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Message: [QUOTE="diggerfoot, post: 3248419, member: 1673"] Glad to see you bring this up! Though, unfortunately it had to be in response to trolling. There are two things striking about Auriemma's tenure as a coach. The most talked about is the consistent greatness he can get from high level recruits, with the record number of championships as testament. The other is the extent to which he built a program up from nothing, also unprecedented. Few remember or even knew that the '95 Tennessee team was touted as one of their best collections of talent ever. They were the heavy favorite preseason. As for UConn? They were the team that prompted VanDerveer to remark "We have six Nykesha Sales." She predicted Tennessee to win the championship game after her team was clobbered by UConn, based on her perceptions of both coaching and talent. Yet UConn won its first championship, culminating the greatest program building feat in history, against a team thought to be one of the greatest collections of talent up until that time. Of course, UConn did indeed have it's own great players, but certainly no one saw Wolters or Rizzotti as player of the year material coming out of high school. Few D I programs even wanted Wolters. You might say the elevation of their games by Auriemma was similar to the elevation of the program. Not even Riley's ascendance to college greatness matched that of Wolters, plus ND's ascendance as a program was remarkably slow, as you mention, given what they had going for them. So when a UConn fan hears "You have more talent," we can and should hearken back to the fact that Auriemma made something out of nothing better than any other coach in the history of the game. The fact that he no longer can be in a position to do that should not be held against him. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach