Illinois faces more than UConn — Hurley’s volatility is part of the test: Telander

CHICAGO - What’s wrong with Dan Hurley?

The UConn men’s basketball coach is so balled up inside he can’t tell when to be happy or sad, calm or in a rage. After his team beat No.1-seeded Duke on Sunday, 73-72, in one of the greatest comeback wins in NCAA Tournament history, he went up to referee Roger Ayers and planted his forehead on the ref’s in what could best be described as a low-level headbutt.

With his sportcoat hanging down off his right shoulder, his face angry-blank, his lower lip protruding in defiance, eyeglasses magnifying a death-ray stare, Hurley looked halfway insane.

What?

The man’s team had just come back from a 19-point first half deficit to win on an incredible steal and flying three-point shot by freshman guard Braylon Mullins. And Hurley was mad at the ref? UConn was in the Final Four again. Maybe there were some calls the coach didn’t like earlier in the game. Maybe there was acid indigestion troubling him. It didn’t make sense.

Hurley should have been ecstatic Mullins, the 6-6, five-star rookie from Greenfield, Indiana, was even enrolled at his school and making the shot of a lifetime. Mullins, Indiana’s 2025 Gatorade High School Player of the Year, averaged 33 points and seven rebounds a game as a senior, and his hometown is just up the road from Bloomington, Ind. and just down the road from West LaFayette, Ind. UConn’s gain was Indiana’s and Purdue’s loss.

But after dancing around briefly and shouting, "How about this kid!" as he pointed at Mullins’ head, Hurley soon dropped into his surly mode. It was a good thing referee Ayers didn’t do anything to exacerbate the moment. Why he didn’t call a technical foul on Hurley or report the incident to tournament officials, we don’t know.

As it is, there are college fans who feel Hurley should be suspended for the next game. And who is that next game against? Yes, Illinois, our hometown favorite.

Illinois lost to the Huskies back in November, but they most assuredly are not the same team as the one that got whipped 74-61 at Madison Square Garden on Black Friday. Suffice it to say that Illini freshman guard Keaton Wagler has matured about 15 years in that span. He may still have a baby face, but he’s now a superstar, a certain NBA lottery pick. He’s drawing comparisons to a young Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who was only last year’s NBA MVP and looks likely to win the award again this season.

So this is a big game coming up, and a madman coach on one side can be a huge factor. Hurley knows he’s out of control at times. He’s said as much. Earlier this month he got hit with a tech and ejected in the last second of UConn’s loss to lowly Marquette. The scene was eerily similar to the Duke finish, with UConn down two points with ten seconds to go and a chance to win. But guard Silas Demary Jr. missed a shot, didn’t get a foul call, and Hurley went off.

"I’m embarrassed," Hurley told "60 Minutes" interviewer John Wertheim last year of his behavior in some games. He admitted, "Sometimes I’ll say or do anything that I think may give me some type of advantage."

It all could be cover for unresolved anger issues. That Hurley is intense is beyond question. He has talked about feeling under so much pressure that he has hidden under his desk in a "pitch dark room, trying to deal with some very serious panic attacks." He has undergone therapy to help him understand himself better and to act more rationally.

His father, Bob, was a tough-as-nails probation officer who coached St. Anthony High School in Jersey City, N.J. to an astounding 28 state championships. Dan’s older brother is Bobby Hurley, a former All-American guard at Duke, an NBA player until injured in a car wreck, and, like Dan, a college coach, most recently at Arizona State.

Competition and tenacity were the watch words in the Hurley family. The undersized brothers’ ferocity made them successes in college (Bobby won two NCAA titles at Duke; Dan was a star point guard at Seton Hall), but it also may have given them difficulties relaxing, chilling out.

I was writing a magazine story about Bobby during his Duke days, some 23 years ago, and he and brother Dan were guarding each other in a five-on-five pickup game in a tiny Jersey City gymnasium. Bobby, grim-faced and silent, internalized everything, never said a word. Dan looked like a stick of dynamite with its fuse sparking. I thought the two were soon to get into an all-out physical brawl. It was hard to watch there in the empty gym. It was almost biblical, like a Cain and Abel stage setting.

Dan Hurley does not need to be the new incarnation of Bobby Knight. Bullies and lunatics are not needed in college hoops. Fire and passion, yes. Which makes one wonder what calm and dignified Duke coach Jon Scheyer thinks about the man he just lost to. Does he see Dan Hurley’s flame as a difference-maker? Or does he see a nearly out-of-control coach winning despite everything, hanging by a thread.

Then too, what do we see? I wonder.

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