Here's what Jim Calhoun had to say about Scott Burrell being hired as the new head basketball coach at Southern Connecticut State:

"I think it's ideal, the fact that he was maybe the greatest athlete in the history of the New Haven-area school system."

"Like a lot of young guys, he probably needed to get a head job. I think at Southern Connecticut, his mom and dad graduated from there, so that makes it more special. I think he's ready. He and I talked a great deal about this over the years. There was a point where he wanted to get into coaching. Tommy (Moore) and I talked about hiring him, and he's moved on. He's done a good job there. I've watched him practice probably three or four practices a year at Quinnipiac, he does a great job at practice. I think he'll do a good job recruiting-wise, he's smart. A head coaching job is a head coaching job."

(did he see this day coming when Burrell played for him at UConn?)

"I never thought Scott Burrell would ever coach. Because then someone else would have to coach Scott Burrell. That was my joke to him. He was a typical 'boys of summer' -- he just wanted to play. He loved practices for the scrimmages. The drills, not so much. Watching him in the dugout when he wasn't pitching one day, he couldn't sit still ... Just a great kid, one of the best kids you're gonna find. He's kind of a throwback in many ways."

(does he have what it takes -- work ethic, etc. -- to be a head coach?)

"This isn't something that just came about. He started thinking about this four or five years ago ... Scott Burrell is ready for this job, he'll do a great job. We talked yesterday. We talked about this for the past few months, we've talked about a couple of things the past year or two."

"Taliek Brown is the next guy I'd love to see get into college coaching, because he's done a good job in high school ... He's trying to. We've talked a lot. He's been up to camp working. He's a great teacher. I always say the best (leaders) I ever had were 1. Kemba Walker and maybe 1a. or 2., would have to be Taliek. They played with great joy."

Calhoun also noted that he'll be back with ESPN this season and is talking about doing a lot more games -- and a lot of big-time games -- with Rece Davis and the gang.

No doubt, Ryan Boatright had the quote of the day today. The kid can't watch ESPN anymore, and I'm right there with him (though, for me, it has more to do with the station's obnoxious love affair with the NFL than anything else).

When asked prior to UConn's practice (in preparation for Wednesday's bout at the Garden with St. John's) about how frustrating it is knowing that UConn can't play in the postseason, especially at this time of year, he replied: “I don’t even like watching ESPN half the time. I see the daggun’, ‘Journey to the Tourney’ commercial every other commercial. I get irritated, so I turn the TV off.”

Here's the video:

That's "daggun'" as in Roy Williams' pet saying. Maybe it's "daggone," or "daggum." Not sure. But Boatright's point was clear: with March Madness seeping back into the national lexicon over the next couple of months, it's tough for UConn to be on the outside looking in.

“It’s definitely frustrating," Boatright continued, "especially when you work hard every day, you put the work in that we put in, and you see other schools that aren’t even doing as well as you and they’re getting a chance to play in the tournament. It’s frustrating, but we knew going into the season that we weren’t going to be able to (play in the postseason). We’re alright.”

Added Kevin Ollie: “I imagine if you look at it that way, it gets frustrating. We’re trying to emphasize the positive things – you’ve got a good record in the Big East, you still have that opportunity to win that conference championship, which is very elusive. That’s the first and foremost goal, anyway – for any season – to win that conference championship.”

“I don’t see this team dwelling on the negatives.”

*** At the Husky Run back in October, Shabazz Napier noted that the Huskies might relish the chance to play spoiler.

"Why not go out there and hurt someone else’s postseason?," he said at the time. "We’re going to do our best to win every game possible, and realize we’ve still got a chance to win a championship – the regular season championship."

Certainly, St. John's (at 14-8, 6-4 Big East) is a team that needs to build a resume for NCAA tourney consideration.

On Tuesday, Napier added: “You kinda think about (being the spoiler). The first thing you think about is trying to win the game. After you win the game, that’s probably the second thing you think about. I just wanna go out there and play them with utmost respect and try to win a game. Especially playing for the last time in Madison Square Garden, it’s something special for the whole team … If we win, just think about that we spoiled it a little bit for them.”

*** Red Storm freshman Chris Obekpa leads the Big East and is second in the nation in blocked shot at 4.50 per game. UConn, of course,heavily recruited the 6-foot-9 center from Long Island. Omar Calhoun put the hard sell on Obekpa after committing to the Huskies.

"I tried to," Calhoun said. "It didn't work too well, but me and him are close friends. He knows how to time blocks and jump. He’s definitely someone like me likes playing with.”

