National title game: Facing Michigan’s ‘Monstars,’ UConn finds itself in the unlikely position of underdog

A new CNN FlashDoc “Money Madness: College Basketball at a Crossroads” examines how betting culture, wealth-creating NIL deals, and fixers preying on the vulnerable have led to a perfect storm. Stream the special now on the CNN app.

Indianapolis — 

In 1999, a Boston Southie with daddy issues fueling an insatiable need to prove himself laid the cornerstone of Connecticut basketball greatness.

When he was 15, Jim Calhoun lost his father to a heart attack and for a time, shelved his own basketball dreams to work as a gravedigger, stone cutter and scrap yard worker to care for the family. But his passion for the sport eventually led back to the hardwood, where Calhoun channeled his loss and his pain into the gym, eventually building an uninspiring state school in the farmland of Storrs into a national champion and perennial powerhouse.

When the Huskies beat Duke for the ‘99 title, they were a 1-seed who had swapped spots atop the polls with the Blue Devils the entire season. Nonetheless, Vegas oddsmakers tagged Duke as 9.5-point favorites, making UConn the biggest title-game underdog since 1985, when 9-seed Villanova tried to tackle Georgetown and Patrick Ewing.

Calhoun so deeply planted the seed that his team was being disregarded that when Connecticut won the game, Khalid El-Amin dashed around the court screaming, ‘We just shocked the world.’’

Twenty-seven years later, a New Jersey kid with daddy issues fueling an insatiable need to prove himself is trying to take UConn to a place unmatched in modern college basketball history.

The son of a Hall of Fame high school coach, Dan Hurley has chased his own unreachable measuring stick, creating foils and demons even where they don’t exist. His unquenchable desire to achieve has taken UConn to the brink of becoming the first team since the UCLA dynasty to win three national championships in a four-year span.

Yet here again, on the precipice of a greatness not realized in four decades, the Huskies are underdogs. The same team that is 18-1 against the spread in four years of NCAA games under Hurley (the lone miss, ironically, came against Furman in the first-round this year when they failed to cover the 20.5 margin) is either a 6.5- or 7.5-point dog to Michigan in the championship game, depending on your source.

Vegas, of course, doesn’t do sentiment and what the Huskies have done before has little to no bearing on what they are predicted to do now. Meantime, what Michigan has done lately – cruised on a murderous March march that humbled Arizona into submission into the national semifinal – does matter.

“Monstars,’’ Hurley called the Wolverines, kicking it back old school to 1996…