But UConn didn’t have to score a lot of points and Butler couldn’t mostly because of UConn’s great defense, the same defense that shut Kentucky down in the semi final.

It’s amazing how many people want to diminish UConn’s win by saying it was a mediocre year for college basketball., and that UConn might’ve been the best of the mediocre. One Big 10 coach went so far as to  not vote for UConn #1 in the final poll, voting instead for Ohio State which was taken out of the tournament the weekend before.

That’s mean-spirited and petty. UConn won all the games it was supposed to win. The Huskies beat 11 straight opponents from wherever they came from. While the rest of the country complains about a soft season, fans in Connecticut will be celebrating another title.

You see, Pasqualoni and I worked together back in Syracuse when he was the head coach there and I was doing the coaches show on the local Fox station.

I never got especially close to Pasqualoni, sportscasters and reporters just about never do get close to the people they cover, but we were friendly, and I will say I always admired the way he ran his program and thought he got about as much out of the talent he recruited as possible. Randy Edsall is a lot like that. They get some good kids, but hardly ever the best ones, then coach the heck out of them. Donovan McNabb, a kid very few major college were interested in, flourished under Pasqualoni.

For 9 of the 14 years Paqualoni coached at Syracuse, they went to a bowl game, he won 6 of them, and there was just one losing season.

But that losing season in 2002 was the beginning of the end. Pasqualoni followed it with two 500 seasons.  Syracuse football fans stopped going to the games, and instead starting beating up Pasqualoni on local radio talk shows. In 2004 after a 6-6 season, Pasqualoni was run out-of-town.

I thought firing Pasqualoni was a mistake and said so as often as possible on my daily  . The only thing Syracuse did worse than firing Pasqualoni was hiring the guy who replaced him.

Greg Robinson’s 4 year record in the Big East, three and 25, is the worst four-year record in Big East history. 

It’s hard to do these days, take a program from one level to the next. There are two kinds of coaches. Those who get a lot of really good players and with some coaching can win 10 games and get to a major bowl game. And then there’s the coach who gets some good players, coaches them up, wins seven or eight games and goes to a medium bowl game. UConn has been, is and will be a place that gets some good players. UConn needs a coach who will make some good players better. That coach is Paul Pasqualoni.