Enosch Wolf will have to go up against Obekpa on Wednesday night.

“He’s a good defensive player," said Wolf. "I’ve just got to stay solid, try to maybe outsmart him a little bit. I know he’s really athletic.”

*** Naturally, Calhoun (a Brooklyn native) was recruited hard by St. John's, as well.

“Coach (Steve) Lavin’s a great guy," he said. "St. John’s is a great school. Everyone looks at St. John’s if they’re from New York.”

*** Seen at Gampel today: Taliek Brown (he's taking courses to get his degree) and SNY honcho (and Mets owner) Fred Wilpon.

*** UConn's bout with Syracuse on Feb. 13 will be ESPN's 7 p.m. game. Brent Musberger and Bob Knight are expected to be on the call.

Andre Drummond took a night to think about it and has decided he'll wear uniform No. 12, rather than 15, according to UConn men's basketball SID Kyle Muncy. Other notable No. 12's for UConn have been A.J. Price, Taliek Brown and current Husky assistant Kevin Ollie.

No. 15, of course, was worn by Kemba Walker. Walker's uniform was raised into the Huskies' "Wall of Honor" last April, just a couple of days after they won their third national championship.

If you're interested in seeing how UConn newcomers Jeremy Lamb, Michael Bradley and Shabazz Napier look, how much guys like Kemba Walker and Ater Majok have improved since we last saw them in March, or how Taliek Brown is playing since his UConn days, swing by the Sports & Medicine Sciences Academy in Hartford for some Greater Hartford Pro-Am action tonight.

At 6:30 p.m. (or thereabouts), Club Palace Slamm takes on the Attorney Deron Freeman All-Stars. Lamb, Bradley, Majok and Napier all should be playing for Club Palace, along with a few other local college standouts. The Freeman All-Stars is also populated by some lesser-known local college talent.

Then at 8:15(ish), the Doc Hurley All-Stars, featuring Walker and Brown, among others, face Cambyland, which features older former stars like Charles "The Beast" Easterling, Ben Grate and Roosevelt Lee, along with Hartford prep star Anthony Jernigan. That should be an up-and-down, entertaining contest, to say the least.

While UConn is at its scholarship limit of 13, don’t be shocked to see another slot or two open up over the coming weeks via transfer, etc. The Huskies are still in pursuit of some of the top Class of 2010 recruits in the country, but like their competitors on the recruiting trail (Kentucky, Kansas, Texas, Syracuse, Florida, etc.) they are at the whim of the decisions of a bunch of 17, 18-year-old kids. Once one major recruit (Brandon Knight?) makes his decision, the dominos will all start to fall over the next month.

So what’s UConn’s sales pitch to elite recruits? Well, here’s a good one: since Ray Allen in 1993-94, there have been (by my count) 17 players who started right off the bat as freshmen at UConn. Of those 17, 11 wound up being NBA draft picks, and many emerged as NBA stars. And that list doesn’t even include Ben Gordon, who didn’t start for most of his freshman season despite being the team’s second-leading scorer (12.6 per game). The others not on the list: Kevin Freeman, Ajou Deng, Taliek Brown, Rashad Anderson and Jeff Adrien.

Translation: if you come to UConn and play immediately, there’s a great chance you’ll wind up making lots of money in the NBA one day.

And there are definitely minutes to be had next season for the Huskies. Starter’s minutes. Incoming frosh Roscoe Smith could certainly be one. Can UConn land another?

***Totally unrelated, but here’s a feature from today’s Register about New Haven’s Keith Cothran, who’ll lead URI into action against North Carolina tomorrow night in the NIT semifinals at Madison Square Garden. Nice story (whether well-written or not) about a nice kid who’s overcome a lot and has truly used college basketball as a ticket to an education and a better life.

Well … didn't see that one coming. Especially after a first half that, at times, appeared to be men vs. boys – with Texas playing the roll of men.

Then came a second half that few – and certainly not this prognosticator – could have seen coming.

Admit it, after UConn committed 16 first-half turnovers, then Stanley Robinson threw away the inbounds pass to start the second half (leading to an Avery Bradley dunk that gave Texas a 10-point lead), you didn't really believe the Huskies would pull off the comeback, did you?

"We went at them at halftime, (turnovers are) pretty much all we talked about," said George Blaney. "Then the first play of the second half we turned it over. I called a timeout and said, 'What did we just spend 10 minutes on?'"

And even if you did call it, you couldn't have possibly predicted it would be as thorough and impressive as it was, with the outcome determined with 6 ½ minutes left following a head-spinning, 26-6 Husky run.

