YearoftheHusky
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O’Neil: After cutting sports, UConn needs to focus its future on basketball
UConn shut down four sports on Wednesday, victims of budget cuts and the school's insistence on making football work.
theathletic.com
He used to make his pitch, rambling on as the king of filibustering is known to do, selling the promise of what his program would be. Invariably someone would stop Jim Calhoun and ask if his school was in Alaska. “You know, because it was UConn,’’ the Hall of Famer says. “I’d have to say that it’s UConn with a U, not a Y.’’ A reluctant add to the Big East only after Holy Cross said no, the school had so little juice that some people wanted commissioner Dave Gavitt to boot the Huskies less than 10 years into their conference membership.
But then along came Calhoun, a fast-talking kid from Boston, hired a year after an Italian immigrant by way of Philadelphia had taken over the women’s team. In 1990 Calhoun led the Huskies to the Elite Eight in the men’s NCAA Tournament, and a year later, Geno Auriemma took the women’s team to the Final Four.
Basketball built UConn. Now it’s going to have to save it.