GLENDALE, Ariz. — Dan Hurley is a perfect college basketball villain; as cocky as he is good, as inevitable as he is hot-headed. 

On Monday night, Hurley gesticulated and screamed and bullied his way to a second straight national title, his UConn Huskies once again rolling through an NCAA Tournament without much of a challenge — including from Purdue, the supposed second-best team in the country, which could barely put up a fight in a 75-60 loss. 

“For the last 25 years or 30 years, UConn’s been running college basketball,” Hurley said, hat turned backwards, celebrating as the confetti fell on the Huskies for the sixth time in the last 26 years. 

Hurley, the son of legendary but flammable high school coach Bob Hurley Sr., is a throwback to the days when college basketball coaches didn't seem so corporate, publicly beefed with each other and told you exactly how good they thought they were. And Hurley thinks – no, he knows – that he’s really, really good. 

“I’m still just a worse version of (my dad),” Hurley said before pausing. “A little bit worse. Getting better and I'm coming for him."

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He’s the perfect sports heel. And he belongs at the perfect heel program. After coaching the best team he’ll ever have, completing a two-year run that we may never see again in our lifetimes, Hurley’s best move would be trading his gear for a lighter shade of blue. 

Hurley shouldn’t just go to Kentucky, he should run to the challenge of restoring the dominance, the pride and, yes, the arrogance of America’s most extravagant program, just as he rescued UConn from its short period of disrepair.

“I don’t think that’s a concern,” Hurley said, laughing as I asked if he planned on entertaining any other jobs — including the one that will officially open on Wednesday, when John Calipari officially signs his new contract at Arkansas. “My wife, you should have her answer that. She'll answer that question better than I can.”

Maybe there’s nothing Kentucky can do to lure Hurley from the frozen farmland of Storrs to the bluegrass of Lexington. Maybe his outward confidence is hiding a deep-rooted fear of leaving his comfort zone in the Northeast and going to a program whose fan base touches all corners of the country. Maybe he’s just happy where he's at. Maybe he sees himself eventually leaving UConn for the NBA, a league where he would undeniably be able to match X’s and O’s with the best coaches in the world.

I mean, did you see how UConn completely shut off the water for everyone Monday night except Purdue big man Zach Edey? Did you see how utterly hapless his teammates were making 9-of-29 shots with five combined free-throw attempts? It was Hurley’s Sistine Chapel, a game so perfectly coached against another outstanding coach in Matt Painter that there was seemingly nothing the opponent could do to change the flow of the game. 

Did you see how UConn, game after game in this tournament, completely crushed opponents with pure fundamentals – like moving without the basketball, closing out to shooters and staying disciplined to its gameplans to a degree you almost never see at the college level?

“They just made a decision, like, we can defend the perimeter and we can take this away from you,” Painter said. “Then you’re just going to get the ball to your best player, he’s going to be one-on-one, then that’s that. They were going to live with that. Not everybody can do what they did. You have to give credit to their defense and how they’re coached and how they’re wired.”

But here’s what you also saw: A coach who lost it with the officials every 30 seconds the entire night, complaining about every call or non-call that didn’t go his way. A 51-year-old with the sideline comportment of a toddler hooked to an IV full of Red Bull. A control freak who was dictating every dribble down to the last second as his son, Andrew, spiked the ball off the floor to end the final possession of UConn’s season. A hothead who had a bit of a stare down with Edey going into a timeout in the first half because he thought an illegal screen went uncalled by the officials. 

“This was the energy he was giving when I played his team in the tourney … dude is crazy. Competitive crazy!” Atlanta Hawks All-Star guard Trae Young posted on X, formerly Twitter, referring to Hurley’s Rhode Island team beating Oklahoma in 2018.

And, clearly, it works at UConn. Hurley doesn’t need to go anywhere. You could easily make an argument he shouldn’t go anywhere.

But there are only a few people in the coaching profession with the combination of absurd coaching chops and cartoonish swagger to give Kentucky the aura it so desperately wants to recapture after Calipari pulled the ripcord Sunday, ending his 15-year run. 

Once the ink is dry on the new contract Calipari is going to sign at Arkansas — it's going to happen Wednesday, a person with knowledge of the negotiations told USA TODAY Sports on the condition of anonymity — one of the most interesting coaching searches in the recent history of the sport will commence.

Hurley has to be Kentucky athletics director Mitch Barnhart’s first call. And the pitch for why Hurley should take the job is fairly straightforward, besides the gobs and gobs of money Kentucky can put together to pay him. 

Sure, after seeing what UConn just did for two straight years in the tournament, it looks like the Huskies can just win and win and win forever.

But it never really works that way in sports, and especially in college basketball. Just ask Billy Donovan, the last coach who went back-to-back, turned down the Kentucky job in 2007 and again in 2009 and only reached one more Final Four over the next eight seasons before heading to the NBA. 

Heck, just ask Calipari, whose run at Kentucky began to sour at the very moment it looked like he had found the formula to dominate college basketball until the end of time. 

Even for the best of the best, there’s only so much juice in the lemon. 

Hurley has two titles now for a lot of reasons, but among the most important are that he and his staff recruited a point guard in Tristen Newton, a zero-star recruit who started his career at East Carolina, and a 7-foot-2 defensive freak in Donovan Clingan, who played high school basketball 45 minutes from UConn’s campus. 

Maybe he can do it again. Maybe he can’t. There are no sure things, especially these days. 

“We're going to dive in and put together a roster that can play a comparable level of basketball,” Hurley said. “That’s what our mindset will be. We’re going to try to put together a three-year run, not just a two-year run.

"We’re going to try to replicate it again. I don’t think we're going anywhere.”

Against crazy odds, UConn has remained the ultimate outlier in college sports: A Big East program that spends like a superpower on basketball while also losing millions on a football program that has no conference to play in. 

It’s not the most sustainable model on paper, and UConn’s long-term future is always going to exist in a weird state of financial purgatory until it figures out a way to earn more television revenue — which may or may not happen in its current situation. As good as the Big East has been for UConn basketball ever since moving back there from the American Athletic Conference in 2020, it’s still uncertain how much money the league will be able to get from its next TV contract that will commence in 2025. 

Given the tumultuous landscape of conference realignment and a potential employment model for college athletes coming down the pike, does UConn eventually need to end up in the ACC or Big 12 to maintain its national brand and ability to compete in basketball? Is it better off staying put? Nobody can answer those questions right now. 

But we know where Kentucky’s going to be: In the preeminent athletic conference, paying someone a ton of money and tolerating nothing less than the best. 

Maybe Hurley doesn't think that kind of place is for him, which is fine. It’s his life, his career. But the craziest fan base in college sports and the sport’s emotionally volatile genius of the moment would be a history-altering marriage that anyone – well, anyone except Kentucky's opponents and UConn fans – would want to see.