"We should have kept smacking them in the face and playing hard," said Bradley. "But we let them back in it in the second half."

They sure did. And I'm out of the prediction business. In the words of Arthur Fonzarelli, I was wr-wr-wr-wr-wr ...

***Nobody had a better second-half redemption than Kemba Walker. He had six of UConn's first-half turnovers, including four within the game's first five minutes. In the latter half, Walker had 17 points and just two turnovers. He finished with 19 points, 10 assists and six steals.


"That was probably the worst first half I've ever played in my life," Walker confessed. "I was a little bit too hyped. In the second half, I came out poised and in control."

Walker hit a long trey with 6:17 left to give UConn a 71-58 lead, then waxed some Husky history afterwards.

"When it went in, all I could think about was when Taliek Brown hit that shot," Walker said, referring to Brown's 35-foot heave with 35 seconds left in double-overtime of UConn's Big East tourney championship game win over Pitt in 2002.

What did Blaney say to Walker at halftime?

"I told him, 'Don't turn the ball over,'" Blaney said. "I'm serious. I told him another time, 'Go tell Alex (Oriakhi) to make two foul shots.' He looked at me like I'm crazy, and I said, 'Go tell him.' And he did, and he made them. Then, when Kemba missed one, I said, 'Kemba, ask Alex to tell you to make a foul shot.'"

***And Jerome Dyson … oh, Dyson. He had a career-high 32 points on one big basket after another, including four 3-pointers.

"He's not Ray Allen, Ray's a pure shooter," said Blaney. "Jerome's a scorer. You put Jerome in any game, he's going to score points: foul line, drives, steals, dunks, everything. He's not what you would call a shooter, but he can make shots if he would just concentrate a little bit more."


But perhaps Walker said it best.

"'Rome was just 'Rome," the sophomore point guard noted. "That's what 'Rome does."

***Of all the game's numerical stats, however, the most important one didn't show up in the final box score: Three. As in, the number of times freshman Ater Majok dove to the floor for loose balls in the first half.

Majok was back in the starting lineup after usurping the spot to Charles Okwandu the past two games, and his hustle plays truly inspired the Huskies. Early on, he hit the floor for a loose ball and got the ball to Dyson at midcourt. Dyson fired up a long alley-oop pass to Robinson for a dunk.


"The play he made in the first half, going on the floor for that loose ball was something that got everybody's motor going," said Blaney.

Added Gavin Edwards: "That was a huge play. That kind of set the tone for the energy that everybody had to play with. Once everybody saw that, everybody got excited and knew that was how we were going to have to play."

Majok would cause two more jump-ball situations later in the half with hustle plays. He wound up with five points, six boards and four blocks in a career-high 31 minutes, but Majok's contributions went far beyond the stat line.

"I'm not the scorer on the team yet, I'm not the best rebounder," Majok said. "But hey, if they need an energy man, I'm going to be that energy man. I'm going to bring that energy, bring that heart. You've just got to keep working."

***Jim Calhoun spoke to his team via Blaney's cell phone in the locker room after the game.

"He was excited," Blaney said. "He told them how tough they were, and how he believed all along in their heart, never questioned their heart. When you're 10 down to the No. 1 team in the country and come back and go 10 up in a short period of time, that is hard. The kids were all excited, yelling at the phone, 'Hurry up back, Coach. Get well.' He sounded very good."

"We've got to play for him," said Dyson. "We know these wins help him get better, because it takes some of the stress off him, having to worry about us.You could tell through the phone that he was happy and proud of us."

Blaney was asked how much he's had to do with the two wins he's coached since Calhoun's medical leave of absence.

"I think I've had a lot to do with it. I've done exactly what Jim would want me to do, with his team. He prepared the players to play this way. His teams have always gotten better in January. That's when you run offense better, because offense is so hard to teach. That's something he's always done."

***In a gesture to thank the hundreds of students who slept outside of Gampel to get good seats for the game, Blaney invited about 300-400 students inside the gym for Saturday morning's shootaround.

***UConn is now 2-6 all-time against No. 1-ranked teams, its other win over Duke in the 1999 national title game. The Longhorns, however, won't be ranked No. 1 come Monday.

***Big East founder Dave Gavitt, who has been battling health issues, was in the crowd and acknowledged on the big screen during a break in the action. Texas coach Rick Barnes, who was mentored by Gavitt when Barnes coached at Providence, got very emotional after the game.

"Obviously, we want to win basketball games," said Barnes, his voice breaking and his eyes welling with tears, "but coming up here today and having a chance to see Dave Gavitt is everything. I'd take a loss to see him."