After his team’s stunning comeback NCAA March Madness victory over Duke in the tournament’s Elite 8, UConn basketball coach Dan Hurley needed some time alone.
“I was able to go into the bathroom stall and say my ‘Hail Mary’ and say my ‘Our Father,’ and thank the Lord for blessing us with this victory,” Hurley, 53, told Outkick’s Dan Zaksheske after the game on Sunday, March 29. “I know he certainly played a role in it.”
He continued, “When I first had my private moment, the first person I went and spoke to was God. I didn’t necessarily thank him for the victory. But I just thanked him for being in my life. I start every day with prayer and I felt like once I had a private moment, that was the person I needed to talk to.”
UConn beat Duke 73-72 on a 35-foot buzzer beater from Braylon Mullins, after the Huskies managed to steal a pass from Duke’s Cayden Boozer with just seconds left on the clock.
Hurley and the Huskies trailed by as many as 19 points in the game, including a 15-point halftime deficit.
The Uconn head coach said he was “just fried” during an appearance on ESPN’s Get Up on Monday, March 30.
“Such a battle just to claw our way back into the game,” Hurley reflected. “Obviously Duke plays an incredibly high level in the first half. They’ve been a great team the whole year .. We just fought and clawed, and we kind of never stopped competing. We talked about trying to put them in a position to put some real game pressure on them, that if possession by possession we just kept battling, we’d have a chance to walk them down and put ourselves in position to try and steal it.”
Despite the intimidating score at halftime, Hurley could tell that his team was far from throwing in the towel.
“As coaches and players, we’ve all been in dead locker rooms and dead huddles before where you know that your team is cooked, that they don’t believe,” Hurley explained. “At halftime, I was kind of happy with their demeanor. They were a little bit frustrated, a little bit angry. But really, really determined.”
He continued, “In the second half huddles, the group knew we were getting great shots. We knew we had made the right defensive adjustments. We were being a lot more disruptive.”
UConn will play Illinois in the Final Four on Saturday, April 4, with the winner facing either Michigan or Arizona in the national championship game on Monday, April 6.
