By the time UConn announced it would rejoin the Big East for the 2020–21 season, the program had fallen into a period of irrelevance. The Huskies, toiling in the American Athletic Conference, hadn’t won a national championship since 2014, and hadn’t even reached the NCAA tournament since 2016. 

In many ways, the team’s rebirth aligns with the return to its conference of yore. (After all, programs move away from conferences for two reasons: to get rich and, by proxy, get better.) When the realignment announcement came in the summer of 2019, Dan Hurley (above, right) had just finished his first season as the head coach in Storrs. In 2021, their first year back in the Big East, the Huskies made their first NCAA tournament in half a decade. In 2023, they won the national title, and are going for the repeat in Phoenix on Monday night—a feat accomplished by only seven other men’s teams in history. 

But when Front Office Sports asked whether his program would have reached this level of dominance if it hadn’t rejoined the Big East, he leaned forward into the microphone and said, “Absolutely.” 

“We would be where we were regardless.” 

Hurley acknowledged that the move “certainly helped,” and he’s made plenty of comments suggesting he’s much happier with UConn in its current conference than its former one. The Big East’s intense competition really kept the team sharp—Hurley likened the Huskies’ journey to that of Kelvin Sampson and Houston, who moved from the AAC to the Big 12 just this year and led the Cougars to a conference title and Sweet 16 berth. (Hurley has spent most of the postseason reiterating how he believed the conference deserved at least three more bids than it received.)

But the 2024 Naismith National Coach of the Year said that by the time ’20 rolled around, the program was already recruiting “at a very, very high level.” He also said they had the “best staff in the country” at the time. 

From a financial standpoint, UConn isn’t getting rich in the Big East, either. In the AAC, the school could expect somewhere between $8 million and $10 million in annual revenue distributions, according to recent tax filings. In its new conference, the athletic department receives no more than $5 million. (The Big East is in the midst of negotiating a new, and potentially more lucrative, media-rights deal, and talks are going well, commissioner Val Ackerman told reporters during the conference’s tournament.) The school has, however, been able to cut down a multimillion-dollar budget deficit in its new home. 

Ultimately, the conference should be thanking them, he said. “We’ve also had a big impact on the Big East.”

Welcome to the transactional era of college basketball.

Even before the final game of the season is played tonight with the men’s March Madness championship clash in Phoenix, the sport has been turned upside down by an unprecedented expansion of the transfer portal. As of Sunday, 1,450 men’s Division I players had entered the portal, according to Verbal Commits, up by more than 25% from a comparable point last year, and recently boosted with the addition of Bronny James, son of NBA superstar LeBron James. Ultimately, that number is expected to reach 2,000, amounting to nearly half of all college basketball players. 

That surge in the number of players looking to change schools has created two very specific dynamics within the sport, both of which are being widely criticized:

• NIL bidding: There’s been a sharp rise in the number of players operating on a year-to-year basis with a given school, and it’s openly pitting programs against one another in search of the best deal financially for their name, image, and likeness rights. Prep Scouting’s Chas Wolfe reported last week that former Wisconsin guard AJ Storr is seeking $1 million to transfer. Kansas, according to Wolfe’s report, countered with a $750,000 bid that Storr declined. Storr’s next school, if he doesn’t enter the NBA draft, will be his third after starting his collegiate career at St. John’s. Storr’s former coach, Wisconsin’s Greg Gard, told WNRW-Radio that in this new era, “poaching is real.”
• Veteran experience: There’s currently a movement within college basketball toward older players, many of whom are exercising their additional year of eligibility granted as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Early in the tournament, Kentucky coach John Calipari lamented, “All of a sudden [the sport has] gotten really old. So we’re playing teams that our average age is 19, [and] their average age is 24 or 25. So do I change because of that?”

Even this year’s Final Four showcased how the sport has quickly changed. NC State’s DJ Burns (above, right), one of the breakout stars of March Madness, is also at his third school and will turn 24 this fall. The Wolfpack, meanwhile, built their entire starting squad out of the portal as opposed to traditional recruiting of high school players.

“I like the portal a lot, [but] I wish we didn’t have to deal with it at this time,” said NC State coach Kevin Keatts, prior to the team’s semifinal loss on Saturday to Purdue. “We’ve done pretty good in the portal, so I’m excited about it. I got [Burns] out of the portal. All five of our starters are from the portal. I got to be a big fan of it. But I do say this: You have to be careful who you get from the portal. You have to get guys who fit into what you believe in and have the same vision that you have.”