You don’t have to look far to see how great the burden can be. Just take a look at some of the University of Connecticut’s former business partners in the Big East. This was a conference that always specialized in Big — Big Monday, big stars, big games, and giant, outsized coaching personalities.
Those characters helped build the Big East.
And all you have to do is have a look around at what happened when they started to age, started to retire, started to look around for other opportunities. Look at what happened to Craig Esherick when he was tasked with the impossible job of following John Thompson. Look at poor Brian Mahoney, who worked himself to the bone, who wanted more than anything to continue the legacy of Lou Carnesecca at St. John’s. But he couldn’t be Looie, as if anyone could have been.
Look at George Blaney, who had to replace P.J. Carlesimo. Look at Gordie Chiesa, whose career blew up in the jet wash of Rick Pitino’s ascent at Providence. Look at Steve Lappas, who had some fine teams at Villanova but could never quite find the same formula that had served Rollie Massimino so well for so long.
“I know what he went through because I went through it,” Carnesecca said not long ago, talking about Mahoney’s task in replacing him, and Carnesecca’s own challenge in replacing Joe Lapchick back in the day. “No matter what you do, until you measure up to the Other Guy, you’re always going to be measured up against the Other Guy.”
Kevin Ollie had some kind of Other Guy to follow at UConn. Jim Calhoun might not have invented big-time ball in Storrs — the Huskies had fine teams throughout the ’60s and ’70s, teams that regularly won the low-octane Yankee Conference and visited the NCAA Tournament.
But Calhoun surely did invent UConn As We Know It.
“All those banners,” St. Joseph’s coach Phil Martelli marveled last week in Buffalo. “And the Hall of Fame.”
Funny thing, too: One of the early cornerstones for the monster Calhoun would build at UConn was when he recruited Kevin Ollie out of South Central Los Angeles in 1991. That early core — Ollie, Donyell Marshall, Donny Marshall — never did make the Final Four, but proved Calhoun’s first venture behind Scott Burrell and Nadav Henefeld in 1990 was no fluke.
So maybe that made Ollie the perfect candidate to replace Calhoun, to try and measure up to the Other Guy in ways some of the others never could. Last year, Ollie did a fine job working with a Huskies team banned from postseason play because of academic shortcoming. But that was only a preview to what he has done this year, and where they are this year, 40 minutes — “40 full,” in Ollie’s parlance — from the Final Four.
“I just wanted to be who I am,” Ollie said Saturday at Madison Square Garden. “I knew I had a great passion for this university.
“I wanted to make the right decisions. I wanted to stay hungry, but I always wanted to stay humble. It’s about the university and me treating everybody the same, and going out there for one thing, and that common goal is us.”
Those are marvelous sentiments. But when you watch Ollie’s team play, you see it actually manifests, too. UConn was in big trouble against St. Joe’s, and won. Shabazz Napier was in early foul trouble against heavily favored Villanova; UConn won that, too. And Friday, spurred by a crowd Michigan State coach Tom Izzo dubbed “UConn South,” the Huskies overpowered an Iowa State team that had looked superb in taking out North Carolina.
Izzo understands precisely what Ollie has had to do at UConn because he had to follow the same path in East Lansing, where Jud Heathcote had won a national title (with more people watching than any other game in the sport’s history, too) and 339 games, with Izzo as his top assistant and heir apparent for the last 13 of those seasons.
He appreciates that Calhoun has been a ubiquitous presence for Ollie the way Heathcote was a supporting anchor for him in his first few years on the job, which were often a struggle.
“We’re going to have pressure on us to try to live up to certain things, but how the guy before us handles it is key,” Izzo said. “And in Jud’s case, he’s been so supportive. And I know Jim is so supportive of Kevin, too.”
That eased the burden a little. An Elite Eight berth in Year 2? That eased it a lot.