Dan Hurley Shares Why He Almost Quit as UConn’s Coach After Last Season

UConn men's basketball head coach Dan Hurley considered stepping down last season due to the emotional toll of trying to win three national championships in a row, The Athletic's Andrew Marchand reported Wednesday morning, citing a new book co-authored by Hurley.

In perhaps a sign of how serious these considerations were, the 52-year-old coach even had "very preliminary" talks with Fox Sports about becoming an analyst, Marchand wrote, per "sources briefed on discussions."

“I thought about leaving,” the coach said in the forthcoming book, Never Stop: Life, Leadership, and What It Takes To Be Great, co-written with Athletic columnist Ian O'Connor. “Taking a gap year. Resigning as head coach of the UConn Huskies.”

After UConn lost to Florida in the second round of the 2025 tournament, Hurley said he "could feel that I was completely cooked. Just burnt. I didn’t even know how I was standing. I stared at the office walls, muttering, conducting a brutal review of our season. I didn’t build a strong enough roster. I wasn’t a good leader. I let everyone down in Maui.

“I lost control, emotionally, at various points. I came in here some days sad and defeated, when I needed to be positive and inspiring. Then I went through the self-lacerating what-ifs: What if we’d played a little bit better in Maui? What if we hadn’t blown that game against Seton Hall? What if we’d been a better seed than an eight seed and hadn’t needed to face a number one in the second round? Who knows?"

He admitted that it was "unhealthy to be ruminating this way" and that he "needed to do some healing, not think about basketball for a few days." But the NIL era of college sports made that impossible.

"The transfer portal and NIL deals made every college player a free agent, so right after the tournament I needed to be in my office, in Storrs. If I left town right then, I wouldn’t have a team for the 2025-26 season. At that point, I wasn’t even sure that I would return for the 2025-26 season."

As for the flirtation with Fox, Hurley said he "talked to a TV executive about doing some commentary,” and had spoken with Villanova-coach-turned-CBS/TNT-analyst Jay Wright the year prior.

“The previous summer, I talked to Jay Wright about life after basketball. He said he was actually happy, sleeping. He wasn’t sick to his stomach nine months of the year.”

Still, however, Hurley chose to return to coach his Huskies. (For what it's worth, Hurley and UConn agreed to a six-year, $50 million contract in July 2024, around which point the coach also turned down a $70 million offer to coach the Lakers.)

“I’ve got the very best job in the country with the very best program in college basketball over the last quarter century. All of that is hand-on-the-Bible true," he wrote. "But what’s also true is the massive toll that coaching takes on you and your family. The whole thing is exhausting. The seasons are excruciating even when they are going great.

"You rarely get to the national championship game and win it, so if the season ended the way I wanted it to end only two years out of my coaching life, then I was tortured for twenty-eight years. That’s a hell of a way to look at it. I’m not some unbreakable machine programmed to seek and destroy opposing teams and officiating crews—over and over and over again. I’m human.”

In hindsight, Hurley's stress last season was extremely apparent. After the aforementioned loss to Florida, cameras caught the coach's NSFW message to Baylor, which was quickly ripped as "classless" behavior. Hurley eventually apologized, noting that he felt "horrible" about the situation.

The coach is a firebrand; at this point, it's almost part of his competitive advantage. But it sounds like, in the wake of that viral clip and a season that didn't end the way he wanted, he's ready to recalibrate for a new year.