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Message: [QUOTE="Huskybass, post: 4030311, member: 746"] You have to view the big picture when looking at this. Ollie won a National Championship in his second season as Head Coach. He did so with a very stacked veteran team AND 3 very experienced Assistant Coaches in Blaney, Hobbs, and Miller. He also had Calhoun in his camp as an advisor or consultant. Ollie did a great job in those two seasons. As time passed, those Assistants left or were fired and Calhoun was no longer part of the staff so to speak. Once "Calhoun's guys" (for lack of a better term) had cycled through the program, the results began to fall off. After two pretty mediocre seasons, the program suffered 2 losing seasons in a row capped off by the 2018-18 season where UConn lost a school record eight games by 20 or more points. The roster was full of guys with huge holes in their games, some chronic injuries, and in some seasons unfilled scholarships. When Ollie was let go, the program was in a pretty sad state. So yes, Ollie did a great job those first two seasons. Unfortunately, the broad responsibilities of a Head Coach include talent evaluation, recruiting, roster management, player development, etc. Ollie clearly was not up to the task in several of those areas and the results in 2016-17 and 2017-18 strongly demonstrated that. Moving on to the Hurley era... I think any reasonable fan gives Hurley a pass in year one as he was in the process of building a new foundation. Years 2 and 3 were both heavily impacted by Covid, and Bouk's injury and the choppy schedule both likely contributed to a bit less success than many of us would have liked to see. But there's no denying that the culture of the program, level of talent, and enthusiasm regarding the program are vastly higher than when Hurley took over. So yes, Ollie gets credit for leading the team to a National Championship. However, the decline of the program after that is also largely on Ollie as discussed above. I guess that's a long winded way of saying that I am very happy with the state of the program today given what Hurley stepped into when he took over. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach