(AP Photo/Jessica Hill)
On a day where College Gameday announced that they will be coming to Storrs, CT next Saturday, things couldn’t have gotten much better for Husky Nation. Well, they tipped off against Marquette at 3:00 PM and things got a whole lot better. Earlier today the NCAA put out their Tournament Rankings and they had UConn as the second best team in the country. Comical. Whether the Huskies heard them or not, they came to play today against the Golden Eagles.
The early stages of the game went back and forth. No team had more than a 4-point lead until late in the first. In a game where a lot of the talk revolved around two of the best point guards in the country in Tristan Newton and Tyler Kolek, it was the bigs that started off hot early. Donovan Clingan and Oso Ighodaro each put up 6 right out of the gate. Midway into the half, the score was 18-18 and early signs pointed to a back and forth classic.
For the rest of the half it was anything but back and forth. It could more accurately be described as forth and forth. The Huskies ended the half on a 13-2 run. It was an onslaught from basically the entire roster. SLAMson Johnson had 2 electric dunks, Hassan Diarra was a pest on the defensive side of the ball, and Jaylin Stewart came in for a quick bucket and monster block. When the players mentioned are three guys off the bench, things must be going pretty well.
They continued to go well in the second half. Your regularly scheduled stars in Clingan and Newton took over and ran away with the game. After being scoreless for 16 minutes, Newton went on a tear and ended with 15 points, 8 boards, and 8 assists. Clingan ended with 17 points and 10 rebounds and was simply too big down low the entire afternoon. The second half was straight dominance en route to a 28-point victory.
Verne Lundquist (old wolf) was on the call and said that for those of us who hadn’t seen a whole lot of Marquette, this was a very poor showing and not who they really were. This was the only game of theirs I had seen in its entirety and it was more than enough. No juice from the Golden Eagles tonight.
The Huskies are a wagon and it’s scary. They’ve steamrolled the bad teams in the Big East and today was supposed to be their first true test since being #1 in the country. Although ranked #4, Marquette looked just as lost as Georgetown and DePaul. This could very well be the first of three meetings between the two and it will be interesting to see how Marquette rebounds when we go to their place on March 6th.
UConn now has a 3 day turnaround where they will face #17 ranked Creighton on the road. Should be a lot closer than what we saw today.
It’s hard to imagine winning a national championship in such a dominant fashion and then coming back even stronger the following year but that is exactly what the Huskies are doing. As long as they continue to stay humble and hungry (and Dan Hurley will absolutely make sure they are), Storrs could be in for another extremely exciting March.
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