Penny Hardaway gathered his players early Monday before they took the court against the back-to-back champs in the opening game of the Maui Invitational, and in a plain white T-shirt and blue Memphis hat, the seventh-year coach delivered a final message.
“The toughest team wins,” Hardaway said, slapping his hand with each word in a video posted by longtime college basketball insider Andy Katz. “That’s why we’re 4-0. Let’s go 5-0.”
Would you believe they did it?
Final score: Memphis 99, UConn 97 in OT.
The Tigers, listed as 8.5-point underdogs by FanDuel Sportsbook, shot 54.7% from the field, including 54.5% from 3-point range, en route to snapping UConn’s 17-game winning streak that dated back to last season, when the Huskies rolled through the NCAA Tournament while winning their second straight national championship. It was an incredible run for Dan Hurley’s blue-blood program. But this UConn team is not that UConn team, in part because this UConn team is down four starters from that UConn team.
Against Memphis, it showed.
UConn trailed for much of the game and by 12 points with just 2:56 left before rallying to force OT. If you knew nothing about anything, and just turned on the television and watched, you would’ve had a difficult time figuring out which program is attempting to win a third straight national championship and which program was recently picked by American Athletic Conference coaches to finish second in the AAC behind UAB, which is currently 4-4 with losses to High Point and Longwood.
Was UConn overrated? Was Memphis undervalued?
It all seems on the table after Day 1 in Maui.
“We knew it was going to be a physical game. That was the gameplan. We knew they wanted to make it physical,” said UConn forward Alex Karaban, the lone starter from last season’s team who returned to try to three-peat. “It wasn’t surprising [to] us that it was physical. We just had to match their toughness and, for most of the game, we didn’t.”
When the 45-minute back-and-forth affair was over, Hardaway described it as the biggest win of his coaching career — and, given the context, I agree. It’s actually hard to argue otherwise when considering A) what Hardaway predicted when he was hired in March 2018, B) everything that’s happened since, and C) the pressure he carried into this season.
There have been some highs over the past six years, sure — everything from top-ranked recruiting classes to a win over Boise State in the 2022 NCAA Tournament. But the truth is that it’s mostly been a roller coaster featuring zero conference championships, an unusual amount of staff changes, an investigation tied to improper benefits, an investigation tied to academic fraud, suspensions and more off-the-court nonsense than I care to list.
It’s grown tiresome for fans.
So, with just one returning scholarship player and a team that received zero votes in the preseason Associated Press Top 25 poll, Hardaway seemingly entered this season with real pressure to make good on some of the promises he made when he was introduced as Tubby Smith’s replacement. Whether he’ll ultimately deliver or not obviously remains uncertain. Seasons are long and often filled with twists and turns, and no fan base should understand this better than the Memphis fan base given that the Tigers were ranked 10th in the AP poll last January before going 7-8 in their final 15 games and missing the NCAA Tournament.
Nobody is chicken-counting quite yet.
But, that acknowledged, very few coaches, and possibly none, needed to get off to a good start this season more than Hardaway, who remains the most-beloved living Memphian despite the uneven nature of his first six years guiding his alma mater. As I wrote during the offseason, if things don’t eventually calm down and get better, some hard decisions will have to be made. But, as I also wrote during the offseason, the best thing for Memphis — both the university and city — is still for Hardaway to figure out how to get things back on the so-called track and run the program competently and successfully.
So far this season, so good.
The Tigers are 5-0 with four victories over top-100 KenPom teams and ranked 13th in Tuesday morning’s updated CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings. UConn is down to No. 14. Memphis going from unranked to No. 13 caused Indiana, Wisconsin, Baylor, Arkansas, Pitt, Texas A&M, Ohio State, Texas, Arizona, Florida, Cincinnati and Ole Miss all to be pushed down one spot each, no fault of their own.
Mississippi State, previously No. 26, is now what amounts to No. 27.
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Top 25 And 1 rankings
Biggest Movers
14
Memphis
10
Connecticut
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