College basketball rankings: UConn, Dan Hurley embrace challenge of winning third consecutive NCAA Tournament

The last time any of us watched UConn play a game that counted, it was nearly seven months ago, and the Huskies were running away from Purdue en route to winning a second straight national championship. On Wednesday night, the quest for a three-peat begins, as UConn opens its season with a nonconference game against Sacred Heart inside Harry A. Gampel Pavilion.

The opponent is Sacred Heart, which is ranked 316th at EvanMiya.com, 336th at KenPom.com and 336th at BartTorvik.com. In other words, barring a surprise, this won’t be close. In other words, barring a surprise, we likely won’t learn much about the team Dan Hurley has built.

But it’ll still be fun to see the champs!

And have you noticed the way Hurley is approaching this season’s unusual opportunity to become the first coach to guide a team to three straight national championships since John Wooden accomplished the feat at UCLA in the early 1970s? He hasn’t ignored it or even down-played it a little, as others might do. He’s instead consistently tackled it head-on and acknowledged the chance to make history is motivating.

“Our mindset going in is we want to go five for five with the championships,” Hurley said on ESPN earlier this week. “That’s what you come to UConn … to do, if you coach here, or you play here, and for me … and everyone associated with the program, any season that doesn’t end with us achieving championship goals for us, in our minds, is a failure here at UConn.”

I love every bit of that.

Coaches often talk about taking it “one game at a time” and never looking “too far ahead” while refusing to make any grand statements about anything. Just this week, Memphis football coach Ryan Silverfield said he couldn’t yet call his season a “failure” even though his team is 7-2 against a nothing-schedule and unlikely to make the AAC title game despite being picked to win the conference in the preseason — but that’s crazy to me. If you don’t meet expectations in something, and there’s no obvious explanation for why you didn’t, you’ve failed. That’s the simplest way to put it. So I absolutely love that Hurley, before he’s even coached his first game of the season, is already crystal-clear on where the pass-fail bar should be for his team that remains fifth in Wednesday morning’s updated CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings.

It’s three-peat or bust for the Huskies.

Their season tips at 7 pm ET.