a single course in his last semester...Then of course APR, and Calhoun getting suspended and Boatright getting suspended (as much for hanging around with a guy the NCAA had already found as a rules violator as anything else)...and somehow a program that was seen as clean and ethical and even likeable has emerged by the end of Calhoun's tenure as a dirty program that would do anything, recruit anyone, to win. That is the narrative, and the killer is that Calhoun could have been jerry Tarkanian and almost played it up,or Boeheim and come across as utterly clueless, but in not doing that he probably made things worse. That has contributed to the decline in fans. It has contributed to the negative perception.
