A nice reasonable response. Thanks. Yes, your program under Calhoun reached heights that Boeheim never quite reached. Yes, some of our perceived advantage is due to us being a good program over a longer period of time. That's fair. You burned brighter for about 20 years. You and Pitt carried the Big East banner through much of the 90s and 00s, although we did get a championship game appearance in there against maybe the best college team of our lifetime, Kentucky 96, a team that had something like 9 eventual NBA guys on the roster.
Kevin Ollie was never "all that" like you guys thought he was. Even though he got his championship, he coasted afterwards, and your program went to hell. Hurley I really like as a hire. He's got that working class, northeast guy appeal, tough as nails, like Calhoun. He really could do well for you. But if your fan base doesn't recognize the risk of UConn becoming a stepping stone job, well, that's just delusional. The right hire saves you, and Hurley was probably the right hire.
In football, we've been excellent for two sustained periods in my lifetime, and we've been in 2 terrible holes. I hope that UConn finds a way to the Big East or the Big Ten. You're too good a program to completely disappear. I feel like your success in basketball was at our direct expense, though, from the first time we went on probation back in the early 90s, and so that's why some of us of a certain age feel like UConn are still Johnny Come Lately's even though you got 4, yes 4 championships on your shelf.
Much respect for your past, but I like how things are finally trending. Rutgers sucks again, so we are beginning to get football prospects out of NJ again, as we did in our heyday. Pasqualoni and then Diaco destroyed your football program, so we don't have to worry about recruiting against you like we did when Greg Robinson was crapping the bed in Syracuse.
We're not competing directly against you for recruits very often, and we don't play in the same league anymore, so you guys are receding in the rear view mirror, just like we don't matter that much anymore to you. But I do respect your program. I just prefer not to have another mouth to feed at the table, when it comes to recruits. It's already hard enough having Duke and Kentucky swoop in at the last minute and steal away kids that you've been working on for 2 years. Having UConn as a direct competitor too would be a pain in the ass.
