Spring Break
The curse of UConn's perfection
Kevin Meacham
Issue date: 3/27/09 Section: Sports
There is a certain danger for anyone who regularly writes about the UConn women's basketball team.
Just about everybody who has penned even a sentence or two on the Huskies seems to be enveloped in a sense of awe. At 35-0, the hyperbole about and amazement at Maya Moore, Renee Montgomery, Tina Charles and company is, of course, warranted.
At a program that does its best to raise the bar with each successive generation, the 2008-2009 team might push that bar up another notch. Before 1995, no team had ever won 35 games in a season. Before 2002, nobody had won 39. Before 2004, no team - not even mighty Tennessee - had won four out of five championships.
And before 2009, no team had ever gone unbeaten while winning every game by double-figures. Stay tuned on that front.
But as I said, there is danger in anointing the Huskies as the greatest team ever.
UConn wouldn't be the first major sports team to wow fans with perfection. We writers have, in turn, been glorifying them with praise. It's a cycle that has been going on for as long as there have been outstanding teams.
Think, for example, about the 2004 USC Trojans football team (with future NFLers Matt Leinart, Reggie Bush, and numerous All-Americans), or the 2007 New England Patriots.
Those two recently sliced through their regular-season competition with little or no difficulty. The media prematurely crowned them the greatest ever in their respective classifications. And then, on their grandest stage, those teams failed.
When Vince Young and Texas dropped the Trojans in the 2005 Rose Bowl, and when David Tyreeís New York Giants beat the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII, those great teams were forever relegated to the insignificant discussion of "best team never to win a title."
And rightly, those talking heads who proclaimed them the "greatest ever" were roundly mocked.
Geno Auriemma is very careful when he talks about his team's chances to go undefeated. He's more likely to talk about what could go wrong than what could go right. In various press conferences, he's mocked the media's assertion that the Huskies are miles ahead of the pack.
Just about everybody who has penned even a sentence or two on the Huskies seems to be enveloped in a sense of awe. At 35-0, the hyperbole about and amazement at Maya Moore, Renee Montgomery, Tina Charles and company is, of course, warranted.
At a program that does its best to raise the bar with each successive generation, the 2008-2009 team might push that bar up another notch. Before 1995, no team had ever won 35 games in a season. Before 2002, nobody had won 39. Before 2004, no team - not even mighty Tennessee - had won four out of five championships.
And before 2009, no team had ever gone unbeaten while winning every game by double-figures. Stay tuned on that front.
But as I said, there is danger in anointing the Huskies as the greatest team ever.
UConn wouldn't be the first major sports team to wow fans with perfection. We writers have, in turn, been glorifying them with praise. It's a cycle that has been going on for as long as there have been outstanding teams.
Think, for example, about the 2004 USC Trojans football team (with future NFLers Matt Leinart, Reggie Bush, and numerous All-Americans), or the 2007 New England Patriots.
Those two recently sliced through their regular-season competition with little or no difficulty. The media prematurely crowned them the greatest ever in their respective classifications. And then, on their grandest stage, those teams failed.
When Vince Young and Texas dropped the Trojans in the 2005 Rose Bowl, and when David Tyreeís New York Giants beat the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII, those great teams were forever relegated to the insignificant discussion of "best team never to win a title."
And rightly, those talking heads who proclaimed them the "greatest ever" were roundly mocked.
Geno Auriemma is very careful when he talks about his team's chances to go undefeated. He's more likely to talk about what could go wrong than what could go right. In various press conferences, he's mocked the media's assertion that the Huskies are miles ahead of the pack.
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